ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: WORLDING RACE IN MINORITY U.S. FICTION Emily Yoon Perez, Doctor of Philosophy, 2018 Dissertation directed by: Professor Zita Nunes, Department of English Professor Sangeeta Ray, Department of English Worlding Race in Minority U.S. Fiction reads encounters with foreignness as a definitive mode of representation deployed in minority U.S. literature. “Foreign” may mark a character’s actual encounter with a foreigner but could also suggest the presence of something unfamiliar, dangerous, and prohibited at home and abroad. Lisa Lowe’s expansive theorization of various forms of intimacies that arise across four continents has been crucial to thinking about race globally. My project shifts the scale of these intimacies by focusing on personal relationships forged between minority subjects: the “little intimacies” that arise from globalization. I argue that when minority subjects interact with each other, what emerges is an opportunity for a more expansive, global understanding of race and minority subjectivity while also paying close attention to the particular ways an individual uses those understandings to imaginatively navigate their various worlds and the people who inhabit those worlds, an ongoing process that I call a worlding of race. My dissertation engages and expands transnational American literary studies by examining various minority characters’ encounters with the foreign. In exploring the myriad ways in which discomfort transforms a literary character’s understanding of the foreign from one of difference to one of solidarity, I show how these characters discover the need to forge alliances across race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality. In particular, literature provides an ideal avenue for such moments through its capacity for expanding the imagination, a worlding of how we understand minority identity. Worlding race entails being more inclusive—taking into account other axes of identity such as gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity—but also looking beyond the U.S. and to the world, both as a geographical space expanding outward from the nation and also as the imaginative potential of those at the margins. My project of worlding race makes two gestures: the first is to bring other marginalized identities inward to the center as a means of recognizing how they intersect with understandings of race and the second is to expand our understanding outward by considering how racial formations are constituted, altered, and challenged when we begin thinking beyond the nation. WORLDING RACE IN MINORITY U.S. FICTION by Emily Yoon Perez Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Advisory Committee: Professor Zita Nunes, Co-Chair Professor Sangeeta Ray, Co-Chair Professor Mary Helen Washington Professor Edlie Wong Professor Janelle Wong © Copyright by Emily Yoon Perez 2018 Acknowledgements The years spent on this project were made more productive, more livable, and more gratifying thanks to the numerous people who have supported me along the way. I am immeasurably indebted to Sangeeta Ray, who pushed me to be the best scholar I could be and never let me settle for less. She demands an exceptionally high degree of excellence from her students while simultaneously believing that such high standards will undoubtedly be met. Her fierce faith in me held me up as I navigated thinking and writing through the questions that drove this project. I am especially grateful to Zita Nunes, whose kindness, support, and confidence in my ability as a writer and thinker were invaluable while writing this dissertation. I hope that I can extend a fraction of the generosity of spirit and grace to my students that she has extended to me. Mary Helen Washington has been a steady source of support and encouragement from the beginning of my doctoral career. Her reminders to pay careful attention to the relationships between history and cultural production have enriched and strengthened my work. Her mentorship has been one of the highlights of my graduate career. My work has deeply benefitted from Edlie Wong’s vast knowledge across numerous fields, time periods, genres, and methodologies. From helping me prepare for my comprehensive exams to being a reader for this dissertation, she has provided insightful feedback and recommended key texts to enrich and expand my thinking at each stage of my graduate career. My heartfelt appreciation goes to Janelle Wong for being the Dean’s Representative for the dissertation committee. ii The support of various faculty and staff members in the University of Maryland English Department was instrumental to my intellectual growth and progress. Peter Mallios spent many office hours encouraging me and thinking through important questions in the field during my early stages in the program. Ralph Bauer and Kellie Robertson provided invaluable guidance, advice, and feedback at various stages of my graduate career, and always advocated for me, along with the other graduate students in our department. The organizational skills and kindness of Manju Suri and Michelle Cerullo ensured that I kept up with deadlines associated with registration, funding, satisfactory progress, and the like. I am also grateful for the various forms of institutional support that helped me progress in my degree: to the College of Arts and Humanities for awarding me a Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship and an ARHU travel grant; to the Graduate School for a Graduate Dean’s Fellowship, a Summer Research Fellowship and a Jacob K. Goldhaber Travel Grant; and to the Department of English for a T.A. Enhancement Grant and support for conference travel. I am lucky to have such wonderful colleagues and friends among past and present graduate students at the University of Maryland. Sarah Bonnie and John Macintosh read drafts and provided valuable feedback along with many words of encouragement. Lindsay Bogner Kelly and Rob Wakeman came into the Ph.D. program with me and were my first friends at the University of Maryland. I am grateful for our conversations during long commutes and over many meals, and our friendships that have endured moves to different states. I have never met anyone who shows up for others the way that Tim Bruno does. I cannot begin to thank him for his iii material support and friendship. The world and the academy are better because of you, and so am I. Doug Ishii’s ability to bring people together is astonishing. I so greatly admire his generosity and unapologetic honesty that is comparable only to his scholarship, pedagogy, and ethical commitment to inclusivity and social justice. He gives me hope for the role of Ethnic Studies in creating a more livable future. The fierce feminist friendships of Aqdas Aftab, Abbey Morgan, and Ruth Osorio carried me through moments when I struggled with feelings of self-doubt and unbelonging. Thank you for your generous expressions of camaraderie, community, and solidarity in the midst of a world that feels increasingly hostile to our existence. Baltimore is not only my beloved home, but also the source of deep friendships that have sustained me through graduate school and beyond. Gavin Tabb has known me since childhood and gives weight to the saying that friends are the family we choose. I cannot imagine getting through this dissertation or the various other stages of my life without his steady presence and unwavering support. Here’s to many more sunny Junes over margaritas, fam. Lauren Reding and Thomas Bechtold are the best doggie godparents that I could have asked for, as well as amazingly generous and supportive friends whose presence in my life has been a comfort and a blessing. I am especially grateful to Lauren for being forever willing to listen to whatever anxieties, fears, and hopes have occupied me, and always providing words of assurance and understanding, mixed with humor. My time volunteering at the Baltimore Area Rescue and Care Shelter (BARCS) was crucial to my emotional well- being and provided a place where I could pursue my passion for animal advocacy in meaningful and measurable ways. I am especially grateful to Brian George and Laura iv Griffiths for their unrelenting service to and love for the 12,000 homeless animals that end up in the shelter’s care every year. Thank you for inviting me to participate in the shelter’s life-saving programs and including me in your mission. And, my heart is with the hundreds of dogs that have touched me with their inherent loyalty, trust, and love during their stay at the shelter. My family is at the core of who I am and what I have been able to accomplish. My parents left their home and all they knew so that their children could have the freedom to pursue their own paths. I cannot come close to expressing my gratitude for their years of hardship, sacrifice, and love that paved the way for me to pursue my own dreams, which came at the cost of their own. My younger brother, David Yoon, first taught me what it means to love someone more than myself. That lesson has informed how I carry out an ethics of responsibility to others in my daily practice. A petite pibble named Coco, formerly homeless on the streets of Baltimore, came into my life after my first semester at the University of Maryland. She reminds me of the importance of going outside every day and taking the time to enjoy the present moment, no matter what is happening in my life or in the world. That such a small creature can fill so much of my heart still baffles and terrifies me, but I am honored and humbled that she chose me as her human. Finally, my partner, Marcos Perez, has been my biggest advocate, my loudest cheerleader, my constant source of encouragement. He has always supported me in every aspect of who I am, what I want to pursue, and what I imagine is possible for the future. Thank you for not just accepting, but celebrating every part of me, my dreams, my fears, my quirks, and my v iron will. Thank you for making room for all of those parts of me in your life, so that our lives can be held together as we face what lies ahead. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements....................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................ vii Introduction: The “Little Intimacies” That World Race ............................................... 1 Part One: Worlding Race in African American Literature ......................................... 18 Chapter One: Reading Lynching in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man ........................................................... 18 Chapter Two: Breaking the Silence: Race, Love, and the Korean War in James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head ...................................................................... 64 Part Two: Racial Crossings at Sea from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans ............. 110 Chapter Three: A Lesson in Worldliness: The Figure of the American in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies ................................................................................ 110 Part Three: Queering as Worlding: The Immigrant Narrative in Contemporary U.S. Fiction .................................................................................................................... 153 Chapter Four: Consuming Intimacies and Queer Racialization in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt ............................................................................ 153 Chapter Five: Diaspora and Global Intimacies in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting ......................................................................................................... 200 Conclusion: Notes of an Immigrant Daughter, Baltimore, MD................................ 243 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 260 vii Introduction: The “Little Intimacies” That World Race Neocolonialism and globalization produce new racial formations and thus demand new methodologies for the study of race. This violent reorganization of the world economy exacerbates established modes of exploitation, creates new conditions of dispossession, and produces new displacements alongside new forms of immobility. -Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, editors, Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011) Modern hierarchies of race appear to have emerged in the contradiction between humanism’s aspirations to universality and the needs of modern colonial regimes to manage work, reproduction, and the social organization of the colonized; the intimacies of four continents formed the political unconscious of modern racial classification. However, these intimacies remain almost entirely illegible in the historiography of modern freedom, making the naming and interpretation of this global conjunction a problem of knowledge itself. -Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents” (2006) The phenomenological concept of worlding offers a radically new perspective on literature’s relation to the world based on the affinity between the realities of literature and the world. Because worlding is grounded in temporalization, the world eludes and confounds received philosophical understandings of reality. -Pheng Cheah, What Is A World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016) Introduction In the 1985 special issue of Critical Inquiry titled “Race,” Writing, and Difference, editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asks in his introduction, “What importance does ‘race’ have as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory?” (2). This question has long been at the center of Ethnic Studies and is the focal point for the contributors to Gates’s collection. Though the individual essays do not necessarily cross field-specific boundaries and instead, reside within either African American or postcolonial literary studies, read together, they create a 1 conversation that illuminates a formative moment for thinking about race globally. Gates continues, “In much of the thinking about the proper study of literature in this century, race has been an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence” (2). While one could trace the beginning of a global consideration of race in the United States much further back, perhaps to W.E.B. Du Bois at the turn of the twentieth century,1 I have chosen Gates’s special issue as my critical starting point because it is a key beginning for recent work that turns to the transnational and interdisciplinary approaches of studying race in American literary studies. As Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt write in their introduction to their edited collection Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (2000), the United States “may be understood to be the world’s first postcolonial and neocolonial country” (5) and scholars studying race in the United States have been indebted to postcolonial studies since its inception as a field.2 In bringing together African American and postcolonial scholarship in this special issue, Gates illustrates how literary scholars have always been thinking about race globally. “Race,” Writing, and Difference reminds us that studying race within the United States must also look to the larger world and consider the intimate ties among globalization, colonialism, and racialization. Worlding Race in Minority U.S. Fiction continues this investigation by reading encounters with foreignness as a definitive 1 Anthony Appiah discusses Du Bois’s conceptions of race in his essay, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” which is included in Gates’s edited special issue. 2 Singh and Schmidt continue: “For those scholars for whom questions of race, ethnicity, and empire are central, U.S. studies in the 1990s has gained immensely from dialogue with the emergent field called “postcolonial studies,” which provided comparative historical analyses of these issues from global or transnational perspectives” (3). 2 mode of representation deployed in minority U.S. literature. “Foreign” may mark a character’s actual encounter with a foreigner but the term could also suggest the presence of something unfamiliar, dangerous, and prohibited at home and abroad. The novels studied in this dissertation show how both physical travel outside the United States and a critical expansion beyond the standard scope of American literature allow for a return to thinking about racial formations in the United States. While Lisa Lowe’s work on global intimacies has been formative to my thinking on race and minority subjectivity, I study how individual relationships, while seemingly small in scale, illuminate how race forms and functions globally. Lowe’s expansive theorization of the various forms of intimacies that arise across four continents has been crucial to thinking about race globally. My project shifts the scale of these intimacies by focusing on personal relationships forged between two minority subjects: the “little intimacies” that arise from globalization and their ensuing “volatile contacts” (“Intimacies” 203). I argue that when minority subjects interact with each other, what emerges is an opportunity for a more expansive, global understanding of race and minority subjectivity while also paying close attention to the particular ways an individual uses those understandings to imaginatively navigate their various worlds and the people who inhabit those worlds, an ongoing process that I call a worlding of race. “Worlding race” provides a methodology for exploring racial formations in minority U.S. fiction. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, “Three Women’s Texts: A Critique of Imperialism” in Gates’s edited collection provides an important beginning for my own use of the term “worlding.” I use worldliness in lieu of cosmopolitanism 3 because it provides the opportunity to use global knowledge to understand the national. While scholarship on cosmopolitanism informs my work in significant ways, particularly in exploring the relationship between globalization and the nation, this dissertation moves beyond what Bruce Robbins identifies as “a detached, individual view of the global” (Robbins 5). In order to advance my argument, I theorize the concept of worldliness not only as a state of being—an active process of self-reflection and interrogation in relation to the world—but also a critical methodology and reading practice that pays close attention to processes of worlding. Spivak illuminates how the world is often understood as existing prior to the colony, so that the colony can only be legible after assimilating into Western understandings of culture and geography. My use of worlding is indebted to Spivak’s idea of worlding of the Third World, which obscures the role of Western imperialism upon how we understand and represent the Third World through cultural representation. This dissertation seeks to reveal “the imperialist narrativization of history” (Spivak 244) that Spivak identifies and interrogate its lasting marks upon the worlds that minority subjects inhabit, which materially alter processes of racialization and minority experience. Those lasting marks are central to understanding the world not as geographical space, but rather, how the experience of inhabiting space changes based on the subject position of the individual, particularly for minority subjects. By reading minority fiction through the lens of worlding race, I do not just acknowledge the imperial processes that world how minority subjects inhabit race and space; rather, I show how worlding race allows for a remapping of imperial space, which is always marked by processes of racialization, colonization, and nation-building. Space 4 is reconfigured through the little intimacies forged between minority subjects, which build coalitions through affirmations, as opposed to erasures, of difference, making such space more navigable and inhabitable My third epigraph is from Pheng Cheah’s monograph, What Is A World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016), which continues the inquiry that Spivak initiates in her essay. While Cheah discusses worlding in relation to postcolonial and world literature, his theorization of worlding is especially useful when taken in the comparative and collaborative spirit of Gates’s edited collection. Cheah makes two related arguments: first, that “[w]orlding exceeds and remains ‘after’ any world made by human subjects,” and second, that “worldliness is fundamental to literature and even part of its structure. [….] literature uncovers the world and opens up other possible worlds, thereby giving us resolve to respond to modernity’s worldlessness and to remake the world according to newly disclosed possibilities” (Cheah 129). By insisting that literature is not only inherently worldly, but also has the capacity to world reveals the potential of literature to both represent and change the ways in which we imagine how we live in the world. In a similar vein, David Palumbo-Liu discusses “how literature engenders a space for imagining our relation to others and thinking through why and how that relation exists, historically, politically, ideologically. This in turn creates new forms of narration and representation” (14). In other words, literature not only provides the avenue for interacting with others through reading, but the process of reading also changes the literature itself because it facilitates how we interact with others and otherness such that we emerge as “better, richer, more moral, more tolerant, more sensitive to the 5 world and the lives it contains” (Palumbo-Liu 12). Literature and reading are mutually constitutive acts, each changing and enriching the other, resulting in what Palumbo-Liu calls “a convergence of two different sorts of otherness: literature presents the worlds of others to us, leading us to inhabit those worlds and live those lives; concomitantly, the representation of this otherness is itself of a nature entirely different from the world of experience, and while it brings us closer to others, it cannot or does not reach complete deliverance, so to speak” (12). Cheah and Palumbo-Liu provide new ways of thinking about literature as worldly in their capacity to change how its readers view and navigate the world. In particular, considering the potential for reading about minority experiences to change how we relate to others makes literature an ideal genre for a worlding of race. My dissertation engages and expands the transnational dimensions of American literary studies by examining various minority characters’ encounters with the foreign. In exploring the myriad ways in which discomfort transforms a literary character’s understanding of the foreign from one of difference to one of solidarity, I show how these characters discover the need to forge alliances across race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality. In particular, literature provides an ideal avenue for such moments through its capacity for expanding the imagination, a worlding of how we understand minority identity. Worlding race entails being more inclusive—taking into account other axes of identity such as gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity—but also looking beyond the U.S. and out to the world, both as a geographical space expanding outward from the nation and also as the imaginative potential of those at the margins. In this way, my project of worlding race makes two gestures: the first is 6 to bring other marginalized identities inward to the center as a means of recognizing how they intersect with understandings of race and the second is to expand our understanding outward by considering how racial formations are constituted, altered, and challenged when we begin thinking beyond the nation. From “Race,” Writing, and Difference to Comparative Racialization Twenty years after the publication of “Race,” Writing, and Difference, PMLA published a special issue titled Comparative Racialization coordinated by Shu-mei Shih. The collection showcases a wide, interdisciplinary range of essays on comparative racialization, along with reflections on Gates’s 1985 special issue and Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States (1986). In their book, Omi and Winant put forth the argument that the way race has been understood, defined, and negotiated has gone through various processes of “racial formation” in order to cater to the changes that American society has undergone at various historical moments and periods. The authors present three paradigms of race: ethnicity, class, and nation. These three models for theorizing race, they argue, were prevalent at different times from the 1960s to the book’s present moment: the 1980s to the early 1990s. What remains constant, however, is the prevalence of race and its centrality to “the American experience” (6), along with the idea that “race has been a fundamental axis of social organization in the U.S.” (13). In revisiting these two key texts, the collection shows how the study of race across multiple fields has evolved into the twenty-first century. 7 Shih’s introduction begins with the state of studying race in English departments, which she identifies as “now largely taken for granted” while simultaneously causing “a deep sense of anxiety that the situation with regard to race may have been normativized and comfortably compartmentalized but not improved” (1347). While postcolonial scholarship was crucial to the conversation that Gates initiated in 1985, Shih points to its enduring “strongly ambivalent relation to race studies” (1347). These two observations make clear that studying race remains essential even as we surpass the publication of Gates’s collection by three decades. Shih also acknowledges the realities of racialized populations in the world outside of critical theory and academia, whose “lived realities […] have not necessarily improved” (1348). In evoking the world beyond the academy, the lived experienced of actual people in the world, not just those we read about in literature, Shih positions the work of comparative racialization as necessarily anchored to the material realities facing minority populations. She concludes her introduction by arguing for the ethical practice of studying race in the academy across disciplines: “To use race as theory or to race disciplines is to imagine a way of looking at the world from genuinely reciprocal perspectives, which is, ultimately, an ethical practice of comparison” (1361). As Shih makes clear, we must think about race globally not just in theory but also in practice in ways that go beyond “the arbitrary juxtaposition of two terms in difference and similarity” (1350) and instead, consider what can be gained when we consider a wide range of perspectives and experiences in our consideration of race and the world. 8 “Race,” Writing, and Difference and Comparative Racialization model the kind of comparative and interdisciplinary work to which I hope to contribute. Two other edited collections also extend the important work initiated by the conversations that those two special issues facilitated. Shih and Françoise Lionnet in their collection, Minor Transnationalism (2005), insist on what they call “a minor or minoritized perspective” (6). By shifting the focus to minority subjectivity, such work not only argues for the need to center those perspectives, but also shows that the relationships among these myriad minority populations and experiences are crucial to more expansive and comprehensive understandings of race, racism, national identity, and the world. Such a critical position acknowledges the wide-ranging experiences of minority subjects and examines how their intersections allow for a new mode of studying race in minority U.S. fiction. My first epigraph is taken from Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson’s edited anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011), which examines the “coalitional possibilities” across race, gender, and sexuality, what the editors call the “strange affinities” (18) that emerge through the study of comparative racialization. Taken together, these two collections represent ways of moving forward in studying comparative racialization in a global context that pay close attention to difference, rather than homogenizing across various identities. My dissertation also responds to the critical call to extend the scale of American literary studies through a decentering of the nation, showing how the experiences of minority characters within and beyond the United States shape and reshape U.S. racial formations at home and abroad. Critics have responded to recent 9 calls to decenter the nation with the turn to Black Atlantic, hemispheric, and transnational studies, beginning the necessary work of extending the scale of American literary studies. My project is indebted to the scholarship of those who have expanded how we study race and nation in relation to the larger world via literature. Paul Gilroy’s seminal monograph The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) crucially links the historical experiences of the black diaspora to a historical process of modernity, claiming that the cultures of the Atlantic slave trade contributed meaningfully to the development of modernity. What emerges is a dual meaning of the Black Atlantic: on the one hand, it is a critical practice or mode of study and on the other, an actual historical center of black diasporic culture and exchange. Gilroy emphasizes the importance of diasporic routes through the Atlantic world, broadening our critical perspective beyond the national to the oceanic and the transnational. More recent work in Black Atlantic Studies such as Yogita Goyal’s Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) seeks “[t]o truly globalize American studies” (Goyal 12) by insisting that “nation and diaspora are mutually constitutive”: “While diaspora can imply a critique of nation as critics contend, it can also infuse and exemplify nationalist longings. Its critique of nation, then, does not work as a disavowal alone, but more intimately, as it contains within it its object of critique. To note that nation and diaspora are mutually constitutive is to move against the grain of most accounts of nationalism today” (Goyal 16). Goyal shows how Africa’s role has been “curiously absent” (7) in discussions of the Black Atlantic, demonstrating Africa’s role as not merely as an origin, but as the center for black 10 diasporic culture. In so doing, she critically expands the critical conversation around the Black Atlantic, not just geographically, but also theoretically. Amy Kaplan’s monograph The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (2002) examines U.S. culture as informed by both domestic and foreign relations, particularly through the project of U.S. imperialism. She argues that imperialism brings together domestic and foreign spaces into “jarring proximity” (1) insofar as the international imperial project of expansion comes to inform ideas of nationhood at home. U.S. expansion and imperialism is not only a racial project that seeks to differentiate the colonizer from the colonized through race, but it is also participating in an ongoing project of racialization, where the very terms of racial difference are shifting to accommodate the different spaces in which they are employed. Kaplan calls this phenomenon “the anarchy of empire,” a term she borrows from W.E.B. Du Bois’ poem “A Hymn to the Peoples” to illustrate “ways of thinking about imperialism as a network of power relations that changes over space and time and is riddled with instability, ambiguity, and disorder […] it also suggests the internal contradictions, ambiguities, and frayed edges that unravel at imperial borders, where binary divisions collapse and fractured spaces open” (13-14). This instability is not only a symptom of imperial identity, but national identity as well. In mobilizing imperial projects around the world, the U.S. blurs the distinction between itself and these other nations in need of imperial aid in a gesture that both reinforces and undermines the distinction between colonizer and colonized. Wai Chee Dimock has also called for a decentering of the nation within American literary studies by moving to the planet. In the introduction to her 11 collection, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007) co- edited with Lawrence Buell, Dimock calls the nation “an epiphenomenon, literally a superficial construct, a set of erasable lines on the face of the earth” (1). Part of this construction is the idea that globalization entails a kind of Americanization on a global scale. With these critiques of the nation, Dimock calls for a distinction between the American nation and the American field of studies, which would require the mapping of “alternate geographies” that decenter and deprivilege the United States. Such an approach to American studies at once recognizes the limitations of the field while acknowledging the grand scale of the planet, of which American literature emerges as one subset, worthy of study as its own entity within the larger context of the planet. Paul Giles similarly calls for a decentering and deprivileging of the nation in his book The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011). He seeks to break American literary studies away from what he calls “the myths of American exceptionalism such as those centered enduringly on religion and immigration” (265) by elucidating the relationship between the U.S. and the rest of the world and disassociating the study of American literature from its national physical borders. These scholars across American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Ethnic Studies help us rethink how space and global processes of capitalism, empire, and racialization alter the experience of the minority subject. My dissertation continues this critical work by examining how such movements enable a worlding of race in minority U.S. fiction. This dissertation brings together transnational literary studies with comparative racialization studies to contribute to the growing body of work that examines racial formations in the United States as necessarily engaged with the world 12 beyond national and oceanic boundaries. While the Atlantic Ocean remains crucial for the worlding of race as evidenced by Black Atlantic Studies, this dissertation also moves us to the Indian Ocean to further complicate and extend the idea of “strange affinities” by centering minority experience as crucial to understanding processes of racialization. I focus on the period from 1900 to the present and read a wide range of what I classify as “traveling texts”: ones that feature foreign spaces, either through the physical travel of the characters or through narrative representation. The traveling text privileges the circulation that occurs within the text and how the content of the work navigates other non-domestic spaces—how the text circulates over how the text is circulated; geographies of narration over geographies of readership. In tracing the little intimacies between characters, the chapters that follow traverse the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, widening the scope of Paul Gilroy’s important claims surrounding the Atlantic slave trade while also tracing “the intimacies of four continents” through a worlding of race that at once focuses on the individual while also being attentive to the larger world. Chapter Overview Worlding Race in Minority U.S. Fiction is organized into three parts comprising a total of five chapters. Part One is comprised of two chapters that explore how encounters of black characters with other minority characters alter their understanding of black identity in the United States. Beginning in the Jim Crow era, my first chapter argues that the unnamed narrator in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) expands his understanding of race 13 through his encounters with the foreign. This knowledge alters how he participates in and reacts to the lynching near the novel’s end, which emerges as the key mechanism for his racial recognition and identification in the novel. Unlike other lynching narratives, Johnson extends his text beyond the encounter with racial violence so that lynching is not the end of the story, but the moment when the narrator must learn how to continue existing in the world as a black man who is continuously haunted by the specter of lynching. My second chapter considers the productive potential of silences in James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head (1979). The protagonist, Hall, encounters the foreign in two distinct ways: first, as a U.S. soldier in Korea and second, through his negotiation of his brother’s homosexuality. In both cases, Hall remains silent, yet these moments invite the reader to recuperate that which remains unspoken, resulting in alternative modes of knowledge production that specifically challenge singular narratives of racial identity and experience. Reading these “disavowed silences” opens the avenue for world-making, not just in the sense of other worlds, but also for imaginatively remaking the world we currently occupy to make it more inhabitable for those who have been marginalized. Chapter Three serves as Part Two and focuses on Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), thematically serving as a bridge between the chapters that precede and follow. The novel follows the transcontinental journey of Zachary, a black American passing for white aboard a coolie ship. In his redeployment of the common trope of passing central to African American literature in a South Asian context, Ghosh is speaking to and through an American literary tradition. By centering the 14 Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic Ocean, Ghosh illuminates a different kind of crossing that expands and complicates how race is constructed not just by domestic formations, but also by global routes beyond the Black Atlantic. Part Three, comprised of Chapters Four and Five, provides for my most expansive iterations of worlding race in American literature by focusing on novels whose characters are not U.S. citizens. Chapter Four explores practices of consumption in Vietnamese-American Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003) that link the legacies of colonialism and a global system of racialized labor to American processes of racialization. I explore the various ways that the narrator, a colonial subject and servant, both cultivates and resists the consumption of his racialized body by those who hire him as a cook. Specifically, through his romantic relationship with Sweet Sunday Man, a wealthy, biracial American passing for white, I reveal how the foreign encounter between two marginalized characters allows for unexpected intimacies to emerge that world our understanding of race through queer reading. The Book of Salt privileges Bình’s worldliness from below in contrast to the elite worldliness of the Steins and even Sweet Sunday Man, whose status as American citizens provide certain levels of privilege but also obscure the intersections among American national identity, racial formations, colonialism, and a globalized system of labor. Chapter Five considers Cuban-American Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting (2003). The novel creates a transnational perspective on the genealogy of Americanness through Chen Pan, a Chinese coolie, and his racially-mixed descendants, who travel to China, Cuba, the United States, and Vietnam. Through 15 these routes, each generation experiences increased amalgamations of different races and claims a different country as home. Though only a small portion of the novel takes place in the U.S., an American presence permeates the text, with chapters depicting such events as the American occupation of Cuba and American involvement during the Vietnam War. This interaction between U.S. imperialism and the world through the experiences of the characters reveals the interconnectedness of racial formations abroad and within the U.S. By acknowledging this crucial link, García centers the world outside of the United States as fundamental to American formations of race and nationality. I conclude the dissertation with an intellectual autobiography that speaks to the personal journey that led to this project. In tracing my personal and familial history, I provide an account of the “little intimacies” that have informed how I, myself, try to world race in my everyday practice. The scope of this project leaves many gaps in the story of minority subjectivity in twentieth- and twenty-first century U.S. literature. As I reflect in my conclusion, my hope is that the vastness of the unknown and unspoken will not deter us from critically bearing witness to the myriad experiences of minority populations, from illuminating that which has been diminished to the margins of history and memory. The chapters that follow are my attempt to carry forward the important work of expanding how we understand transnational racial formations and U.S. national identity through minority subjects, and the crucial role of literature in expanding those understandings using the imagination. As academic inquiry is increasingly criticized as being divorced from the material realities of the world, I would argue that it is even more imperative not to 16 lose sight of individual people and their ensuing “little intimacies” when we talk about expansive concepts like race and globalization. In addition, our current political reality is not just a symptom of an increasingly polarized public, but also of a passive progressivism that does not put into practice that which it preaches. Framing my inquiry around these “little intimacies” is an ethical imperative that insists upon theory and practice taken together so that we can not only imagine a better world, but also make it so. By insisting on the potential of the individual subject to challenge existing paradigms that continue to marginalize minorities, I hope to advance a mode of reading that also models an ethical way of being in the world that not only invests in abstract ideas of justice and equality, but practices those ideas in the day-to-day interactions with others, forging alliances that move beyond difference and into fierce solidarity. 17 Part One: Worlding Race in African American Literature Chapter One: Reading Lynching in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Literature plays a crucial role in the mourning of catastrophic events, particularly when there has been a radical forgetting in other areas of communication and in the preservation of history. […] There are no official records such as court transcripts or the depositions of witnesses. It is impossible to come up with an accurate estimate of the number of people killed in the lynching epidemic, although there is unanimous agreement that the actual number of the dead was much, much higher than the numbers routinely cited in the historical literature. In the face of such a gap in statistical evidence, the subjective and affective record created by these writers represents a vital source of knowledge in which the literary texts carries the burden of remembering and working through the past. -Anne P. Rice, Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond (2003) I have only a faint recollection of the place of my birth. At times I can close my eyes, and call up in a dream-like way things that seem to have happened ages ago in some other world. -James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) Introduction The project of worlding race in minority U.S. fiction finds a logical beginning in the African American literary tradition. African American literature provides a particularly rich and expansive archive given the sheer number of texts produced over several time periods and its critical focus on race. As such, in this first section of my dissertation, comprised of two chapters, I examine how African American characters world their understanding of race through cross-racial coalitions. Specifically, I read James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head (1979) as examples of how understandings of racial and national identity are expanded and revised through encounters with foreignness. Both protagonists—the ex-colored man and Hall Montana—experience 18 the foreign in two ways: first, in the United States in creating relationships with those of other marginalized identities and second, by traveling abroad and interacting not just with foreigners but also with how those foreigners view the United States. Upon returning to the United States, both characters are better equipped to navigate their own racial and national identities as black Americans who are at once citizens by law but denied certain rights in fact. I argue in this section and throughout the dissertation that such encounters with foreignness illuminate how minority subjects navigate race, racism, the United States, and the larger world. In Chapter One, I use Langston Hughes’s “Home” (1933) as a segue into Johnson’s text to explore how Johnson uses lynching and its haunting of his narrator as he travels within and beyond the nation. I argue that the scene of lynching near the end of The Autobiography is the culmination of the narrator’s worldly understanding of race. While his cosmopolitanism allows him to travel abroad and flourish, he is unable to reconcile the threat of racial violence upon his return to the United States. The narrator’s decision to pass for the remainder of his life speaks to the limits of his cosmopolitanism when faced with the realities of racism and racial violence at home. Paying close attention to the global routes of Johnson’s novel, I read The Autobiography as a traveling text,3 which allows for a worlding of race as we follow the narrator’s journeys around the world and across the color line. 3 In this chapter, I extend travel to include both the physical and psychological: “The race passing plot of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is embedded in a narrative line structured by the narrator’s passage through the North, South, and Europe. As the narrator tells the story of his life, from his birth in an unnamed town to his current life as an anonymous white man in New York, he lays out two trajectories of travel: a psychological journey through whiteness and blackness and a physical journey through the United States and Europe” (Kawash 138). 19 In Chapter Two, I continue exploring how the foreign contributes to more expansive understandings of race and racism in the United States. Through the character of Hall Montana in Baldwin’s Just Above My Head, I trace the progression from cosmopolitan to worldly. Hall travels outside of the United States to fight in the Korean War and upon his return, he develops a newfound understanding of his identity as a black American. Much of his ability to world race comes when he confronts the life and death of his brother, whose homosexuality renders him foreign to Hall. With these two novels, we can trace a progression from the cosmopolitan black American who expands his understanding of race but cannot reconcile that newfound knowledge with racism at home, to the worldly black American who forges alliances with other marginalized populations in racial solidarity. The Lynching Narrative The opening paragraphs of Hughes’s short story “Home” establish a sense of looming tragedy when introducing the main character, Roy Williams. Returning from Europe with “bright stickers and tags in strange languages the home folks couldn’t read all over his bags, and on his violin case” (33), Roy returns to Hopkinsville, Missouri because “[h]e had a feeling that he was going to die, and he wanted to see his mother again. This feeling about death had been coming over him gradually for two or three years now” (Hughes 33-34). This doubled sense of doom—on the part of Roy as well as of the reader—is realized at the end of the story when Roy is lynched for speaking to Miss Reese, a white woman who “understands music” (Hughes 43). The beginning of the story identifies a causal link between Roy’s illness and his 20 decision to return home. Roy’s “unreadability”4 is a result of his “being away seven or eight years, wandering the world” (Hughes 33). When “the white loafers” see Roy “standing, slim and elegant, on the station platform” after getting “off a Pullman— something unusual for a Negro in those parts,” they respond by calling him “An uppty nigger” (Hughes 36). Roy’s time abroad has made his blackness unrecognizable to these racist whites in a U.S. context, who cannot reconcile his “elegance,” indicative of a class status that is deemed unattainable for a black man in the South, with his racial status. Roy’s worldliness marks him as foreign to white spectators just as his black skin marks him as susceptible to inordinate suspicion and violence. Roy’s return to the United States results in a collision between his worldliness, made possible through his music, and U.S. racism: “He felt dizzy and weak. The smoke and dust of travel had made him cough a lot. The eyes of the white men about the station were not kind. He heard some one mutter, ‘Nigger.’ His skin burned. For the first time in half a dozen years he felt his color. He was home” (37). The juxtaposition of Roy’s foreignness and his imminent death highlight the impossibility of escaping the specter of lynching even as he travels beyond the United States. Lynching’s power functions on two levels: as a physical bodily threat and as a psychological erasure through a denial of recognition and selfhood. Roy and Johnson’s narrator experience lynching on both levels, as Roy’s death is predicated 4 As Kate Baldwin argues, “This unreadability becomes the mirror of Roy’s articulation of selfhood in which recognition is always under erasure” (813). As such, Roy’s status as subject is constantly reliant upon—and by extension, threatened by— white spectators who recognize him, a recognition that ultimately leads to his erasure through death. 21 on his unreadibility and Johnson’s narrator remains nameless to the reader. Roy’s murder at the hands of the lynch mob seems inevitable from the very first paragraphs of the story. The constant threat of possible lynching haunts the story, especially for readers familiar with the plot in African American texts from the twentieth century, including Johnson’s novel. Though The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man predates “Home” by two decades, Roy experiences the same racial violence that haunts Johnson’s novel. Both characters come of age in post-Reconstruction America, pursue musical careers, travel to Europe to further their musical talents, then return to the United States only to face the crisis of racial violence. Both narratives culminate with a lynching scene. Of course, the crucial difference in the two texts is that Roy is the one lynched while the ex-colored man witnesses a lynching that results in his decision to pass as a white man, thereby ending his musical career, which he associates with blackness. The fictional representation of lynching that Johnson and Hughes provide extends the trauma of lynching from the physical torture and death of the specific victim, to the psychological trauma for all those who witness and fear the possibility for themselves and their loved ones. Lynching and its specter disrupt how these two characters orient themselves in the world, for wherever they go, whether in the United States or abroad, they are doubly haunted: as survivors of lynchings that they have witnessed or heard about and by the inevitable threat to their own bodies. Both characters alter their movements in the world because they are haunted by memories and threats of lynching. The loss of the black self in both of these texts, either through death or passing, illustrates the inescapability of racial violence as sanctioned by Jim Crow despite one’s mobility in the larger world. It also challenges 22 an understanding of the world simply as a spatial concept, for both scenes of racial violence, while occurring in particular places, shows how the same space is occupied differently because these characters are black men. Their worlds encompass more than geographical space because their navigation of these locations is altered by their blackness, which is always precarious because of the threat of racial violence. In this way, the specter of lynching worlds how we understand race and its role in how these characters move and understand their world. While Hughes, like many other writers, ends his text with lynching—a tradition that includes works such as Jean Toomer’s “Blood-Burning Moon” (1923), William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), Richard Wright’s “Long Black Song” and “Bright and Morning Star” from Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944), among others—Johnson continues his narrative past the moment of lynching in a gesture that allows for a worlding of race beyond the spectacle that is the moment of lynching. For Johnson’s narrator, lynching does not conclude his story but rather, emerges as the key mechanism for his racial recognition and identification in the novel. This chapter argues for the significance of lynching beyond this specific scene for it permeates the text leading up to and beyond the narrator's witnessing of racial violence. The specter of lynching stays with the narrator as he travels to various parts of the United States and Europe, and after he decides to live as a white man. Reading Form 23 While The Autobiography incorporates aspects of the passing narrative, the lynching narrative, and autobiography, it does not neatly fit into any of these categories. Johnson illustrates the novel’s formal innovativeness, recasting genres traditionally associated with race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. In addition, Johnson’s biography suggests that his own worldliness informs the writing of his novel. Although much of the scholarship on Johnson has focused on his work within the context of modernism and the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance, more recent scholarship has drawn attention to his hemispheric and global connections, both in his life and his writings.5 His biography shows strong ties to the Caribbean: his mother was from Nassau and he spent six years as U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, during which he published The Autobiography. In his monograph The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction (1992), Eric J. Sundquist points to the importance of Johnson’s location in the world for considering the color line in his novel: “Writing most of his novel in Venezuela, a nation whose racial fluidity made the color line of the United States all the more stark, Johnson could stand outside the racial dilemma just long enough to imagine an alternative—as 5 Michael Nowlin, Brian Russell Roberts, and Amanda Page have discussed the importance of Johnson’s time abroad to his literary production, specifically serving as U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. In addition, W. W. Norton released a Norton Critical Edition of Johnson’s novel in 2015. In the introduction, Jacqueline Goldsby discusses the new edition and its aims: “Bringing together a wealth of previously unpublished archival materials and a rich range of secondary sources that explicate the novel’s narrative innovations and intricacies, this volume approaches ECM as an early experiment in literary modernism whose aesthetic innovations and cultural history established African American novel writing in a global literary- historical scheme” (“Introduction” xiv). 24 well as the moral burden and cultural loss it would entail” (47).6 Despite Sundquist’s observation, the narrator’s decision to pass tends to dominate scholarly discussions of Johnson’s text. There is only one scene where the narrator intentionally passes: during the lynching close to the novel’s end. The majority of the plot recounts the narrator’s life as a black man, defying the conventions established by the passing narrative as centered around the figure of the tragic mulatto. The novel also strays from the formal conventions of the lynching narrative: it does not use the moment of racial violence as the climactic conclusion. Finally, as many scholars have noted, the novel also poses as an autobiography, in many ways mirroring the masquerade of racial passing that centers the novel’s plot.7 The novel’s form and genre uses the analogy of an author constructing a narrative to illuminate the social construction of race through the ex-colored man’s decision to pass for white. Just as passing destabilizes the very definitions and codes used to demarcate racial distinctions, so too does a fictional autobiography unsettle the ways in which we read accounts posing to be true. As a text that itself “passes,” Johnson’s novel resists generic conventions. While none of these classifications alone adequately describe the novel, actively reading the novel as an intersection of and deviation from these genres illuminates how Johnson disturbs generic categories in order to mirror the constructed 6 Amanda M. Page similarly argues for serious consideration of Johnson’s hemispheric influences, discussing the complicated nature of Johnson’s relationship with the nation and its engagement with the world in relation to his writing: “In his only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Johnson synthesized his experiences with Latinos and Latin Americans to question the predominately binary discussion of race by making Latinos central to the racial landscape” (26). 7 Donald C. Goellnicht, for example, argues that this generic “passing” of the novel is an “important part of establishing the text as complexly ironic” (116). 25 nature of racial categories. In other words, rather than reading the novel as belonging to particular genres whose conventions dictate how it should be read, Johnson’s text requires a new approach that complicates accepted categories and boundaries of literary production and consumption. While many critics have questioned the narrator’s reliability because of the novel’s refusal to abide by formal conventions, it is that very refusal and the subsequent perceived unreliability of the narrator that destabilizes how we believe texts, language, and reading ought to function. In addition to being the implied author of the Autobiography, Johnson’s narrator is also himself a reader. Depending on his location, the narrator shifts how he identifies racially, not just in terms of color but also class—he associates with the black bourgeoisie in Jacksonville but with the black working class in New York. The narrator’s strategy of improvisation is dictated by his location in the world and his plans to gain personal and financial success. In this way, the narrator’s engagement with the world is not simply as a black man who passes for white; rather, he is a reader of the world who uses improvisation in order to advance personally and financially. In order for such a method to succeed, the narrator must understand the social, political, and cultural realities of each space he inhabits. The narrator’s performance of race is dependent upon his physical location and his ability to adapt to that new environment. The distinction between writer and reader is blurred as are the boundaries between black and white, and between autobiography and fiction.8 As 8 As Pisiak argues, “By its very existence, this text demonstrates that the constructs upon which its story is based—the most important being the split between “white” and “black” in America—are themselves “unreliable.” The obvious ambiguities and uncertainties of the narrator and the text make evident the less obvious, but equally arbitrary and ambiguous aspects of all that American society is based on: character, 26 someone who is light enough to pass, the narrator’s physical body makes illegible the distinction between black and white, while his narrative voice destabilizes the language and conventions associated with autobiography and the trope of the tragic mulatto. Because the narrator decides to pass when he witnesses the lynching, it is the moment when the story becomes both an autobiography and a passing narrative. The lynching scene serves two purposes: on a formal level, it is when these two genres converge and on a narrative level, the narrator’s understanding of race is worlded such that he decides to live on the other side of the racial divide. Because the narrator is the witness rather than victim of racial violence, the function of lynching in Johnson’s novel is markedly different from other texts within the genre. While the novel clearly condemns the racial violence it represents, it also reads lynching through multiple lenses, expanding how the lynching narrative functions beyond political commentary to understanding the reverberating effects of racial violence both prior to and in the aftermath of witnessing. Lynching and its specter are inescapable for the narrator wherever he travels and even as he chooses to pass. The opening lines of the novel reveal that the narrator has a secret he plans to reveal to his audience: I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life, the secret which for some years I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions; and it is a curious study to me to analyze the motives which prompt me to do it. I feel that I am led by the same impulse which forces the unfound-out identity and selfhood, social standards and cultural codes; law, history, and literature; and language, which creates and maintains all of these” (104). 27 criminal to take somebody into his confidence, although he knows that the act is liable, even almost certain, to lead to his undoing. (5) Most readers and critics presume that “the great secret” is that the narrator is black passing for white, which overlooks that the narrator only deliberately passes during the lynching scene. Jacqueline Goldsby is also skeptical that the narrator’s secret is his “true” racial identity: “[T]he lynching is the novel’s structural secret because that event inaugurates and sustains the writing of the text, not the fact of the narrator’s passing as white” (Spectacular Secret 200). Goldsby’s emphasis on the importance of the lynching not just for the narrator personally, but also as the pivot around which the narrative revolves is crucial to understanding the novel. However, the lynching is critical beyond its structural function. Goldsby argues that the narrator’s decision to pass for white in the aftermath of the lynching “is not made in order to escape that fate, but to historicize the violence as the central event of his life” (Spectacular Secret 199), but such a claim attempts to divorce race from the threat of racial violence. The two are linked—the narrator chooses to pass because he witnesses the lynching and recognizes that he is susceptible to the same kind of racial violence. The scene literalizes the fear of lynching that has haunted Johnson’s narrator throughout the entire novel. In addition, because the ex-colored man is living as a putative white man, the threat of lynching continues to haunt him even as he passes for white. The narrator’s passing into the white world is not the first instance of racial performance in the novel. Rather, the narrator’s final move to live within the white world is a reiteration of what he has been doing all along: performing different racial identities and appropriating various cultures in order to maximize his personal and 28 economic advantages. Salim Washington traces the ways in which the narrator’s engagement with literature, music, and racial identity is performative and ever- shifting: “Primed through his facility with oral/aural approach to learning, his predisposition towards black performance styles, and his literacy, the ex-colored man makes a gradual ascent into blackness through his changing social identity and his reading habits” (243). The narrator’s literacy and his ability to pass grant him a degree of mobility and access, which he uses for personal and financial gain. As the narrator travels, he performs being both black and white throughout the novel, revealing their social constructions as always shifting, multiple, and unassimilable.9 Though the narrator’s physical and metaphorical movements between different geographical locations and racial spheres, respectively, seem to show different moments of immersion into particularized identities, he is never able to transform completely; just as his movement South does not make him any more Southern, his adoption of different racial characteristics does not make him any more a member of that particular race in that particular moment. If, as Kawash explains, racial identity is always a performance based upon inauthenticity, then the narrator’s negotiations of race are not independent acts of deception but rather, reveal how the parameters of racial identification and classification are unstable as symptoms of the constructed nature of race. Though the narrator does not pass for white until the end of the novel, he repeatedly capitalizes on his light skin in order to garner social and economic capital. Once he decides to pass, however, he finally understands the weight of his 9 Kawash similarly argues, “As the novel unfolds, the narrator’s relation to blackness is shown to be as inauthentic as his relation to whiteness; rather than being both black and white, or either black or white, he is in fact neither” (147). For Kawash, it is this lack of a fixed identity that sets Johnson’s novel apart from other passing narratives. 29 actions and their negative consequences not just for himself, but also for those from whom he profits. Racial Awakening The narrator experiences two moments of racial crisis: first as a child when he realizes he is black and second, as an adult when he decides to pass for white. In both cases, crisis is precipitated by violence. In the innocence of childhood, the narrator does not immediately realize that he is black—he associates almost exclusively with his white peers at school and even participates in an incident of racist bullying: The other black boys and girls were still more looked down upon. Some of the boys often spoke of them as “niggers.” […] On one such afternoon one of the black boys turned suddenly on his tormentors, and hurled a slate; it struck one of the white boys in the mouth, cutting a slight gash in his lip. At sight of the blood the boy who had thrown the slate ran, and his companions quickly followed. We ran after them pelting them with stones until they separated in several directions. (11) At the beginning of the passage, it unclear whether the narrator identifies with the group of white bullies, for his language distances himself from both the “black boys and girls” and the “crowd” who would follow the black students home from school in order to taunt them (11). However, once the black boy retaliates and there is the initiation of physical violence in response to psychological violence, the narrator clearly aligns himself with the white boys when he says “we ran after them” (emphasis mine). Believing he is white, the narrator identifies with the boy who is 30 struck and suffers “a slight gash,” and reacts violently by “pelting [the black boys] with stones.” When the narrator goes home to tell his mother what had happened, she scolds his racist language and behavior: I was very much wrought up over the affair, and went home and told my mother how one of the “niggers” had struck a boy with a slate. I shall never forget how she turned on me. “Don’t ever use that word again,” she said, “and don’t you ever bother the colored children at school. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” I did hang my head in shame, but not because she had convinced me that I had done wrong, but because I was hurt by the first sharp word she had ever given me. (11) The narrator feels no shame or remorse for his actions, nor does he reflect on the incident beyond how it affected his mother’s behavior towards him. The narrative almost immediately turns to the narrator’s revelation that he is black. In the paragraph that follows, the narrator recounts how his schoolteacher publicly reveals his racial identity to the entire class. Once he arrives at home, he stares at his reflection in the mirror: “I rushed up into my own little room, shut the door, and went quickly to where my looking-glass hung on the wall. For an instant I was afraid to look, but when I did I looked long and earnestly. [….] How long I stood there gazing at my image I do not know” (12). In contrast to his reaction to his mother’s scolding, here, the narrator literally reflects on the meaning of being subject to racially-motivated mockery—“A few of the white boys jeered me, ‘Oh, you’re a nigger too’” (11)—and fails to find any answers in his mirror image. This moment reflects the narrator’s 31 crisis of identity while simultaneously revealing the absurdity of racial classifications: “I noticed the ivory whiteness of my skin […] I noticed the softness and glossiness of my dark hair that fell in waves over my temples, making my forehead appear whiter than it really was” (12). He immediately assigns racial value, showing that he has understood the social meanings of blackness and whiteness all along. While the narrator is initially devastated by his revelation, he eventually identifies with the social and racial category that he is assigned by U.S. law and culture. As a young child, the narrator hears his classmate, Shiny, give a rousing oration at school. For the first time since discovering that he is black, the narrator feels a sense of racial pride: “But the effect upon me of ‘Shiny’s’ speech was double; I not only shared the enthusiasm of his audience, but he imparted to me some of his own enthusiasm, I felt leap within me pride that I was colored; and I began to form wild dreams of bringing glory and honor to the Negro race” (26). Shiny’s ability to speak effectively to his audience moves the narrator and he begins reading black writers. This increased interest in black culture, however, does not go beyond the personal. The narrator eventually plans to fulfill his “wild dreams” of furthering the race through appropriation of black culture as an adult pursuing his musical career. He has an epiphany while listening to a musician in Europe: [T]his man had taken ragtime and made it classic. The thought came across me like a flash—It can be done, why can’t I do it? From that moment my mind was made up. I clearly saw the way of carrying out the ambition I had formed when a boy. [….] I made up my mind to go back into the very heart of the South, to live among the people, and 32 drink in my inspiration firsthand. I gloated over the immense amount of material I had to work with, not only modern ragtime, but also the old slave songs—material no one had yet touched. (74) The narrator wants to immerse himself in black culture for personal advancement, not to connect with the black community. What begins as a personal fascination with blackness shifts to a selfish desire to cultivate black culture in his music for personal and financial prosperity. The narrator’s initiation into black culture as an adult occurs with his journey South to attend college. The narrator attributes his decision to go to Atlanta University to his “peculiar fascination which the South held over [his] imagination” (36). His journey, however, results in a “steadily increasing disappointment” the closer he comes to Atlanta, which he calls “a big, dull, red town” (37). Though the narrator has been in the company of other black people in the past, this is the first time that he encounters a black community: “and here I caught my first sight of colored people in large numbers. I had seen little squads around the railroad stations on my way south, but here I saw a street crowded with them” (39-40). Despite his “feeling of almost repulsion” upon seeing “these people” (40), the narrator comes to Atlanta identifying as black even though he can pass for white; his companion comments: “Of course, you could go in any place in the city; they wouldn’t know you from white” (41). For critic Roxanna Pisiak, he identifies as black out of convenience: “The narrator passes for black (or white) when it is convenient for him to do so. When he first moves to the South, passing for black allows him to study his people, but, more importantly, it gives him the opportunity for companionship with 33 others” (106). This is an opportunity, though, that the narrator does not take. As a newcomer to the South and having no prior interactions with black communities, the narrator does not fully integrate himself into black society and instead, exists as an outside observer. It is not until he leaves Atlanta and goes to Jacksonville that he feels like a member of the black community. However, when he goes to Jacksonville, he capitalizes on his light skin in order to advance not just in the black community, but in the Cuban exile community as well. In so doing, he relies upon the logic of U.S. racial hierarchies as a means of participating within various communities of color and thereby, reinscribes them. Reading and the Cuban Cigar Factory When he arrives in Jacksonville, Florida, the narrator looks for a boarding- house and meets a black woman and her Cuban husband, who become his landlords. Upon inquiring about employment options, the husband offers to get the narrator a job at the cigar factory where he works. As they continue talking, the conversation moves to the subject of Cuban Independence, “the subject nearest [the Cuban man’s] heart”: He was an exile from the island, and a prominent member of the Jacksonville Junta. [….] As the man sat there nervously smoking his long, “green” cigar, and telling me of the Gomezes, both the white one and the black one, of Macco and Bandera, he grew positively eloquent. He also showed that he was a man of considerable education and 34 reading. He spoke English excellently, and frequently surprised me by using words one would hardly expect from a foreigner. (39) This description juxtaposes the Cuban’s foreignness with the narrator’s command of the English language in such a way that links his political passions with his ability to express himself effectively. The Cuban’s discussion of revolutionary leaders recalls Shiny’s recitation of Wendell Phillips’ speech on Toussaint L’Ouverture: “[Shiny] made a striking picture, that thin little black boy standing on the platform, dressed in clothes that did not fit him any too well, his eyes burning with excitement, his shrill, musical voice vibrating in tones of appealing defiance, and his black face alight with such great intelligence and earnestness as to be positively handsome” (25). In both instances, impassioned speech about freedom and liberty inspires the narrator to identify with disenfranchised populations of color. There are some key distinctions, however, between the two moments. First, Shiny’s speech arouses in the narrator a sense of racial pride and solidarity, an extension of Shiny’s own enthusiasm. In contrast, the narrator listens to the Cuban’s speech as an outsider who is not fully invested in the subject. The narrator observes, comments, and is impressed by the speech’s delivery and eloquence rather than its content. Second, in Shiny’s oration, the revolutionary figure leads an all-black revolt against whites, whereas in the Cuban’s discussion, blacks and whites work together towards revolution.10 It is this interracial alliance that the narrator never experiences or witnesses in black or white communities within the United States, nor does he seek 10 Amanda M. Page discusses how the Cuban exile and the narrator have different concepts of race because of their nationalities so that the novel “presents Cuba and its people as an alternative to the Jim Crow politics of the U.S. South” (29). 35 out any such connections. From his “forced loneliness” (15) as a child upon discovering his racial identity to his later relationship with the white millionaire and those within his circles, any interracial interactions he experiences are based upon exchange value. Listening to the Cuban “foreigner” (39) is a crucial step in the narrator’s worlding of race because it shows the potential for thinking beyond the racial divide that so heavily dictates race relations in the U.S. in the spirit of a common goal. The Cuban exile community gives the narrator another picture of how blacks and whites can coexist in the world, expanding the narrator’s understanding of race beyond the racism he knows and experiences in the U.S. The narrator’s meeting with his Cuban landlord leads to his employment at a cigar factory. Beginning as a “stripper,” responsible for stripping tobacco leaves from its stems, he quickly rises within the hierarchy of the factory itself thanks to his affinity for language: I discovered that I had a talent for languages as well as for music. [….] I bought a method for learning the Spanish language, and with the aid of my landlord, as a teacher, by constant practice with my fellow workmen, and by regularly reading the Cuban newspapers, and finally some books of standard Spanish literature which were at the house, I was able in less than a year to speak like a native. In fact, it was my pride that I spoke better Spanish than many of the Cuban workmen at the factory. (40) The narrator is not only able to learn and speak a foreign language, but he claims that his fluency is superior to the majority of these workmen. Furthermore, the narrator 36 acquires his fluency through aural/oral and textual immersion. Just as the narrator attributes his Cuban landlord’s ability to speak eloquently in a foreign language to his level of reading, the narrator also attributes much of his fluency to his immersion in the written word. Later in the novel, the narrator again uses his natural talent for language to his advantage when living in Paris (69-70). The narrator claims his superior position in the cigar factory through his official role as reader as well as his self-proclaimed mastery of language. The narrator’s aptness for language facilitates his promotion to the prestigious position of “reader” (lector). The other workers would pay the lector out of their wages and therefore, had a stake and say in what was being read to them. As a result, the lector had to please his audience: “Lectores had to win over their audience, so they varied the volume of their voice and were conscious of their tone, gestures, and pronunciation—basic elements for doing a good reading or giving an eloquent speech” (Tinajero 73). In order for the narrator to be an effective reader, he must embody the very same qualities that he admired in Shiny when he delivered the Toussaint L’Ouverture speech. The narrator’s ability to mimic Shiny’s performative prowess purely for personal gain as well as his use of language—specifically in this case, Spanish—draws on various aspects of different people and identities. This fusion of strategies for self-advancement mimics the form of the novel as a combination of specific literary conventions. Similar to Johnson’s formal choices that draw attention to the constructed nature of literary and racial categories, his narrator’s choices reveal the instability of the identities he mimics. The narrator strategically appropriates multiple identities for personal gain. Throughout the novel, the narrator 37 uses material from other people and communities of color in order to garner his own social, cultural, and racial capital even at their expense, culminating in his plan to appropriate spirituals for his musical career later in the novel. By mirroring Shiny’s performance, the narrator fulfills the expectations of his position as reader and improves his position within the factory, resulting in both personal and financial advantages. However, in so doing, the narrator draws attention to the ways in which race, nation, geography, and language move beyond established and accepted borders. Significantly, the narrator privately reads the same kinds of texts that a cigar factory reader would read to an audience of workers when he is teaching himself Spanish. What begins as texts used for private consumption are then disseminated to a larger audience. Reading aloud not only “served to educate, entertain, convince, and inform” (Tinajero 29), but also to promote political awareness and involvement.11 As the lector in this factory, the narrator participates in a long-standing tradition of social, cultural, and political engagement that challenges inequality through reading. The development of Cuban cigar factories in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century illustrates the how ideas and practices traveled beyond their country of origin. Along with the factories and their products came Cuban traditions and ideas of social and political progress, embodied by the figure of the lector. 11 Tinajero describes the expansive social and political influence that the practice of reading aloud had on Cuban citizens: “Likewise, reading aloud encouraged the workers to found labor associations. When the vast cigar sector was educated by way of reading aloud, a civic conscience was created, which was why the cigar workers fought for both their labor and their political rights. Reading was always under scrutiny because it represented a threat to the colonizing government” (Tinajero 43- 44). 38 Furthermore, reading was banned in cigar factories in Cuba during the Ten Years’ War and the Spanish-American War, while the tradition continued and thrived in the United States: [T]he practice had been established in the United States at precisely the time when it had been interrupted in Cuba, where reading aloud did not take place between 1868 and 1882. Reading aloud in cigar factories in Key West not only laid the foundation for a practice that would be carried out for decades outside Cuba, but also contributed to a Cuban cultural phenomenon becoming firmly rooted in the United States. Also, reading aloud helped to keep the native tongue alive and well in a foreign land. (Tinajero 83) While this ongoing development of Cuban culture through the cigar factory occurred within the United States, the radical politics as embodied by the lector stood in direct contrast to social realties of racial discrimination of the U.S., particularly in the southern regions where such factories operated. While the narrator’s immersion into this community of Cuban nationals exposes him to such politics, he does not adopt their ideals and instead, seeks to advance himself even at the expense of others.12 The narrator gains his status in the established hierarchy of that community through his appropriation of Cuban culture, which is achieved by “learn[ing] not only to make cigars, but also to smoke, to swear, and to speak Spanish” (40). This appropriation, 12 Stecopoulos convincingly argues that the narrator’s interactions with the Cubans signals his eventual ability to abandon his race and live as a white man: “A virtual (Latin American) South provides him with the comforts he cannot locate in the domestic southland or anywhere in the United States. Indeed, the ex-colored man’s ability to jettison the terrifying problems of the regional for the colonialist compensations of the hemispheric enables him to live as a racial passer” (57). 39 however, is a reversal of the usual process of imperialism in which the colonized population—in this case, the Cubans—adopts the language and practices of the colonizer—in this case, the narrator. Instead, the narrator adopts the language and practices of the Cubans. Yet, his position at the top of this community’s hierarchy is tenuous, for he is still within the U.S. and therefore, his status as black still has social and legal implications that cannot be suspended. Though the cigar factory is a representation of Cuban culture and politics, it exists within the borders of the United States and therefore, he is subject to American hierarchies of race and class. Like his reaction to Shiny’s speech, the narrator’s mode of reading as reader is only to show his status; he ignores the content of what he reads and the revolutionary ideals that dictate those texts, as evidenced by the lack of any contextual information in the narrative. The narrator exercises a kind of intellectual superiority that is tied to the earlier moment of hearing Shiny’s speech. In both cases, the narrator is invested in racial uplift, but in such a way that elides race and the need to make any real connections with communities of color. The narrator’s appropriation of a Cuban political and cultural phenomenon is therefore also a depoliticization that reproduces racial hierarchy. While working with the Cubans, the narrator also strives to achieve a certain degree of status within the black community, consciously associating with the black elite in Jacksonville: “I became acquainted with the best class of colored people in Jacksonville. This was really my entrance into the race. It was my initiation into what I have termed the freemasonry of the race. I had formulated a theory of what it was to be colored, now I was getting the practice” (40-41). At the very same time that he 40 profits and advances within the Cuban community, the narrator describes his “entrance into the race,” linking his political and economic capital as reader, and his social and racial capital as a light-skinned black man. The narrator takes full advantage of his positions and profits in both contexts, both personally and economically: The protagonist’s ability to “go Cuban” within the confines of the U.S. South speaks powerfully to the complex elasticity of both the region and the nation. The presence of an anti-imperialist Cuban American community in northern Florida suggests the commendable heterogeneity of the U.S. South despite its stringent Jim Crow codes. Yet the existence of this Cuban pocket in “Dixie” also testifies to the ability of the southeastern United States to absorb and exploit persons from proximate nations, regardless of their politics. (Stecopoulos 64) The narrator’s time in Jacksonville is also significant because he identifies with a black community for the first time. While embracing the camaraderie and culture of his fellow Cuban factory workers, he also uses his acceptance into their community in order to gain the economic status needed to enter into the company of a certain class of blacks. Before living in Jacksonville, the narrator does not identify with other black people and remains outside of the black communities he encounters because of their class. Though the narrator actively participates in the black community once he is in Jacksonville, his racial identity is still ambiguous. While he identifies himself as a black person by not passing for white, there is a sense that the narrator is performing 41 his idea of blackness according to his preconceptions of “what it was to be colored” for he claims to be “getting the practice” of his prior theorization of black identity. Furthermore, through his observations of the South, particularly when he describes black people as “roughly divided into three classes […] in respect to their relations with the whites” (41-42)—“the desperate class” (42), “all who are connected with the whites by domestic service” (42), and “the well-to-do and educated colored people” (43)—the narrator distances himself from the community that he joins. If, as Donald C. Goellnicht argues, this categorization is just one example of the narrator’s “adoption of the white gaze” (119), then his racial identity is still indeterminate. He is performing both identities, which is especially illustrated when the narrator describes the experience of the black person as always mediated by one’s status as colored (Johnson 14), resulting in a black gaze that the narrator himself seems to be negating through his distant categorization of the three classes of blacks. If we look back to the narrator’s experiences in the factory, we can see him performing a third identity—that of the Cuban expatriate. Each of these performances provides him access to a specific physical space that is determined by “the geography of race” (Kawash 139), which he gains through active appropriation rather than passive assimilation, and each space grants him a position of privilege. The narrator’s introduction to the musical phenomenon of ragtime and his subsequent decision to cultivate black culture for his musical ambitions are the culmination of his imperialistic urges. His considerable musical skill, like his affinity for language, becomes his new tool for gaining a position of privilege: 42 By mastering ragtime I gained several things: first of all, I gained the title of professor […] Then, too, I gained the means of earning a rather fair livelihood […] Through it I also gained a friend who was the means by which I escaped from this lower world. And, finally, I secured a wedge which has opened to me more doors and made me a welcome guest than my playing of Beethoven and Chopin could ever have done. (61) Music grants the narrator a privileged title that is much like his position of “reader” in the cigar factory. Ironically, prior to mastering ragtime, the narrator earns extra money by rolling cigars, a task that he feels is beneath him after working as lector in the Jacksonville factory. Furthermore, it is his musical ability that attracts the white millionaire, which leads to the narrator’s “escape” from the world that is represented through the “Club.” This “Club” is the embodiment of thriving black culture in Harlem: “almost every night one or two parties of white people, men and women, who were out sight-seeing or slumming” (78). The narrator is thankful to escape with the help of his white patron, for he views the black patrons of the “Club” as inferior, which is illustrated in his designation of them as members of this “lower world.” What propels the narrator to spend time in Europe is the murder of a white woman in a New York club at the hands of her black lover. The narrator describes the black man in the moments leading up to the murder: “His ugly look completely frightened me. [….] I expected every moment to feel a blow on my head” (65). The narrator feels threatened, replicating both the immediate criminalization of black men and their over-sexualization by the white majority. Though it becomes clear that the 43 narrator is not the intended victim when the widow is shot and killed, the narrator panics, and he “traveled, not by sight, but instinctively” (65) to flee the scene. Johnson unsettles the reader’s assumptions, playing on the fact that most will interpret the narrator’s actions as being motivated by the fear that he will be misidentified as the killer of a white woman and therefore, subjected to violence himself. However, the narrator reveals that his motivation is based in guilt: I did not feel at ease until the ship was well out of New York harbor and, notwithstanding the repeated assurances of my millionaire friend and my own knowledge of the facts in the case, I somehow could not rid myself of the sentiment that I was, in a great degree, responsible for the widow’s tragic end. (66) Johnson reverses the all-too-familiar scenario of a black man being falsely accused of a crime against a white woman and immediately being afraid for his life. Instead, the narrator feels guilt for the widow’s death but does not face bodily harm, nor is he concerned about the fate of the widow’s black lover, whose life would be very much in danger. Johnson leaves this character unnamed, just as his narrator remains unnamed throughout the entire novel, suggesting that the ex-colored man’s response to this person’s presence as a threat of his own safety is in fact, a projection of the ex- colored man’s own susceptibility to those very same racist classifications, the ultimate price being lynching. The narrator continues by describing his state of mind in the moments following: “I could still see that beautiful white throat with the ugly wound. The jet of blood pulsing from it had placed an indelible red stain on my memory” (66). Though the narrator seems to be describing the trauma associated with 44 seeing “the widow” murdered, he is in fact traumatized by the consequences of a black man murdering a white woman. Such a reaction seems not only to ignore the constant threat of racial violence that black men faced, but also indicates the narrator’s lack of identification with that reality as being relevant to his own racial identity in the U.S. Traveling to Europe and Back The physical movements of Roy and the ex-colored man around the world are indicative of a kind of cosmopolitanism, especially because these characters go to Europe in order to increase their social and cultural capital through the pursuit of classical music. While in Europe, both characters experience a partial suspension of the color line insofar as their blackness does not bar them from social and economic opportunity. In Vienna “where so many people were hungry,” Roy is “a man who had a job” (Hughes 34). Similarly, Johnson’s narrator describes himself as “a polished man of the world” (75). However, once back in the United States, both Roy and the ex-colored become reacquainted with the color line through racial violence. When Roy returns to Hopkinsville, Missouri and greets an old classmate, who is white, Hughes writes, “Roy had forgotten he wasn’t in Europe” (36) to explain his mistake of extending his hand. At the end of the story, prior to seeing Miss Reese again, he takes a walk through town but “[h]is mind went back to the lights and the music of the cities of Europe” (46). Roy walks as if he is back in Europe and not in the U.S. South. Once he sees Miss Reese, he repeats his initial mistake with his old classmate, ultimately catalyzing the events leading to his murder: “Forgetting he wasn’t in 45 Europe, he took off his hat and his gloves, and held out his hand to this lady who understood music” (47). Roy’s murder speaks not only to the pervading racism of those occupying his particular location, but also the limits of his cosmopolitanism, which cannot protect him from the threat of racial violence that becomes actualized in the final moments of the story. Though he physically travels around the world, he cannot escape the racial realities of the South. The ex-colored man similarly “forgets” the threat of lynching once arriving in Europe: “the strange sights, the chatter in an unfamiliar tongue, and the excitement of landing and passing the customs officials caused me to forget completely the events of a few days before” (66-67). Even after he escapes the traumatic scene of violence at the “Club” and overlooks its racial politics, the narrator still cannot escape the specter of lynching despite being in Europe as “an American. Americans are immensely popular in Paris” (71): Only once in Paris did I have cause to blush for my American citizenship. I had become quite friendly with a young man from Luxembourg whom I had met at the big café. [….] One night he asked me in a tone of voice which indicated that he expected an authoritative detail of an ugly rumor, “Did they really burn a man alive in the United States?” I never knew what I stammered out to him as an answer. I should have felt relieved if I could even have said to him, “Well, only one.” (71) In this moment, the narrator’s shame still distances himself from lynching as a personal threat and is expressed through his identification as American. Lynchings 46 were directly tied to ideologies of white supremacy, which included the need to control the number of black bodies in particular places.13 Goldsby further discusses the widespread social and economic significance of lynching: “[T]he ex-colored man encounters lynching’s violence in shocking ways and nearly everywhere in the world that he travels. The labor, goods, services, things, people, and memories that make the novel’s social world materially palpable and inhabitable to the narrator all bear the mark of lynching’s violence on them” (Spectacular Secret 169). Even when the narrator travels beyond the U.S., he cannot escape lynching’s specter. It is not until he witnesses the lynching near the novel’s end that he is able to face his own vulnerability to racial violence. Out of the world of Harlem clubs, the narrator moves first into the upper crust of white society through the white millionaire’s patronage, then into the larger elite world of Europe. Though he inhabits the same physical space as the members of these upper classes, it is only through his employment, which by definition places him in a position of inferiority. Many critics have described the relationship between the narrator and the millionaire as reenacting the master-slave relationship, but I would argue that rather, the narrator consciously cultivates this relationship. By maintaining his relationship, he ensures his access to the world of upper-class whites, which eventually leads to his epiphany that he should cultivate black culture for his own 13 Patricia Hill Collins describes the material and economic phenomena that contribute to the realities and frequency of lynching: “Like many other violent crimes, lynchings were more frequent during the summer months than in cooler seasons, a reflection of the changing labor demands of agricultural production cycles. One function of lynchings may well have been to rid White communities of Black people who allegedly violated the moral order. But another function was to maintain control over the African American population, especially during times when White landowners needed Black labor to work fields of cotton and tobacco” (Collins 218). 47 music. This realization points to the narrator’s reversal of his prior musical practice of “turning classic music into ragtime” (74), which mimics his reversal of his positioning as a victim of imperialism to perpetrator. The ambition that the narrator identifies from his boyhood is born after listening to Shiny’s speech. It is through mimicking this man who he hears playing ragtime in Germany, however, that he sees himself “carrying out the ambition” of “bringing glory and honor to the Negro race” (74). Just as the performance of racial identity, as Kawash points out, is inherently inauthentic because it is an act of what she calls “mimetic spectatorship” (Kawash 148), so too are the narrator’s musical aspirations because they not only mimic the techniques of another artist, but also rely upon different categories of music that remain unfixed, for the form that the narrator seeks to reproduce is one that blurs the distinction between ragtime and classical music. The narrator’s social mobility allows him access, once again, to a foreign language. The narrator employs similar strategies to learn French while in Paris as he did to learn Spanish in the Cuban cigar factory. His “more than an ordinary command of French” (69) leads to the narrator analogizing his mastery of music with that of language: “The acquiring of another foreign language awoke me to the fact that with a little effort I could secure an added accomplishment as fine and as valuable as music; so I determined to make myself as much of a linguist as possible” (69). The narrator’s experiences in communities of various racial, ethnic, and national identities illuminate his ability to conform to his environment for his personal gain, an ability that he attributes to his blackness: “It is remarkable, after all, what an adaptable creature the Negro is. I have seen the black West Indian gentleman in London, and he 48 is in speech and manners a perfect Englishman. I have seen natives of Haiti and Martinique in Paris, and they are more Frenchy than a Frenchman. I have no doubt that the Negro would make a good Chinaman, with exception of the pigtail” (80). What the narrator identifies as adaptability is, in fact, the ability to perform various identities outside of one’s own. While such a statement illuminates the performative aspect of all identities, whether they are one’s own or not, it also reveals the narrator's attempts to escape the realities of race. Much to the disappointment of the millionaire, the narrator decides to return to the United States to pursue his musical career but has “an uneasy feeling about returning to New York” (77), which anticipates the forthcoming scene of lynching. Like Roy Williams, the ex-colored man returns home knowing that he will face tragedy. Upon his return, the narrator begins to question his intentions for cultivating black Southern culture in his musical project: “I began to analyze my own motives, and found that they, too, were very largely mixed with selfishness. Was it more a desire to help those I considered my people, or more a desire to distinguish myself, which was leading me back to the United States? That is a question I have never definitely answered” (77). Unlike in the earlier passage in which he calls blacks in the South “the people” (104), in this passage, he switches the article, calling them “my people.” This shift signals the narrator’s attempt to connect with the heritage of his mother, who is both from the South and black. The narrator decides that returning to the South is the best way to carry out his musical vision: “I made up my mind to go back into the very heart of the South, to live among the people, and drink in my inspiration firsthand. I gloated over the 49 immense amount of material I had to work with, not only modern ragtime, but also the old slave songs—material no one had yet touched” (104). For Stecopoulos, this gesture is inherently linked to the American South: Instead of a black southern cultural product colonizing the world— instead of ragtime marching triumphantly across the globe—the black South becomes the site of colonization itself. Imagining the world of culture and the culture of the world in black imperial terms has not linked the protagonist closer to his mother’s people in a glorious manner; instead it has separated him from them. Black culture and black people now constitute the object, not the subject, of the ex- colored man’s global vision. (72) This internalization of the white patron’s “dream of U.S. global conquest through ragtime” (Stecopoulos 72) from a foreign to a domestic space results in the narrator’s complete separation from both black culture and black people through his imperialistic intentions, and his “gloat[ing] over the immense amount of material” (Johnson 74) points to his selfish motivations for his journey back to the South. Despite questioning his motivations, the narrator continues his mission to appropriate black culture for his personal gain: “When I reached Macon, I decided to leave my trunk and all my surplus belongings, to pack my bag, and strike out into the interior. This I did; and by train, by mule and ox-cart, I traveled through many counties. This was my first real experience among rural colored people, and all that I saw was interesting to me” (122). As in other moments throughout the novel, the narrator takes on a sociological approach to observing the people he encounters and 50 in so doing, distances himself from the black people he sees, despite being in the land of his mother. Sundquist identifies this experience as “an imperial incursion or sorts” into the rural South: The analogy of imperial exploration is apt, for this simple phrase, like so many others in the novel, maps onto the narrative action a constellation of cultural implications that locate Johnson’s protagonist at a historical moment of great racial upheaval, asking us to see the potential disappearance of African-American culture under the pressures of harsh segregation and race violence in terms at least vaguely synonymous with the colonial decimation of African culture. (11) If, as Sundquist claims, Johnson is interrogating the historical nature of white supremacy and its implications for black culture, then Johnson’s narrator would seem complicit to a certain extent by inhabiting the role of imperialist and classifying the rural blacks as “these dull, simple people” (124). The narrator goes on to say, “I could not but appreciate the logic of the position held by those Southern leaders who have been bold enough to proclaim against the education of the Negro” (124). While the narrator announces his blackness on his first trip to the South prior to his tour in Europe, on this second trip, he neither identifies himself as black nor hides his black identity (Johnson 126). Furthermore, the narrator’s intentions have shifted from attending college to making a conquest out of black culture, which could, arguably, signal a shift in the narrator’s position within the social space of the color line; through his adoption of the role of imperialist and his anonymity, which makes the 51 narrator “sure [his] identity as a colored man had not yet become known in the town” (135), the narrator goes from a member of one black community—specifically, the black bourgeoisie—to an outside observer of another black community with the intention of conquest. This shift not only signals the narrator’s changed intentions, but also his changed position within the geography of race to that of performing whiteness, despite his socially-defined black body. It is not until he witnesses the lynching that he abandons his plans to profit off of the black community for his own personal gain. Lynching and Passing The crucial scene of lynching, much commented on by critics, mirrors the scene discussed earlier in this chapter when the narrator participates in the torment of his black classmates prior to realizing he is also black. While the violence in the latter scene is incomparably more severe with the black victim being burned alive, the narrator’s positioning among the participants is strikingly similar. It is because of his visible whiteness that he is able to participate in both scenes, first because he believes he is white as a child, then because he uses his whiteness to gain access to the scene as an adult. In the lynching scene, he is alienated from both because he is passing—as a black man, he cannot identify with the violent beliefs and actions of the mob and as a man passing for white, he cannot betray his racial identity for his position on the white side of the racial divide is a precarious one. The narrator’s isolation from all of the other people present reveals that he has no community, black or white, and therefore cannot feel any sense of collective anger or even collective support. The 52 lynching scene illustrates the social construction of race through the narrator’s position as a spectator who can neither identify with the white mob nor with the black victim. Upon hearing a disturbance outside of his boarding house, which the narrator deduces is the formation of a lynch mob, the narrator decides to investigate: “[I]t was impossible for me to remain in the house under such tense excitement. My nerves would not have stood it. Perhaps what bravery I exercised in going out was due to the fact that I felt sure my identity as a colored man had not yet become known in the town” (96). Though the narrator identifies himself here as a “colored man,” the sequence of his thoughts and actions are consistent with someone who is white. Upon hearing “the rumor that some terrible crime and been committed, murder! rape!” (96), he is excited, not fearful, and goes towards the lynch mob rather than away from it, knowing he will be able to blend into the group of white participants. Once the lynch mob finds the accused black man, the narrator’s description of what follows is ambivalent and vague: A space was quickly cleared in the crowd, and a rope placed about his neck; when from somewhere came the suggestion, “Burn him!” It ran like an electric current. Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings into savage beasts? Nothing can be more terrible. A railroad tie was sunk into the ground, the rope was removed and a chain brought and securely coiled around the victim and the stake. (97) The actions of the mob are narrated in passive voice, making the narrator’s degree of participation unclear. The narrator similarly describes the superior attitude of his 53 white classmates towards their black peers in the passive voice—“The other black boys and girls were still more looked down upon”—before describing his black classmate’s retaliation for being taunted. In both cases, the narrator distances himself from both sides, black versus white, victim versus perpetrator, refusing to identify with either. The rhetorical question in the middle of the passage is similarly vague: it is unclear whether the transformation to which he is referring is that of the white men who are so bloodthirsty that they will commit murder, or whether he is referring to the black man who has been stripped of his humanity as a victim. As the mob burns its victim alive, the narrator describes the various reactions of those who are participating, both in the murder itself and as spectators: “Some of the crowd yelled and cheered, others seemed appalled at what they had done, and there were those who turned away sickened at the sight. I was fixed to the spot where I stood, powerless to take my eyes from what I did not want to see” (98). The narrator’s own involvement is once again unclear, as the parallel structure of this passage implicates him along with those who “yelled and cheered” and “seemed appalled.” In this moment, however, the narrator does not simply pass for white; he witnesses the lynching as a white spectator. After the lynching is over, the narrator finally describes his own reactions and feelings: “A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive” (98). In this passage, shame functions as a mode of identification, linking him to the nation. The narrator’s shame stems from his identification with the 54 human race suspended from associations with being black or white; he is ashamed that “a human being would be burned alive.” At first, the narrator resists identifying with the victim, who he describes as “a man only in form and stature” (97), signaling his disconnection from the victim. In addition, all of his descriptions of the victim omit his blackness, which glosses over the racial politics of the lynching. However, as the narrator continues, there is a turning point: “My heart turned bitter within me. I could understand why Negroes are led to sympathize with even their worst criminals, and to protect them when possible. By all the impulses of normal human nature they can and should do nothing less” (98). The narrator acknowledges that being black comes with the constant threat of violence, yet he separates himself from black people by using the third person pronoun. Despite his efforts to distinguish himself from other black people, the narrator also recognizes that his legal status automatically marks him as black and therefore, susceptible to the same kind of racial violence that he has just witnessed. After processing what he has just seen “with bitter thoughts running through [his] mind” (99), the narrator finally decides to leave the scene: “When I decided to get up and go back to the house I found that I could hardly stand on my feet. I was as weak as a man who had lost blood” (99). In this moment, the narrator finally identifies with being black by describing himself as a potential victim—someone who is “as weak as a man who had lost blood.” The narrator’s shame turns from a general feeling about being American to a personal sense of shame because he is yoked to the realities of being black. Whereas during the lynching, he is a spectator who is at once pretending to be white and resisting any identification with the victim, illustrated by his lack of anger and 55 description of the lynching victim as less than human, here, his affective response to the lynching illustrates that his body is also susceptible to racial violence. It is in the aftermath of the lynching, which repeats the process of racial confusion and shame of his racial awakening, that he finally understands not just the realities of race and class, but his complicity in buttressing their institutionalization, signaling a worlding of how he understands race. The narrator experiences various forms of recognition, which lead him to understand his own racial subjectivity. The source of and reaction to feeling ashamed is a progression from the prior scene when his mother scolds him. While before, the narrator’s shame is because of his mother’s disappointment and not because of his behavior, after witnessing the lynching, the narrator feels shame rooted not only in his disgust concerning the events that transpired, but also his past roles in buttressing racial hierarchies. Prior to the lynching, the narrator inhabited various spaces through a position of relative privilege, seeking personal advancement, often at the expense of other people of color. Here, while passing for white and therefore, inhabiting a position of privilege, he sees the ultimate price of privilege—murder through lynching—leading not just to a recognition of his own blackness, but also remorse for his past actions. The shift in the narrator’s perspective is even clearer when comparing this scene with the murder of the “widow.” The narrator’s reaction to the lynching revises the earlier moment through a change in perspective that develops through his various foreign encounters throughout the novel. After spending time in the Cuban cigar factory and Europe, the narrator develops a deeper, more personal understanding of what it means to be black in the United States, a recognition that 56 crystallizes when he witnesses the lynching. In this way, his decision to pass is an acknowledgement that he, too, is susceptible to the same fate, and a rejection of that fate for himself and his children. Significantly, the moment of passing coincides with the moment of lynching; it is precisely being witness to such extreme violence—and identifying himself as a possible victim—that moves the narrator to live as white. The lynching scene has two effects on the narrator: it forces him to face his own racial subjectivity and it expands his understanding of race. The lynching scene worlds race for the narrator because it moves him to pass for white based on the knowledge he has garnered over the course of his life through his travels and his negotiations of the racial divide. Witnessing the lynching alters how the narrator understands and inhabits the world; as Goldsby describes, “lynching becomes the lens through which the narrator perceives and knows this world and its terms of existence” (Spectacular Secret 190). If we rethink Goldsby’s lens as a mirror, we recall the narrator’s first moment of racial crisis as a child. As a result, the lynching scene acts as a moment of reflection upon the narrator’s life prior to this moment, from his childhood revelation of his blackness and subsequent (misplaced) shame, to his appropriation of Cuban and African American culture for self gain. Though his participation as a spectator in the mob, made possible by passing, and his passivity in the crucial moment of the murder itself are objectionable, his recognition and shame signal a knowledge of the world that he did not previously possess. The issue of shame arises once again when the narrator grapples with his decision to live as a white man: 57 I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead. All the while I understood that it was not discouragement or fear or search for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was the shame. (139) Though critics and readers identify this point in the novel as the moment when the narrator decides to pass for white, I would argue that Johnson’s narrator is still inhabiting the inscribed social space within the color line, for although he lives as a white man, his actions mirror his prior masquerades of racial identity, particularly in the South. Just as the narrator performs his preconceived idea of blackness when he first arrives in the South, and he neither claims nor denies that he is black while in Macon right before the lynching, so too does he fail to commit to one racial category over another in this moment in the novel. Significantly, the narrator goes on to say, “I had made up my mind that since I was not going to be a Negro, I would avail myself of every possible opportunity to make a white man’s success; and that, if it can be summed up in any one word, means ‘money’” (141). Though the narrator claims he is abandoning his black identity, his language in this passage also resists being classified as white; rather, he says he will “make a white man’s success.” This distancing from white identity while simultaneously resisting blackness is particularly important because he identifies his new goal as being driven by the desire to make money. This capitalistic urge is reminiscent of the narrator’s prior investment in 58 imperialistic gestures in the South, suggesting that his transformation is not as stark as shifting from black to white but instead, is based on a shift in how he uses the white rather than black side of the racial divide for personal gain such that he is no longer profiting off of communities of color. In the last pages of the novel, the narrator reflects back upon his experiences and in so doing, reveals the his complex positionality within the color line: “Sometimes it seems to me that I have never really been a Negro, that I have been only a privileged spectator of their inner life; at other times I feel that I have been a coward, a deserter, and I am possessed by a strange longing for my mother’s people” (153). Despite his self-inflicted ejection from the black race and living as a white man in an attempt to disavow race, he is still haunted by his tenuous negotiation of racial identity. For Goellnicht, the narrator’s living as a white man reinforces the socially- constructed boundaries of race: “He lives in the closed world of white society, looking with both disdain and nostalgia at the life of black America that he has repudiated [.…] The full subversive potential of passing fails to materialize for the Ex-Coloured Man” (130). Though the narrator attempts to live beyond race, his existence within the borders of the United States as someone who performs racial identities makes it impossible for him to escape the color line. He is never able to resolve the issue of his racial identity and instead, is still performing race—in this case, whiteness—at the novel’s end, for he simply says, “My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise” (154) without saying what “I am” signifies. In this way, the narrator is performing the same gestures of racial identity at the end of the novel that he performs on his various 59 visits to the South. However, the decision to capitalize on whiteness rather than using minority identity for personal gain signals a shift in the narrator’s understanding of racial hierarchies. By profiting off of whiteness rather than minority communities, the narrator shows a progression made possible through a worlding of race. The lynching scene is also a significant turning point for the reader: “Our common understanding of lynching’s violence no longer holds sway in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man because, in Johnson’s plot, lynching is not simply a symptom of southern white supremacy’s regressive character. Nor is the violence antithetical to industrially driven modes of progress” (Spectacular Secret 169). Rather, the lynching scene is the final disruption of the various binaries that Johnson challenges through his novel. While historically speaking, lynching achieves its effect through public spectacle, Johnson’s literary treatment of lynching focuses upon the narrator’s individual response. In so doing, Johnson highlights the private and personal shame that the narrator experiences as a witness to the lynching. In addition to conflating formal conventions by writing a novel that passes for an autobiography, Johnson also challenges the desire to neatly categorize identities based upon race, class, gender, and sexuality. The narrator’s understanding of race in worldly terms crystallizes through the lynching. If lynching is the mechanism by which the narrator decides to pass and therefore, ultimately drives the entire narrative, then reading lynching subverts the intention of such racial violence and instead, challenges binary models of understanding race and racial subjectivity. 60 Conclusion Music compels both Roy Williams and the ex-colored man to travel abroad and emerge as cosmopolitan. However, the specter of lynching is a constant reminder of the violent realities associated with their nation and their blackness. Even as these characters travel abroad, they are constantly reminded of the possibility of racial violence. Johnson’s novel ends with the image of the narrator’s musical potential that has been discarded: “[W]hen I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage” (Johnson 154). Though these final lines of the novel are significant in the sense of remorse and ambivalence concerning the narrator’s choice to live as a white man, there is the couched acknowledgement that he views both whiteness and blackness as parts of his identity. In identifying his choice to live in the white world as “the lesser part,” the narrator suggests that the companion “greater part” would be his blackness. Though he concludes the narrative by stating, “I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage” (112), with the “pottage” being the personal and economic advantages of living as a white man, he is also left “a little box in which [he] still keep[s] [his] fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent” (112). While the “manuscripts” refer specifically to the 61 narrator’s musical compositions, this word choice evokes the literary, making a direct reference to the narrative itself.14 The Autobiography negotiates race in a way that is more complex than its categorization as a passing narrative, a lynching narrative, or an autobiography would suggest, for the narrator’s actions throughout the novel are not so neatly distinguished based upon the racial community he inhabits—his relationship to the black community is equally fraught as his relationship to the white community and as such, resists the notion that the narrator privileges one over the other. Even when he participates in church life through his music, both as a child in Connecticut and as an adult in Jacksonville, the narrator never establishes any real personal connection with those around him, and his involvement within those institutions is short-lived. In fact, the narrator fails to establish any long-lasting associations with any community, black or otherwise. For many readers of Johnson’s text, the narrator is essentially black pretending to be white by the novel’s end. While some scholars have resisted the idea that the narrator’s racial identity is fixed at any point—which it never is—these same scholars see this misconception as symptomatic of a need to redefine the terms of passing within the novel. While the narrator’s lack of fixed identity is accurate, I would argue that this lack of coherence in what passing entails calls for a new way of thinking about the narrator’s engagement with race, both as a social phenomenon and as a personal epistemological crisis. Many critics have read the narrator’s decision to 14 Washington makes a similar claim that links the narrator’s time as reader at the Cuban cigar factory with the final lines of the novel: “As a ‘reader’ he discovered that he “had a talent for languages as well as for music” at a time in his life when he did not perform as a musician. The position also prefigures the ending of the novel when the narrator’s linguistic/literary pursuits triumph over his musical endeavors. In the end, he is a failed musician, but he succeeds as the ‘author’ of the narrative” (244). 62 pass as the culmination of a lifelong, self-inflicted alienation from the black community based upon the narrator’s own feelings of superiority. However, it is through the permanent severance with the black community through passing that the narrator is finally able to understand that which he has been missing. Though the novel ends with the narrator’s transformation into the ex-colored man, disavowing race and embracing his identification as white by the outside world, it is not until he begins living as the ex-colored man that the narrator feels a sense of loss in his alienation. He finally acknowledges the value of the black community, not as a site of economic gain, but as a center of cultural production whose value cannot be measured by “a white man’s success; and that, if it can be summed up in any one word, means ‘money.’” (101). This revelation shows that the narrator has come to terms with his racial subjectivity, achieved through his ability to read and act in such a way that no longer profits from communities of color and instead, contributes to the archive of black culture through the narrative of The Autobiography. Of course, this comes at the cost of identifying as black. In the next chapter, I show how Hall Montana’s story provides an alternative response to a worlding of race that ends not with passing and relinquishing one’s racial identity but rather, with unexpected alliances across race, nationality, and sexuality. 63 Chapter Two: Breaking the Silence: Race, Love, and the Korean War in James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head The withholdings at critical moments, which I once took to be deliberate evasions, stumbles even, or a writer’s impatience with his or her material, I began to see as otherwise: as entrances, crevices, gaps, seductive invitations flashing the possibility of meaning. Unarticulated eddies that encourage diving into the novel’s undertow— the real place where writer captures reader. -Toni Morrison, “This Amazing, Troubling Book” (1996) You must put yourself in the skin of a man who is wearing the uniform of his country, is a candidate for death in its defense, and who is called a “nigger” by his comrades- in-arms and his officers; who is almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do [….] And who, at the same time, as a human being, is far freer in a strange land than he has ever been at home. Home! The very word begins to have a despairing and diabolical ring. You must consider what happens to this citizen, after all he has endured, when he returns—home: search, in his shoes, for a job, for place to live; ride, in his skin, on segregated buses; see, with his eyes, the signs saying “White” and “Colored.” -James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963) Introduction James Baldwin’s discussion of the irony of “home” for black Americans in my second epigraph, particularly after having spent time abroad, resonates with concerns raised in my first chapter. Like musician Roy Williams in Langston Hughes’s “Home” and James Weldon Johnson’s ex-colored man, Baldwin’s protagonist Hall Montana in Just Above My Head (1979) only grasps the full extent of America’s “strangeness” after traveling outside of its borders. These characters all share the realization of home as ironic and strange when that home is put into the context of the larger world. The collision of these various worlds, shaped by the experiences of different individuals in the United States and abroad, permeates Baldwin’s novel. Just Above My Head centers around Hall Montana, a black Korean War veteran who is mourning the death of his brother, Arthur, a homosexual gospel 64 singer. Hall’s experiences with Koreans—specifically, those who are classified as enemy combatants and, therefore, threaten the very constructed idea of “home” that the U.S. is quite literally fighting for—worlds race through the uncomfortable intimacy he feels towards those he initially deems foreign. Hall encounters the foreign in two distinct ways: first, through his experiences in Korea and second, through facing his brother’s homosexuality, even in the aftermath of his death. Hall does not immediately come to terms with his status as a black citizen or his brother’s homosexuality. Initially, his response is silence concerning his time in Korea and his brother’s death, exhibiting a deep ambivalence that illustrates his own anxieties about his race, nationality, masculinity, and heterosexuality. This chapter reads deliberate silences in Just Above My Head and explores their productive potential. I posit that there are two kinds of silences in the novel: those that the text cannot say and those that the text will not say. The first is one of unknowability in which the given text does not have access to the knowledge necessary to fill the silence of the text; in the second, however, the text possesses knowledge, but does not readily relinquish that knowledge in a gesture of disavowal. I borrow this terminology from Sibylle Fischer,15 who defines her use of disavowal both in the “everyday sense as ‘refusal to acknowledge,’ ‘repudiation,’ and ‘denial’ (OED)” (37) as well as the psychoanalytic sense as a “refusal to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception” (38). Disavowed silences signal moments when the text self-consciously withholds or omits, inviting the reader to recuperate that which remains unspoken. In his monograph Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of 15 See Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Culture of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (2004). 65 History (1995), Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, “not all silences are equal […] any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly” (27). Using Fischer’s strategy of disavowal to read Baldwin’s novel as “a particular bundle of silences” recovers what is unsaid and asks that readers pay attention to why such knowledge has been hidden from view. By reading Hall’s narrative along with his silences, we see how the novel is an exercise in recovering history and memory on a personal level through the memorialization of Arthur, and a negotiation of his initial discomfort with otherness. Hall is a black man who is initially homophobic and prejudiced against other racial minorities. Over the course of the novel, he initiates an ongoing process of reflection and revision concerning his initial discomfort with the foreign and puts into practice a worlding of race that helps him navigate white America and the larger world. This development of a worldly understanding of race ultimately challenges socially-constructed hierarchies of human difference in their various iterations and provides opportunities for new solidarities across marginalized identities. Disavowed Silences and World Making Toni Morrison reflects upon the nature of silences in my first epigraph, which is taken from her introduction to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Morrison points to the productive potential of silences and narrative gaps, those moments when seemingly nothing is expressed and yet, leaves an effect upon the reader. As a result, the reader becomes as an active participant in the construction of 66 the narrative, for she must use her imagination in order to fill in the blanks of what goes unsaid. According to Morrison, such silences are deliberate on the part of the author, who thus provides the reader opportunities to produce meaning and significance. I discuss the silences surrounding Hall’s narrative within the larger context of the historical silences surrounding the Korean War. President Harry Truman downplayed U.S. involvement as a “police action” and the war was not congressionally recognized as a war until 1998, forty-five years after its negotiated end. The Korean Armistice Agreement in 1953 was not met with celebrations at home, nor are the names of the thousands of soldiers who lost their lives recorded in a Korean War Veterans Memorial. Often called “the forgotten war,” the silences of the Korean War persist today, both in the national imaginary of the United States and in the familial histories of Korean immigrants.16 Many of these silences surround the production of “Amerasians,” a term a term meaning the child of a Asian mother and U.S. soldier father post-WWII, with a significant number of these U.S. soldiers being black. As a result, both the Korean and U.S. governments encouraged the adoption of Korean War babies, who were denied political standing since citizenship was patrilineal until 1998, by U.S. citizens. These children are products of the U.S. expressing their imperial power both militarily in the peninsula and in the sexual violence committed against Korean women. This history illuminates violence on a global scale informs comparative racialization, as well as the importance of 16 As I discuss in my conclusion to the dissertation, my Korean immigrant parents have remained largely silent about their past, including the significance of the Korean War, both as affecting their particular families, but also Korean national identity and Korean-U.S. military, social, and political relations. 67 interrogating historical silences in a project of worlding race that pays close attention to how minority subjects are coerced into such silence.17 Literary critics have begun the important work of reading silence not just as an absence of speech or meaning but also as its own site of meaning and knowledge with the potential for challenging hegemonic structures of power that marginalize people of color.18 Such silences do not signal a lack of knowledge, but rather, a withholding of it. To identify such silences, however, we must first be able to discern when something is being withheld from us. We must achieve a level of familiarity with the text in order to know when it is withholding, which can be achieved through what Min Hyoung Song calls “deep reading” in The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American (2013), which “allows the reader to make worlds rather than simply to accept the world as it is given, precut, prepackaged, tired in its rutted ways of seeing” (16). If, as Song suggests, deep reading paves the way for world-making, then the reader does not simply become acquainted with the world of the novel in a passive sense but rather, uses the text itself “to imagine what is not yet” (25), to imagine otherwise,19 or as Morrison writes, “to see as otherwise,” actively creating beyond the pages of the text. 17 For discussions of Korean War babies and the ensuing international adoption program, see Arissa H. Oh’s To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (2015). 18 Patti Duncan and King-Kok Cheung discuss the ways in which both speech and silence are tied up in systems of power and therefore, cannot be distinguished with silence and oppression on one end, and speech and liberation on the other and argue against the neat binary of speech versus silence. In addition, Cheung explores “enabling silences,” which hold productive potential and challenge silence’s association with oppression. 19 See Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (2003). 68 Disavowed silences are particularly well-disposed to the methodology of deep reading because of their deliberate invitation to uncover that which is hidden from obvious view. As such, disavowed silences invite the reader to participate in a particular kind of world-making: [W]orld-making is a process of stepping outside the flow of time in order to see what potential exists beyond the constraints of the possible and its always accompanying shadow, the impossible. Literature has the capacity to make worlds that might seem otherwise not to be possible, and in showing in concrete detail what such a world looks and feels like, literature can point to ways of being and becoming that we haven’t yet considered [….] believing another world is possible. (228) Just Above My Head promotes a worldliness not hitherto examined by critics, in the production and recovery of knowledge from minority perspectives, a process that may pave the way for rupturing dominant accounts of history and memory, as well as the potential to alter how we imagine the future. Reading disavowed silences in the novel opens the avenue for world-making, not just in the sense of other worlds, but also for remaking the world we currently occupy to make it more inhabitable for the marginalized. James Baldwin: A Writer in the World In the introduction to his collection of essays Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961), James Baldwin declares that the subject of the writer is 69 “himself and the world,” requiring “every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are” (12). For Baldwin, the experience of the individual unlocks knowledge of the world and those who live within it, and seeking such knowledge is an ongoing process of inquiry. He continues: “The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion” (13). For Baldwin, worldliness begins with the individual facing the self in order to encounter and confront those around us. The personal is never isolated from the experiences of others. As Cora Kaplan and Bill Schwarz state in the introduction to their edited collection James Baldwin: America and Beyond (2011), “The shifting relations between the self and the other [Baldwin] never conceived to be merely private transactions, only of subjective significance: the power of his writing derives from the fact that he consistently strove to imagine self and other in ‘the world,’ such that each was always ‘worldly’” (5). In this way, the personal is never solely concerned with the individual, for personal experience is crucial for navigating the larger world. For Baldwin personally, part of his self-education involved embodying worldliness at the most physical level: mobility within the world. Baldwin learned about himself through traveling even though he spent most of his adult life in France. Like many black Americans of his time, leaving the United States was necessary because of racism and the threat of racial violence. When asked in a 1984 interview why he left the United States, he responded, “I knew what it meant to be white and I 70 knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed” (Conversations 233).20 Baldwin’s response explains his leaving the United States as essential to his physical well-being. His movement out of the United States is also linked to his mission to understand the idea of the United States as both geographical and metaphorical. In “The Discovery of What It Means To Be an American,” the first essay in his collection Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961), Baldwin discusses his experience of leaving the United States and points to the inherent unknowability of the word “America”: America’s history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar defeats, and her position in the world—yesterday and today—are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans. (17) Baldwin sees the misconception of America, or as he calls it later in the essay, “the myth of America” (23), as impeding the progress of both the nation and its citizens 20 “The Art of Fiction LXXVIII: James Baldwin” Jordan Elgrably and George Plimpton/1984 [from The Paris Review]; reprinted in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt. Baldwin expresses similar sentiments in his essay, “Notes of a Native Son” from Notes of a Native Son (1955) when he describes going into a whites-only restaurant and the physical altercation that ensued: “I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder.” (97) 71 and thereby, impinging on their knowledge of America as such. For Baldwin, leaving the United States and experiencing what is not American was crucial for discovering what it meant to be an American. As Kaplan and Schwarz note, however, moving outside of the United States did not erase its permanence in Baldwin’s life: “If America remained with him, it did so as a consequence of his engagement with the world beyond. Most of all, the identification with America required also the capacity to see America through the eyes of others” (11). Indeed, America did remain with Baldwin as evidenced in his writing and his continued involvement in American life and politics. Like many self-imposed exiles, Baldwin carried the baggage of America, his home, with him throughout his journeys in the world. Just Above My Head actively resists narrating a singular account of African American identity, providing a complex, vexed, and messy account of what it means to be black in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Lynn Orilla Scott states, “Unlike Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, the homosexuality of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone and of Just Above My Head occurs within a specifically black context, making it impossible to explore the representation of homosexuality in these novels without also addressing the representation of race” (15). Siobhan B. Somerville similarly argues in her book Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (2000), “questions of race—in particular the formation of notions of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’—must be understood as a crucial part of the history and representation of sexual formations, including lesbian and gay identity and compulsory heterosexuality in the United States” (5). Both Somerville and Scott make the crucial case for considering race and 72 sexuality in tandem rather than as two separate phenomena, which has at times been the trend in both critical race studies and queer studies. The parallel narratives about the recovery of memory—one deeply personal and one profoundly universal—within the novel mirrors the parallel narratives of race and sexuality in the United States. In so doing, Baldwin’s novel pushes us to consider race and sexuality along with questions of citizenship, nation, and the world. Despite the novel’s social, political, and artistic merits, Just Above My Head has largely been ignored by critics. As Scott explains, critics tend to view Baldwin’s last three novels as “less interesting, less complex, and less aesthetically viable than his early works. The supposed failure of these novels is typically blamed on Baldwin’s political activism, anger, and his supposed ideological investment in black power” (xiii). Just Above My Head is significant among Baldwin’s oeuvre for a number of reasons, including its depiction of genuine homosexual love between black men. While Baldwin’s prior works address the theme of homosexual relationships, many of the sexual encounters are exploratory in nature or seeped in racial hierarchy through the depiction of interracial homosexual relationships. In Just Above My Head, however, we see Arthur Montana involved in mutually loving relationship, first with Crunch, then Jimmy, both black men. As E. Frances White argues, “[Baldwin] suggests in Just Above My Head (1979) [that] loving black men can be a revolutionary act in this racist society” (176). Furthermore, the sex that occurs in the novel is not exploratory or self-serving in nature, as in prior novels like Giovanni’s Room (1956) or Another Country (1962), but rather, an expression of shared deep love. Along with these aspects is the fact that the narrator, Hall, is not an omniscient 73 third-person—Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953); Another Country—or a first-person directly engaging in homosexual encounters—Giovanni’s Room; Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968). Like the female narrator Tish of If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), which directly precedes Just Above My Head in publication, Hall Montana is unique among Baldwin’s narrators for his heterosexuality. Just Above My Head was met with mostly negative reviews despite enjoying thirty-seven weeks on the best-seller list of the Washington Post upon publication.21 John Romano in the New York Times Review of Books writes: The curious fact is that it’s so narrow, so tame. Baldwin’s focus is still the private self; he has given us another of his warm, melancholy, basically likable novels and hasn’t really made use of his elaborate generation-historical scheme [….] He has slighted the richness of his own material by merely scanning it, looking for opportunities to do his favorite scenes: ambivalent sex, reunions, quick accesses of love. The Kirkus review similarly states, “this rambling book lacks overall shape [….] Baldwin seems to have lost his way fictionally; he pressed doggedly on here, but the path never clarifies.” But these reviewers fail to look beyond the “tame”—namely, the heterosexual male narrator who has fought against communism in Korea and is now in a loving marriage with two children, the very model of a black man conforming to normative standards of masculinity and citizenship—to see what is truly radical about this novel. Hall, the heterosexual brother of the homosexual Arthur, not only refuses to be ashamed of his brother, but also becomes the reader’s way of accessing Arthur’s 21 See Douglas Field’s A Historical Guide to James Baldwin (p. 56) 74 life story, including his relationships with other men. Hall is only able to tell Arthur’s story, a significant portion of which centers around homosexual love and desire, by embodying Arthur, and, in so doing, his queered body. Hall’s narrative refuses to endorse queerness as a threat to normativity. It instead negates the very idea of an originary normativity. This negation renders queerness as a way of being that is not defined by its subversion of and deviance from heteronormativity, destabilizing the very notion of normative love. Hall comes to consider homosexuality not only as a way of being that should be accepted and embraced, but also one that can help inform how we inhabit the world surfaces as one aspect of Hall’s worldliness. Hall becomes worldly as the novel progresses because he finds solidarity with those with whom he previously thought were completely different from himself. Hall’s emergence as worldly signals a shift from his passive existence within the world, exhibited in large part by his silence concerning his brother’s death, to an active engagement with the world, signaled by his willingness to reconstruct a narrative of his brother’s life. Hall’s narrative is at its most basic level a memorialization of his beloved brother, Arthur, the gospel singer. But it is also Hall learning to experience a sense of solidarity with those he previously considered foreign to him and with whom he had nothing in common, which he achieves through telling Arthur’s story. What Hall does have in common with Arthur, the immigrants coming to the United States that he mentions later in the novel, the “Oriental faces” he encounters in Korea, and even the white racists who wish him harm in the South, is the desire to 75 alter how history is remembered via memory. Scott describes how Baldwin uses Hall in order to reveal how both history and memory emerge as subjective: Through the voice of Hall, Baldwin draws attention to the essentially subjective nature of writing history, of storytelling. Hall’s distinctly personal motivation, his struggle with memory and with his fear of self-disclosure, makes him a narrator who deconstructs the idea that an author can have complete control of his text any more than a singer, like Arthur, can have complete control of his song. In the very process of telling his story, Hall’s narrative is significantly shaped and informed by others. (143) Scott’s argument about Hall’s narrative is insightful in its claims about the importance of others. As Hall states towards the end of the novel, “Our history is each other. That is our only guide. One thing is absolutely certain: one can repudiate, or despise, no one’s history without repudiating and despising one’s own” (512). By cultivating little intimacies with those who seem foreign, Hall learns from the experiences of others in order to achieve a greater sense of empathy and a better understanding of his own being within the world as a black American veteran who is also a father, son, and brother. Hall is able to interrogate how he previously subscribed to hierarchies of difference based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation to which is also subjected through systemic prejudice and American exceptionalism. The importance of the stories he tells provide an analogue for the ways Hall is able to take on his own ideas of race and human difference in a crucial 76 move that allows him to navigate his world and the larger world more effectively in a gesture of worldliness. Narrative Evasions and the Korean War Baldwin discusses the complex position of the black American soldier abroad in my second epigraph, taken from The Fire Next Time (1963). While Baldwin is specifically discussing World War II, the sentiments also hold true for Hall and other black soldiers. Baldwin points to the contradiction of fighting on the side of the United States for freedom when it is denied at home. In Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights (2014), historian Christine Knauer discusses the significance of the Korean War for black soldiers, who at once sought civil rights at home, but were participating in a racialized form of Cold War panic: “Blacks used the Korean War to criticize American foreign policy, American concepts of race, the notion of black inferiority, and the continued exclusion and segregation of blacks” (5). She continues: “As a case study, the Korean War illustrates that African Americans longed to be an equal component of the American nation, at the expense of Asian people. At the same time, they opposed white supremacy and the exclusionary and humiliating discourse within and outside the military” (10). The experience of being “freer in a strange land” then returning to the United States only to face overt, institutionalized racism gives Hall a worldly perspective of racism, both towards Korean communists abroad and black citizens at home. As a result, Hall interrogates the systemic discrimination against minorities at home and internationally, as well as his own prior prejudices. 77 In Just Above My Head, both the reader and the narrator are required to reconstruct that which remains unsaid. The two subjects on which Hall remains silent prior to the beginning of the novel are his time in Korea and his brother Arthur’s death, which are both deeply traumatic events.22 The novel is divided into five books spanning thirty years, with Book I set in the late 1970s, the novel’s present moment, Book II jumping back thirty years to when Hall is eighteen, then the following three books proceeding chronologically. Book I begins with an imagined, yet vivid account of Arthur’s death from the perspective of Hall, who is remembering the day he received the news of his brother’s death in London. The reader quickly discovers that it has been two years since Arthur’s death, despite the urgency in Hall’s tone. We also discover that Hall has remained silent on the subject: “Two years ago: and I have never really talked about it: not to Ruth, not to my children, Tony and Odessa (who love their uncle), not to Julia, not to Jimmy: and they can’t talk about it until I can talk” (8). Hall’s inability to speak of his brother’s death affects not only his own capacity for healing, but it also cripples Arthur’s other loved ones into a reluctant silence, waiting to be broken. Hall goes on to explain his silence: Ruth can’t talk about it, nobody can really talk about it until I can talk about it. It’s nearly two years ago. I’ve been so busy, covering up for Arthur, strong-arming the press, flying half over the goddamn globe— 22 Pheng Cheah asks in What Is A World?: “How do formal mechanisms that disrupt and disorient the reading experience convey to the reader a character's transformation?” (214). In the case of Baldwin’s novel, both the narrator and the author use silence as such a mechanism, and that silence is then broken in the process of transformation. 78 I was so busy getting my brother into the ground right that I’ve hardly had time to cry, much less talk. (15) Once Tony, Hall’s son, has broken the silence surrounding Arthur’s death, Hall knows he must begin recuperating Arthur’s story not only to honor his memory, but also as a means of navigating his own problematic experiences as a black soldier. The novel is Hall breaking the silence surrounding his brother, both in life and death. Furthermore, breaking this silence is the first step in Hall’s process of emerging as worldly. Hall must first accept and commemorate Arthur’s death—and life as a homosexual man—before he can be open to the lives of others, who are not his brother, that challenge his comfort and understanding. This important process begins with Hall’s son, Tony, directly asking his father about Arthur. In the pages leading up to Tony’s query, Hall meditates on familial love—what it means to be a father, son, and brother: “I don’t know if my son loves me—you always feel that you must have made some really bad mistakes—but I know that I love my son. I know this, somehow, because I loved my father; I know the two things don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other” (13). In this passage, Hall traces an epistemology of love, one that follows a genealogical path from a father to his son and so on. Hall posits that his love for his son is absolute and unquestionable precisely because he also loved his father. For Hall, love—at least in a familial sense—is something to be passed down and learned from each generation to the next. Hall then shifts from a discussion of being a loving son to being a “good son”: “I tried to be a good son to him, but—I don’t know: he was formed in a world I never really saw. I tried to be a good brother to my brother, too—but—I don’t know. 79 Arthur lived in a world I only glimpsed, sometimes, through him. I didn’t really pay my dues in that world, not the way he did” (13). Hall states, “I don’t know” when thinking about whether he was a good son or a good brother, which signals unfamiliarity with the respective worlds of his father and brother. The shift from love to “good,” a moral category, shows that the two are not equivalent—Hall’s love for his family is clear, but whether his relationships were “good” remains unclear. Hall’s inner monologue links an understanding of the different worlds people inhabit and the ability to have a positive relationship with those people. In other words, building positive and productive relationships with others necessarily entails worldliness. Hall’s “I don’t know” indicates his worldliness when both of these men were alive, which, in retrospect, he recognizes through making the distinction between love and “good.” Hall’s narrative of Arthur’s life not only memorializes Arthur, but also allows Hall to achieve a level of worldliness that he did not have before. By remaining silent over Arthur’s death for so long, Hall was not only stunting his own ability to heal, but also his ability to emerge as more worldly. Hall’s son, Tony, is the one who breaks the silence surrounding Arthur and allows Hall to begin the process of resolving his ambivalence. Their conversation begins: “What was my uncle—Arthur—like?” “Well—why do you ask? You knew him.” “Come on. I was a baby. What did I know?” “Well—what are you asking?” “A lot of the kids at school—they talk about him. 80 “What do they say?” “They say—he was a faggot.” (30) The conversation immediately centers around Arthur’s homosexuality, stated pejoratively through the use of the word “faggot.” Hall is initially reluctant to discuss Arthur with Tony, but the discussion of Arthur’s sexuality moves Hall to finally speak. Hall’s immense love for his brother, along with his overwhelming ambivalence concerning his brother’s homosexuality, are apparent in his emotional reaction to Tony’s inquiry: “Okay. Your uncle was my brother, right? And I loved him. Okay? He was a very—lonely—man. He had a very strange—life. I think that— he was a very great singer” (30). Hall’s tone is extremely defensive against the charge that Arthur was a “faggot.” In fact, Hall goes on to state, “Whatever the fuck your uncle was, and he was a whole lot of things, he was nobody’s faggot” (30). However, Hall is not dismissing the pejorative and insulting nature of the term, but the validity of the lifestyle that would elicit such a term. By casting Arthur as “lonely” and having had a “very strange life,” Hall delegitimizes Arthur’s homosexuality.23 Hall’s attempt to explain away Arthur’s homosexual lifestyle is even more apparent as Hall continues to respond to his son’s question of what Arthur was “like”: “I know—before Jimmy—Arthur slept with a lot of people—mostly men, but not always. He was young, Tony. Before your mother, I slept with a lot of women”—I do not believe I can say this, his eyes do not 23 Hall’s reaction to his son’s use of the word “faggot” echoes the reaction of the ex- colored man’s mother when he uses the word “nigger” as a child before he realizes that he is black (Johnson 11). Like Hall, the narrator’s mother responds sharply to the use of pejorative language as a means of denigrating an individual regardless of their race or sexuality. 81 leave my face—“mostly women, but—in the army—I was young, too—not always. You want the truth, I’m trying to tell you the truth— anyway, let me tell you, baby, I’m proud of my brother, your uncle, and I’ll be proud of him until the day I die. You should be, too.” (30) Hall’s admission to having sexual relations with other men attempts to minimize Arthur’s homosexuality by reducing it to sodomy, a set of acts that does not challenge normative constructions of sexuality. Scott similarly reads this conversation as one that reveals Hall’s inability to confront Arthur’s homosexuality: “Hall’s response to his son, while not dishonest, is defensive and, I would argue, misleading, revealing at the very least, his discomfort with Arthur’s sexuality. By confessing his own brief homosexual experience, Hall seeks to identify with his brother, but in effect misinterprets the permanence of Arthur’s homosexual desire” (134). While Scott is right to argue that what Hall says does not represent the reality of Arthur’s sexuality, Hall seems to be aware of this misrepresentation, which is a direct response to Tony’s inquiry. Hall’s reduction of Arthur’s homosexuality as acts rather than part of his identity is an effort to comfort and provide a credible explanation to his teenage son, who misses his uncle. The consequence, however, is a misrepresentation of Arthur’s sexuality that is not meant, as Scott argues, to provide Hall with a way of identifying with his brother; rather, by centering his own experience to explain Arthur’s life, Hall is effectively erasing Arthur’s homosexuality by recasting it through a narrative of heteronormativity. Baldwin makes a connection between Hall’s coming to terms with Arthur’s life and death, and his experience in Korea. Both events signal a simultaneous loss 82 and revelation crucial to Hall’s development into worldliness. Hall’s deliberate choice not to narrate his time in Korea shows his desire to keep that aspect of the story from emerging. However, Hall’s overt omission of this experience draws attention its very absence. Baldwin’s text illustrates both the reader’s and Hall’s capacity to imagine our relation to others, which develops as the novel progresses. David Palumbo-Liu explores literature as a means of “imagining our relation to others and thinking through why and how that relation exists, historically, politically, ideologically” (14). He continues: “[I]t is precisely the imagination that fills the gap between self and other; specifically, the imagination seems to finesse the requirement that, on the one hand, the situation of the other be imaginable to the self for its own habitation, and, on the other, that the situation of the other be beyond our lot” (21).24 Palumbo-Liu’s discussion extends that of Morrison, for it is the imagination that can fill the silences of the text. While Hall does break his silence surrounding Arthur’s life and death, he purposely omits his experiences in Korea. Instead, Hall provides an account of the events happening at home in the United States despite his absence. Hall collects bits of information from Arthur’s letters, then fills in the missing pieces using his imagination, constructing a narrative that is not based on firsthand observations or experiences. This choice is compelling considering that Hall can provide a factual narrative based upon what he does witness—war in Korea—and yet, he chooses to tell the unknown story. By making this narrative choice, Hall evades his absence within the narration of the story, symbolically placing himself at home and not in Korea. Baldwin calls attention to Hall’s silence in order to explore how Hall’s time 24 In The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age (2012). 83 fighting for the United States army contributes to Baldwin’s larger exploration of African American identity. Though Hall’s narrative refuses the reader access to the space of Korea during the war, we are able to observe how both his experience and his interpretation of the conflict in Korea inform how he negotiates both his own racial identity and how the United States systemically discriminates against minorities at home and abroad. In so doing, Hall worlds the conflict in Korea by showing its relevance to and direct influence on American ideas of racial difference. Some critics have voiced concern over Hall’s narration and its implications concerning the agency of those whose stories he chooses to tell because the narrative represents his creative version of what transpired. Critic Melvin Dixon is particularly suspicious of Hall’s telling of Arthur’s story: Hall Montana attempts to reconcile himself to race, family, and heterosexuality by narrating his homosexual brother’s life. These “havens” have their price, and Hall’s sentimentality and presumptuousness (his arrogant rendition of Arthur’s emotions and sexuality about which he could know nothing) contribute to the novel’s undoing. [….] Hall’s narration of the life of gospel singer Arthur Montana […] is merely one brother’s manipulation of another to come to terms with his own conventional responsibilities to family and to self. (135) Dixon is right to point out that Hall’s narration of Arthur’s life is his attempt to resolve the forces that have shaped his own individual life as a black man living in mid-century America. However, Dixon’s characterization of the narrative as “merely 84 one brother’s manipulation of another” is reductive because it focuses solely on the story that Hall tells, ignoring the larger narrative that Baldwin, the author, tells and what such modes of storytelling reveal.25 The first mention of Korea happens early in the novel, almost immediately after Hall’s conversation with Tony concerning Arthur. Father and son have joined the others in Julia’s home and are about to sit down to eat. Julia mentions that she recently ran into Red, a member of Arthur’s former singing group. Hall takes a moment to explain: “Arthur had been fifteen-sixteen, Red had been seventeen- eighteen, when they sang together. Their quartet—The Trumpets of Zion—didn’t get too far before the hammer of Korea smashed it; but it had been a good quartet, very heavy in the churches, and in battles of song; and they were, really, very nice boys, crazy though they were” (33). This first mention of Korea not only shows the devastating effects of the war on the singing group, but also is solely discussed within the context of The Trumpets of Zion. Hall completely avoids any association of himself with Korea at this early point in the novel. Hall continues to describe what happens next as the United States gets involved in the Korean conflict: The quartet broke up, the boys scattered. Arthur went solo, Arthur became a star! Crunch went mad, Peanut was murdered, and Red: became a junkie. To spell it out a little, he was thrown into prison for a crime he hadn’t committed, then was thrown into the army, and then his ass was hustled to Korea, and he got hooked, as one of the more 25 Lynn Orilla Scott also argues for the separation of Hall’s desired narrative of Arthur’s life and Baldwin’s story as told through Hall’s struggle to reconcile himself to Arthur’s memory in her book James Baldwin’s Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey (2002), 142. 85 esteemed of the American lyricists would put it, over there. I saw him just after he came back from over there. (33-34) In this continuation of his discussion of The Trumpets of Zion, Hall specifically uses Red’s experience in order to deflect the effects that the draft and military service in Korea had on his own life. In Hall’s version of this moment in time, it is Red whose “ass was hustled to Korea” and it is Red who “[comes] back from over there” even though in reality, these same things also happened to Hall. This association of Korea with the destruction of The Trumpets of Zion and its members—even though Arthur garners fame as a singer, he faces his demise in death—crucially links the military ventures of the United States abroad with the various ways in which these black men and their artistic modes of expression face annihilation at home.26 Baldwin illustrates this relationship between United States imperialism abroad and racial politics at home through the juxtaposition of Hall’s initial inability to speak about Arthur after his death with Hall’s refusal to speak about his time in Korea. By inextricably linking these two events, Baldwin shows us that in order to confront one source of trauma, Hall must also simultaneously confront the other. As Book II of Just Above My Head concludes and Book III begins, Hall prepares to delve into the narrative of Arthur’s life, which begins with Arthur’s time with The Trumpets of Zion in the South and Hall’s departure for Korea: “By the time Amy [Julia’s mother] was buried, in the summertime, [Arthur] was with The Trumpets of Zion, in Nashville, and I was in Korea” (162). The parallel construction 26 This relates to my discussion in chapter one, as both Johnson’s narrator and Roy Williams are musicians who seek to advance their talents abroad, only to have their careers cut short at home because of racial violence. 86 of this sentence suggests a symmetry between the respective experiences of Hall and Arthur, at least in the eyes of Hall. For the duration of Book III, Hall chooses to keep his narrative in the United States with Arthur, while within the timeframe of the story, he is physically in Korea fighting in the war. Baldwin’s novel speaks to the importance of both spoken narratives and those that remain unspoken. As the narrative of Arthur’s life emerges, constructed through events, memories, and speculations of his loved ones as filtered through Hall, the glaring silence of Hall’s experiences as a G.I. during the Korean War is made that much more striking in contrast. When he returns from Korea at the beginning of Book IV, Hall eventually becomes Arthur’s manager and accompanies him into the Deep South for a singing tour, along with Peanut, Arthur’s accompanist who was also part of the Trumpets of Zion. Returning “Home” Hall returns to the United States in the fall of 1953 as the Civil Rights Movement is about to take off. This shift in the political climate from before Hall leaves to after he has returned magnifies his ambivalence surrounding his identity as a black American as does his time being “freer in a strange country.” Baldwin illustrates this shift by contrasting between what Hall says concerning Korea before he leaves and after he returns from combat. In Book II, as Hall faces the possibility of being drafted, he discusses the topic with Martha, his girlfriend at the time. It is Christmas and she jokingly responds that she will shoot him in the foot to prevent his 87 departure. As the two laugh, Hall, for the first time in the narrative, reflects on the implications of the war, not just for himself, but also for the United States as a nation: We both laughed, but it wasn’t really funny. I didn’t want nine toes, I wanted all ten, and I fucking well had no eyes for Korea. I didn’t see what right I would have to be there, what right anybody had to send my black ass there. I don’t think anybody can really hate his country, I don’t think that’s possible; but you can certainly despise the road your country travels, and the people they elect to lead them on that road. If I had been a white man, I would have been ashamed, really, to send a black man anywhere to fight for me. But shame is individual, not collective, and, collectively speaking, white people have no shame. They have the shortest memories of any people in the world—which explains, no doubt, why they have no shame. (139-140) For Hall, the conflict in Korea and the subsequent involvement of the United States should be a source of shame. Significantly, however, he separates his “black ass” from the white men who have decided “to send a black man […] to fight,” and it is these white men who should be ashamed. By insisting upon this separation—further reinforced midway through the passage in the shift from “I” to “they”—Hall separates himself as a black man from the (white) American populace at large because of his status as a second-class American citizen. This status is nowhere more pronounced than in the basic civil liberty of voting. It is precisely because of “the people they elect to lead” (emphasis mine) that Hall must go fight in Korea and that he himself 88 feels no shame, for he has had no voice in how the country is governed and how those elected determine his own fate. In contrast, once Hall returns from Korea, the “they” is no longer white Americans who treat him as inferior because of his blackness, but the North Korean and Chinese communists fighting against the Americans. When Arthur asks Hall about his time in Korea, he replies: “Had to put them gooks in their places. They worse than the niggers, thinking they got a right to a whole country. Why, even the worst niggers here don’t want but a little piece of the country. But we showed them. We put them in their places—six feet under” (296). That Hall’s use of racial slurs not only refers to communists, but also members of his own race is disturbing because he uses this racist bravado in order to deflect any real conversation concerning Korea. Hall’s offensive and casual commentary is his way of covering up the deep trauma he experienced in combat and avoiding any real confrontation with his experience. Furthermore, because he is talking to his younger brother, Hall’s language and tone is meant to protect Arthur from the horrors of the war by minimizing the trauma he experienced. This tension between what Hall says and what he knows to be true—which also occurs in the earlier scene when Tony asks Hall about Arthur at Julia’s house—is further illustrated through Hall’s account of his role in the Korean War just a few pages later: I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever here may be, it must always 89 happen here before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves. (300) Hall reflects on how one’s location in the world determines the knowledge that one can access. Furthermore, one’s location is often prohibitive in that it skews one’s perception of what is happening. The idea that the same things are actually happening everywhere illustrates how Hall is beginning to use his experience in Korea to world race once he is back in the United States. While Hall initially points to a clear distinction between North Koreans and black Americans when speaking to Arthur, there is also a suppressed identification that these two populations have in common: the desire for one’s country, whether it be “a whole country” or “but a little piece.” The passage above also points to the fallacy of Hall’s previous comments to his brother, for Hall recognizes the worldly problem of racism and exceptionalist thinking, further reinforcing that what Hall says to his brother a few pages prior is not an illustration of his ignorance. Rather, the shift in his language points to his awareness of how to speak on the subject of Korea in such a way that maintains the illusion of citizenship and superiority that comes along with being an American, even when that American is black. This recognition and his ability to disavow the deeply personal effects of war demonstrate Hall’s capacity to navigate his world and the 90 people around him. Furthermore, Hall identifies that his purpose in being drafted to go to Korea was “to help guarantee and perpetuate indifference.” Through his comparison of North Korean and Chinese communists with black Americans, Hall not only shows the global similarities of racial prejudice and the real physical results—being put “six feet under”—but he also worlds the conflict in Korea by showing how American ideas of racial difference are replicated in various forms beyond the nation’s borders and aid in comprehending a foreign landscape. Later in the novel, Hall once again discusses Korea with Arthur, albeit briefly. Arthur is telling Hall and Julia about Crunch’s state of mind after returning from Korea. When Arthur emotionally describes Crunch, his former lover, as being bitter, Hall admits to his own bitterness: “A lot of us came back from over there bitter,” I said. “It was a bitter thing to be part of.” I looked at Arthur, who turned to look at me. “It was bitter to see that you were part of a country that didn’t give a fuck about you, or anybody else.” “That’s true,” Arthur said. “I see that.” Then, “But you’re not bitter.” “I’m not going to let it kill me,” I said. “But I’m bitter.” (391) In this exchange, though Hall still does not fully divulge the extent of his trauma, we can see a clear progression in how he is able to talk about the experience from his initial conversation with Arthur. While Hall has expressed a deep level of analysis and critique concerning what he learned through his experience in Korea, it was all done silently through his narration and never spoken aloud to another character. Like 91 Hall’s explanation of Arthur’s homosexuality to his son earlier, the novel conveys meaning at different registers. Hall the narrator tells a different story from Baldwin the author, and these variations are presented distinctly for other characters versus the reader. Here, Hall is vocally condemning the role of the United States in the Korean conflict and claiming that the American entry into Korea is symptomatic of the larger problem of white American exceptionalism. In contrast to how he glorifies the Korean conflict to Arthur initially, Hall shows his ambivalence towards the United States, a country that is simultaneously his home but also doesn’t “give a fuck about you, or anybody else.” Hall’s time in the foreign setting of Korea crystallizes the lack of care that his country has for him and equips him to world race once he returns to the United States in such a way that allows him to better understand the current political situation for black Americans both at home and abroad. Hall also relates his experiences in Korea to the Civil Rights Movement. As Hall, Arthur, Peanut, Florence, and Paul discuss the recent desegregation in Washington, D.C., Hall thinks back to his time in Korea: I thought of some of the Oriental faces I had seen, and the dry, bitter contempt in their eyes. Some were whores, and some were grandfathers or grandmothers, and some were children. In the case of the old, the contempt might be leavened with pity or, in the case of the children, camouflaged by bewilderment and pain: but the contempt was a constant, at bottom, and bottomless. Not a single white buddy of mine had seen this—but then, they had not seen me. (307) 92 Hall reflects on his ability to see beyond the surface of race—“the Oriental faces”—in a way that his fellow white American soldiers could not. Despite fighting on the same side as white Americans, Hall feels a sense of identification and solidarity with those his country has labeled the enemy. Hall’s ability not only to relate to the individuals behind “the Oriental faces” regardless of gender, age, or social standing—whores, grandparents, and children alike—but relate their experiences in Korea to his own experiences in the United States as a black man show that Hall is beginning to see how racism affects individuals globally in analogous ways, recognizing the possibilities for kinship among minority populations on a larger scale. Hall’s development of a worldly understanding of race comes up again when visiting his friend Sidney, a bartender, who he meets on the same Christmas night when he tells Martha he may be drafted. Sidney is considerably older than Hall and has an almost paternal relationship with Hall both before and after his time in Korea. Like Arthur, Sidney asks Hall about his time in Korea upon his return: “How was it over there?” “Man, you know how it was over there. It was bullshit piled high, pressed down, and running over.” I sipped my beer. “And lots of spattering blood and guts and brains and whores we treated like shit and V.D. and dysentery and dope.” I laughed. “America, the beautiful.” “Well. Look around you, now that you back, and tell me how different is it over here.” I was silent. (340) 93 This conversation is distinctly different from the one between Arthur and Hall earlier on the same subject because Hall feels no need to protect the older and wiser Sidney from the harsh realities of the world. Here, Hall’s tone is decidedly ironic, particularly when he says “America, the beautiful.” Moreover, the “we,” used with pride when speaking to Arthur, is now used with contempt. Furthermore, while Arthur listens silently to Hall’s account without questions, Sidney presses Hall to examine the similarities between the horrors of American imperialism and intervention abroad to the black American experience at home, leaving Hall silent. While Hall’s silence surrounding Arthur’s death is unproductive in the novel, this silence elicited by Sidney’s pointed observation is productive because it forces Hall to consider how his experience in Korea mirrors his experience in the United States. As Sidney continues discussing the state of being black in the United States, Hall remains silent: I could say nothing. I listened to his voice, and I watched his face—or, really, I could almost say that I listened to his face and watched his voice. I was beginning to hear, or see—to perceive—in another, new, very troubling way. It was as though one of my senses, or possibilities—sight, for example, or motion—had just been denied me, had just been stricken from me, and what remained to me had to do double or triple duty. (341) Though Hall does not speak as he listens to Sidney, his narration speaks volumes. While there have been points leading up to this moment that gestured to Hall’s developing worldliness, this particular instance signals a recognizable degree of self- 94 awareness. When Hall explains that he is beginning “to perceive—in another, new, very troubling way,” he is describing that what is around him has not changed but rather, his mode of understanding his surroundings has shifted. Perception is contrasted with sight, for sight has everything to do with what is visible while perception entails understanding and knowledge. Hall’s newfound perception is informed by his prior experiences, specifically in this case, those in Korea. When Sidney compares what is happening in the United States and what Hall saw happen in Korea, Hall’s silence signals his acknowledgement that the victimization of blacks in their own nation by fellow Americans is analogous to the victimization of Koreans in their own nation by foreigners. Hall is troubled into silence not only by his newfound sense of solidarity with the Koreans, but also because he realizes his complicity in perpetuating the same kinds of violence and exceptionalist political values upon the Koreans as white America has perpetuated against him and other people of color. The victimization through racial violence and its ensuing silence is made most apparent in the abduction and murder of Peanut by Southern white supremacists. After returning from Korea, Hall agrees to be Arthur’s agent, and they, along with Peanut, who works as Arthur’s accompanist, arrive in Atlanta for Arthur’s final singing engagement. When they arrive at the church, a group of white men confront them and begin a physical altercation during which Arthur gets hit in the mouth. Before the conflict can escalate further, Mr. Elkins, who is hosting the visitors at his home, confronts the men with his gun. Peanut, however, proceeds to attack one of the white men: 95 Then—and the only warning was the sudden flash of fear in the brown eyes, I will never forget that instant—Peanut, suddenly, uncontrollably, slammed the man across the face with his open palm, four, five, six times, before he was pulled away. The man staggered, but did not fall and I watched his eyes as he slowly opened them, staring at all of us, and then, at Peanut. The sweat on my back slowly grew ice-cold. This was not a man staring at us, then at Peanut, neither was he an animal. No animal could have been so depthlessly humiliated, and I had never, never seen such hatred. (445-446) Peanut’s inability to contain his rage, paired with his blackness, seals his fate. Hall immediately knows the danger in which Peanut has placed himself while Peanut and Arthur do not. Hall knows that the church cannot protect Peanut from the outside world. Even in the conversations following the altercation at the Elkins’ residence, Arthur and Peanut do not seem to fully comprehend the gravity of the situation, particularly when Arthur seems surprised that it might not be wise to leave the house (448) and when Peanut suggests beginning the drive back home that night (452). As Arthur insists he can sing despite his injured lip, the Elkins finally decide that they can go to the church for Arthur to perform, but that the performance must be shorter than previously planned. As the performance comes to a close and the audience applauds, Peanut leaves to go to the bathroom, an outhouse on the property of the church. Hall recalls, “In the next five minutes, we lost Peanut” (458). As Hall, Arthur, and the Elkins search for Peanut, the only trace of him they find is his notebook, discarded on the floor of the outhouse. The other characters realize that Peanut has 96 been abducted and most certainly lynched. This violence is made visible precisely through the rendered invisibility of Peanut’s body, which is never seen or discovered after he has disappeared, and the presence of the notebook in his stead. The text in absence of body provides a powerful metaphor for the narrative that Hall is trying to tell and the silences that ensue. The notebook, like Baldwin’s novel, provides an opportunity for the reader to fill in the silences because the existence of the text itself signals that there is a story waiting to be told. Just as a direct account of Hall’s time in Korea is strangely absent from the narrative, actually drawing attention to its importance through its invisibility not just to the story, but to Hall’s emergent worldliness, so, too, does the absence of Peanut’s body render more visible the real and material violence to which black bodies are subject in their own nation. While Peanut is spared the possibility of violence and death during the Korean War due to his poor eyesight, such avoidance cannot be guaranteed at home in the United States. With Peanut’s abduction and murder comes Hall’s confrontation with the reality of racial violence at home, a reality that is no longer abstract for him as a Northerner and a one that deeply disturbs and changes him. The loss of Peanut results in Arthur’s decision to travel across North America and Europe to pursue his singing career while Hall decides to remain in Harlem to pursue a career in advertising. Hall attributes this temporary separation of the Montana brothers to the shock of Peanut’s abduction and murder: “That blow, the loss of Peanut, seemed to have the effect of fragmenting each of us where we stood, and, fragmented, we scattered everywhere” (463). Once again, though, Hall chooses to tell Arthur’s story rather than his own and specifically, he narrates Arthur’s love 97 affair with Guy, a white Frenchman, while in Paris, further illustrating Hall’s emergent worldliness through his acceptance of Arthur’s homosexuality. Like in Book III, Hall’s source of information for what he narrates is Arthur’s correspondence, for Hall is once again not present for the events he is relaying. Though the method through which Hall acquires information remains the same, the circumstances around the story have been inverted: while in Book III, Hall is the one who has traveled abroad while Arthur is left behind in Harlem, in Book IV, it is Arthur who has left home for a foreign country while Hall remains at home in the United States. Book IV also differs from Book III because Hall himself has changed as a narrator. Though the vast majority of the narrative is retrospective, Hall is psychologically returning to past events and traumas that he had not previously allowed himself to dwell upon. The narrative arc of the novel forces Hall to (re)encounter the trauma of his time in Korea and though any account of those events or his psychological return gets left out of the narrative itself, they leave behind traces in the narration that ensues, enabling Hall to tell his story and honor the memory of his brother. As the narrative turns to Arthur’s perspective in Paris, Hall’s account of what Arthur feels and thinks mirrors Hall’s own inner thought process. Hall attempts to represent Arthur’s time in Paris faithfully while simultaneously using his narration of this period in Arthur’s life as a vehicle for his own personal development. In other words, telling this story of Arthur becomes therapeutic and educational for it forces Hall to imagine what it is like to be Arthur, which in turn illuminates Hall’s own personal identity and place within the world. Hall uses a phone call he receives from 98 Arthur as his transition from narrating his dissatisfaction with his job to narrating Arthur’s time in Paris: “Arthur called me from Paris, to say that he would be coming home in a few days, and he hoped that I would be able to take time off to go south with him. He had been haunted throughout his journey, everywhere he’d been—I could hear this in his voice, and I, too, was haunted” (466-467). What happens in this brief passage pulls together the Montana brothers who had previously been “fragmented” through the loss of Peanut. Hall and Arthur’s coming together after Peanut’s death is also an opportunity for them to share what they have experienced during their separation. Not only does it begin the process of their physical reunion with Arthur’s request for Hall to accompany him to the South—when Arthur returns to the United States, Hall tours with him as his manager—but Hall also acknowledges their mutual states of being haunted by their respective and sometimes shared journeys. Similarly to Hall, Arthur is faced with questions of his racial and national identity when inhabiting a foreign land, but while Hall’s encounter is in Korea during a time of war, Arthur’s is in Paris during a love affair. As the phone call between the two brothers ends, the focus shifts to Arthur in Paris. The tense also shifts from past to present, lending immediacy to the narrative about to follow. In contrast, the majority of the novel is told in the past tense, but occasionally, Hall slips into the present tense when he is imagining the sequence of events for which he is not present. Tellingly, in his narration of the Trumpets of Zion touring the South in Book III, Hall narrative shift from present tense to past tense coincides with the shift from platonic to erotic in Crunch and Arthur’s relationship (198). By narrating their romance and physical relationship using the past tense, Hall 99 is able to compartmentalize it into an event that has already occurred—much in the same way Hall accounts for his own sexual acts with fellow soldiers in Korea—rather than a way of living that is ever-present for the homosexual Arthur. Earlier in the novel, when Hall is describing how their mother knew the depth of Arthur’s love for Crunch and her ensuing worry, Hall uses a heteronormative hypothetical in order to explain Florence’s worry: “It worried her the way the identity, the fate, the future of her child always worried a mother. If I had decided to marry a white girl, for example, my mother would have been worried but would never have opposed it” (256). Hall continues by explaining how he and his father deal with Arthur’s homosexuality: “For the rest, a son, or brother, is simply that—a son, or a brother— and you love him, in the shit or out of the shit, and you clean him up if you have to, and you know he’s got to go the way his blood beats because that’s your blood beating in those veins, too” (257). Hall description of shared blood evokes the idea of kinship despite difference, in this case, sexuality. Throughout the novel, Hall’s deep love for his brother is unquestionable, yet it is clear that love exists in spite of Arthur’s homosexuality. However, in this moment, we begin to see that Hall has the potential to face difference as an opportunity for solidarity rather than opposition. By the end of Book IV, however, Hall’s understanding of Arthur and the larger world has progressed to the point that Arthur’s sexuality no longer makes Hall ambivalent or uncomfortable. While previously, Hall is constantly attempting to justify Arthur’s homosexuality, often interrupting the narrative with his own explanations of what is happening, by the time Arthur is in Paris, Hall identifies with Arthur through his imaginative reconstruction of Arthur’s experience. Of course, even 100 this narration is Hall’s imagined account of what transpired, yet the delivery of the narrative signals Hall’s own maturation in his willingness to confront and represent Arthur’s life. Several moments indicate that Hall is blurring the line between his own experience and that of his brother, suggesting that he is using the telling of Arthur’s story as an avenue for exploring and expressing his own understanding of his identity. For example, when Arthur meets Guy and they begin their love affair, Hall describes the effect on Arthur: Kissing a stranger in a strange town, and in a strange upper room, and with all the world too busy to notice or to care or to judge, with Mama and Daddy sleeping, and Brother out to work, and God scrutinizing the peaceful fields of New England, his past seems to drop from him like a heavy illusion, he feels it fall to the floor beneath them, he pushes it away with his feet, all, Julia, Crunch, Peanut, Red, Hall, the congregations, the terror of trees and streets, the weight of yesterday, the dread of tomorrow, all, for this instant, falls away[.] (490-491) Hall has been clinging to the past, unable to come to reconcile his ambivalence concerning the various traumas he has experienced. Telling Arthur’s story, and in this moment, actively and deliberately identifying with Arthur, signals a significant shift in Hall’s attitude not only towards his brother’s homosexuality but also towards the past. Though meant to describe Arthur, the words “his past seems to drop from him like a heavy illusion” ring just as true for Hall. Hall again inserts himself into the narrative when Arthur reflects upon the inherent irony of the designation “black American”: 101 [F]or the very first time, and almost certainly because he is sitting on this unknown avenue, he puts the two words together black American and hears, at once, the very crescendo of contradiction and the unanswering and unanswerable thunder and truth of history—which is nothing more and nothing less than the beating of his own heart, his song. In many ways, he does not like being a black American, or being black, or being American, or being Arthur, and, for many millions of people, in his country, and elsewhere—including France—his existence was proof of the unspeakable perversity of history, a flaw in the nature of God. (504) This passage is, of course, reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’ discussion of double- consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk (1903).27 Like Du Bois, Hall points to the tension that Arthur faces because he is both black and American, which Hall himself faced as a soldier being sent abroad on behalf of the United States and struggled through upon his return. These lines that Hall attributes to Arthur’s own interior reflection could arguably represent just as accurately what Hall was thinking as he was fighting in Korea, at once identified as an American for the purposes of war, yet denied the basic rights and considerations that the designation of American signifies at home. While Hall identifies with Arthur’s struggle between his blackness and his Americanness, Arthur has the added designation of being gay, which Hall alludes to 27As Du Bois writes: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (2). 102 in the final sentence of the passage above. While previously, particularly in his conversation with Tony at the beginning of the novel, Hall conceived of Arthur’s homosexuality as a set of physical acts, here, Hall is analogizing race and sexuality, which suggests that Hall has come to understand Arthur’s homosexuality as inherent to his identity. The narration of Hall’s physical journey to Korea and metaphorical journey through his memory and his imagination concerning Arthur’s life and death begin with moments of silence that are disavowed, inviting the reader to recover what is unsaid. In Just Above My Head, this reconstruction is required of both the reader and the narrator. Once Tony has broken the silence surrounding Arthur, Hall knows he must begin recuperating Arthur’s story not only to honor his memory, but also as a means of coming to terms with his own problematic experiences as a black man both living in the United States and fighting a war on behalf of Americans in Korea. This process is initiated in Julia’s home through the reminiscing of past events, including many that involved Arthur. Julia begins telling the story of Arthur singing at a funeral, which also happened to be the site of her last sermon as a child preacher, a story Hall is hearing for the first time. When Hall confirms that Julia never told him about the event before, she responds, “Well. I guess it takes time—more time than anybody wants to imagine—to sort things out, inside, and then try to put them together, and then try—not so much to make sense out of it all—as to see. Maybe that’s why what seems to be past begins to be clearer than what seems to be present” (43). Here, Julia is explaining why she never told Hall about this specific event in the past, stating that she needed time “to sort things out.” This statement, of course, also 103 rings true for Hall’s current state of mind concerning his brother. Hall realizes that even if he cannot make sense of Arthur’s life at the current moment, he must attempt “to see” Arthur, by bearing witness to and narrating his life, which he does through the remaining pages of the novel. Conclusion: From Silence to Memory By the end of Book IV, Hall’s understanding of Arthur and the larger world has progressed so that Arthur’s sexuality no longer makes him ambivalent or uncomfortable. While previously, Hall is constantly attempting to justify Arthur’s homosexuality, often interrupting the narrative with his own explanations of what is happening, by the time Arthur is in Paris, Hall identifies with Arthur through his imaginative reconstruction of Arthur’s experience. Of course, even this narration is Hall’s imagined account of what transpired, yet the delivery of the narrative signals Hall’s own maturation in his willingness to confront and represent Arthur’s life. In order to tell his own story, Hall relies on the stories of others—Arthur, Peanut, Red, Crunch, Julia—and through revealing the stories of these other characters, Hall is able to encounter his own story, effectively breaking his silence concerning his own life. The final book of Just Above My Head, Book V, serves as a conclusion for many of the issues raised throughout. Arthur returns from Europe and tours the South once more with Hall as his agent; Arthur and Jimmy begin their romantic relationship; Arthur dies; and Hall finally comes to terms not only with his brother’s life and death, but also his own life as a black American. At the beginning of Book V, 104 Hall acknowledges that the story he has told is not just about Arthur, but also about himself, in a direct address to the reader: You have sensed my fatigue and my panic, certainly, if you have followed me until now, and you can guess how terrified I am to be approaching the end of my story. It was not meant to be my story, though it is far more my story than I would have thought, or might have wished. I have wondered, more than once, why I started it, but—I know why. It is a love song to my brother. It is an attempt to face both love and death. (529) Hall recognizes that through his telling of Arthur’s story, he has also revealed parts of himself and through that process, he has come to terms with both his brother’s life as well as his own. Just as Hall’s narration of Arthur in Paris serves to rectify his inability to narrate his time in Korea and his ambivalence towards Arthur’s homosexuality when narrating his relationship with Crunch, Hall and Arthur’s touring of the South serves as a symbolic return, both in geographical terms as the place where they lost Peanut and emblematic terms as the place of their history and ancestry. Through this trip, Hall is able to face what he has been avoiding, which is his own understanding of what it means to be a black American, encountered directly rather than through the pretense of narrating the events of his brother’s life. Hall learns how to grapple with his seemingly contradictory identity as a black American through facing the reality of racism, not through the instigation of violence as Peanut did, nor through feigning ignorance at the difference between himself and whites, as he did when fighting in Korea: 105 For them, we were black, and that was all there was to it. [….] if I could not conveniently die, or decently smile, gratefully labor, then I should be carried to a place of execution, the dogs to feast on my sex; fire, air, wind, water, and, at last, earth, my bones: it came to that, for me and mine, and in my own country, which I loved so much, and which I helped build. (548) Hall takes ownership of his American identity, both in terms of its dark realities of racial violence and discrimination, and as a product of a collective history to which he has contributed. By finding a way to resolve his ambivalence towards America and Americanness—a process that is made possible by his first resolving his ambivalence towards Arthur’s homosexuality—Hall finally comes to terms with his place in the nation he calls home. As the novel nears its conclusion, Hall reflects upon the problematic nature of memory, an important thematic concern that emerges almost as soon as the novel begins. Part of what prevents Hall from “seeing” Arthur before the novel begins, even immediately following his death, is that Hall does not trust his memory, which he views as unreliable. In the opening pages of Book II, Hall interrupts his own recollection of attending church with his family and hearing Julia preach in order to dwell upon the fickleness of memory: “If one wishes to be instructed—not that anyone does—concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. [….] You cannot see when you look back: too dark 106 behind me” (71). Towards the novel’s end, Hall once again meditates on the nature of memory: I wonder, more and more, about what we call memory. The burden— the role—of memory is to clarify the event, to make it useful, even, to make it bearable. But memory is, also, what the imagination makes, or has made, of the event, and, the more dreadful the event, the more likely it is that the memory will distort, or efface it. It is, thus, perfectly possible, indeed, it is common—to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one’s life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it. (567) In this passage, Hall clearly distinguishes between history and memory. History is how the event actually occurred in the past while memory is how the imagination constructs the event. Memory, then, becomes mediated by imagination in order to make the past, collective and personal histories, more bearable and justifiable. While Hall’s personal history emerges as unbearable at particular moments, he seeks to represent his memory faithfully by narrating Arthur’s life. As Hall continues his line of thought, he relates his own experience and his new philosophy on the nature of history versus memory to immigrants he sees coming into the United States: 107 This is, perhaps, why I so often thought of safety when I watched these so lately baptized Americans, and why I thought of them as homeless. They had to believe in safety, who on earth could blame them? But I knew that they were not safe: if I was not safe in my country, if no viable social contract had been made, or honored, with me, then no one could be safe here. I may not believe that safety exists anywhere, but it certainly cannot exist among such dishonorable people. They did not want to hear this—now that they were the Americans, I was the stranger—I couldn’t blame them, and I held my peace. Still, I had to wonder what their memory made of their ordeal: which could never have so mercilessly overtaken them, had they not believed themselves to be safe. So it was true, after all, however odd and brutal: I knew there was no hiding place down here; they were homeless, I was home. (567-568) This passage returns to the idea of home with which I open the chapter. Hall once again invokes the role of memory, which he describes as being necessarily altered in order to believe that one is safe and at “home.” Rather than insisting that new immigrants face this truth, however, Hall acknowledges the necessity of this process of altering memory in order to make one’s world livable. In saying, “I couldn’t blame them, and I held my peace,” Hall shows how his deployment of silence has also developed from signaling discomfort to a gesture of solidarity and understanding. In addition, Hall points to the irony of the United States as a home for minority subjects, whether they are immigrants or they are black citizens. In describing himself as “the 108 stranger”—the foreigner in the eyes of new immigrants—Hall figuratively puts himself in the position of those he had previously considered foreign. Hall’s identification with immigrants of various backgrounds and races, from countries that are not the United States, honors difference rather than trying to erase it. The little intimacy forged between Hall and Arthur in the aftermath of his death sets up Hall’s development across the novel that leads to his ability to world race and build alliances across axes of difference. The novel traces Hall’s progression from an individual who remains silent on subjects that make him uncomfortable—homosexuality, death, race—to someone who is able to identify deeply not just with his gay brother who he loves, but also those who have no personal connection to him and seem to have nothing in common with him. 109 Part Two: Racial Crossings at Sea from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans Chapter Three: A Lesson in Worldliness: The Figure of the American in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies The Indian Ocean is a theoretical terrain, a geographical space and a historical network of human connectivities. It is by its nature (and culture) a fluid topic, and one of ongoing disciplinary interest—it has been a focus of study for historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and cultural studies critics alike. Scholars have neither exhausted the potential of looking at comparative models such as the Black Atlantic and the Mediterranean for possible insights into the specificities of the Indian Ocean nor stopped probing the surfaces, depths and rims of the Indian Ocean waters to unearth previously unwritten histories of transnationalism, migration and diasporic imaginings. The spectre of race, both in our scholarship and as a category of personhood for those living in the Indian Ocean world, is a topic raised here, but needs to be explored more fully, just as the biography of the Indian Ocean as a history of different faiths, languages, colonialisms, commodities and capitals has yet to be written. -Pamila Gupta, Introduction, Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (2010) The chokey’s door lay open so they climbed into it. The cell was as cramped as a chicken coop and as airless as a snake-pit: apart from a lidded porthole in its door, it had only one other opening, which was a tiny air duct in the bulwark that separated it from the coolies’ dabusa. Jodu found that if he stood on tiptoe, he could put his eye to the air duct. Two months in this hole! he said to Rajoo. With nothing to do but spy on the coolies… -Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (2008) Introduction In Part I, I examined how travel abroad alters how black characters understand race in the United States and their own double-consciousness as both black and American. In Part II, my discussion centers on another black American character who travels abroad: Zachary Reid. Unlike Johnson’s narrator and Hall Montana, however, Zachary’s final destination is not Europe but ultimately, the Mauritius islands. Zachary crosses not just the Atlantic Ocean, but also the Indian Ocean, expanding the 110 scale of the world in my project of worlding race. Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies (2008) centers around the Ibis, a former slave ship that has been repurposed as a coolie ship, and takes place in the years leading up to the Opium Wars. The narrative follows the stories and fates of numerous characters who have found themselves aboard the Ibis for varying reasons, but whose end destination is the same: the Mauritius islands. Through the physical aspects of the ship itself—its properties of containment, its diverse occupants, its numerous air ducts and peepholes—Ghosh’s characters gain a level of access to certain social spaces and even to each other that would normally be denied to them. Those we find aboard the ship come from varying racial, national, socioeconomic, and linguistic backgrounds and fulfill different roles while at sea. While these roles appear predetermined, they are actually undermined by how the characters subvert the social, political, religious, and economic forces that subjugate them in acts of resistance. Through these foreign encounters and the forging of little intimacies, Ghosh explores the far-reaching effects of colonialism and imperialism, and the societal ideologies that buttress these institutions. In so doing, the novel transgresses boundaries—social, political, geographical, literary—in a gesture that worlds race by demanding a particular critical reading practice that pays close attention to the text and its existence in the larger world. My reading of the novel seeks, on one level, to use Sea of Poppies in order to illuminate the specificities of Americanness by examining Zachary. In other words, I propose that we use worldliness as a means of rethinking our critical approaches to studies of American literature and culture that are too often restricted by the bounds 111 of nation-thinking. Paul Giles points to the vexed relationship between the United States and the world in his discussion of American literature: [T]he interrelation between American literature and geography, far from being something that can be taken as natural, involves contested terrain, terrain that has been subject over the past four centuries to many different kinds of mutation and controversy. I will argue that these instabilities have too frequently been overlooked in the ways the subject of American literature has been codified and institutionalized, especially over the past hundred years. (1) These instabilities are the focus of my reading of Zachary as a means of negotiating this “contested terrain” that Giles identifies as crucial to the study of American literature. As Giles later points out, “It is important to emphasize how these forces of deterritorialization have also operated insidiously to disturb and dislocate the national identity of the United States itself, in particular the relationship between its domestic space and the wider world” (14). As I discuss in the introduction to this dissertation, critics like Amy Kaplan, as well as Donald Pease, have begun the important work of thinking more globally when examining U.S. imperialism on a transnational scale, yet this work still relies upon, to some degree, the assumption of U.S. exceptionalism even as it is critiqued. Kaplan argues, “dominant representations of national identity at home are informed and deformed by the anarchic encounters of empire, even as these same representations displace and disavow imperialism as something remote and foreign to U.S. nationhood” (16). If, as Kaplan argues, the U.S. encounters and experiences the world through the lens of imperialism, which in turn informs national 112 identity, Ghosh’s novel extends Kaplan’s argument, encouraging us to gaze backwards from the world onto the United States in a gesture of worldliness. While having the United States as a starting point is clearly important in the realm of American literary and cultural studies, I want to push our thinking about the relationship of the United States with the world a step beyond a simplistic account of American agency within the world. While examining and critiquing how the United States enters and engages the world is an important first step, it is important to avoid privileging the United States in our understanding of the world. Failing to do so would only perpetuate the kind of U.S. imperialism that Kaplan and Pease caution us against. Rather, starting from the perspective of the world decenters the nation and begins the important work of critiquing Americanness without also relying upon American essentialism. Through the geographical scope of the novel as illustrated through the Ibis and its history, Ghosh conceptually links the complex histories of human trafficking as they occurred on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In his reading of the novel, Jacob Crane argues: “Ghosh’s historical novel contests the boundaries of the black Atlantic through a comparative project that produces new forms of hybridity and new theorizations of diaspora formation” (4). In her article “The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method,” Isabel Hofmeyr explains the significance of the Indian Ocean to such new theorizations of diaspora: One important theme in Indian Ocean scholarship has been a revision of older ways of thinking about diaspora that tend to single out only one group for analysis. Not only does this reproduce older racial 113 categories of empire (Indian, African, Chinese), it privileges movement outward—from India to Africa, Fiji, or the Caribbean. What the reverse flows might be, or what such outward flows mean for politics back on the mainland, are themes that have only recently started to attract attention. (587) Both Crane and Hofmeyr read the potential of the Indian Ocean to widen the scope of Paul Gilroy’s important claims surrounding the Atlantic slave trade and fruitfully contributes to discussions of race, transnationalism, and diaspora. Like the Black Atlantic, the Indian Ocean is, as described in my first epigraph, “a theoretical terrain, a geographical space and a historical network of human connectivities” (Gupta 4). While Sea of Poppies is an ideal text to examine the convergence of Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean studies, the novel also demonstrates the discomfort produced through such encounters as experienced by individual characters. In addition, the Ibis, as an example of Gilroy’s chronotope of the ship, illustrates how movements of peoples and cultures affect understandings of race, nation, and empire, but also how the ship itself and those aboard change through the very act of moving beyond the Atlantic and crossing the Indian Ocean.28 By bringing together scholarship on the Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean not just through the chronotope of the ship, but the 28 My argument about the possibilities for bringing together the Atlantic and Indian Oceans builds upon Pamila Gupta’s argument about how the Indian Ocean transformed those who crossed it and their geographies: “In the act of crossing the Indian Ocean, people transformed places and formed new identities. Ideas and objects also travelled the water in the luggage of imperialists, pirates, merchants, pilgrims and traders. Diverse languages and faiths reached the shores on both sides of the water. Thus, it was the melding of ideas, peoples and material objects that because the basis for conceptualising the Indian Ocean as one of flows and fluidity” (3). 114 bodies that occupy it and their ensuing little intimacies, I show how the novel worlds how we understand race both globally and in the U.S. The ship serves as a metaphor not only for the fluidity and mobility of national and disciplinary categories, but also for racial categories. Though the various characters aboard the Ibis have varying ideas of human difference, the space of the ship, which forces a level of proximity and intimacy among the characters, becomes a fertile environment for the evolution of those racial categories for each of the characters. Race is constructed and reconstructed as ideas of difference travel and are disseminated. The various air ducts and peep holes reveal the entwined histories of the ship itself, which serves as a way to think about how understandings of race are understood and altered through unknown histories and communications between individual minority subjects. A particular hole in the ship’s structure plays a significant function in the novel’s plot as a means of communication among various characters: the chokey hole.29 The passage in my second epigraph describes a young Indian peasant aboard the ship as a lascar30, Jodu, who encounters the chokey hole as he is touring the ship’s interior for the first time. In order to see into the chokey or hear what its occupants are saying, one must get as close to the hole as possible. The chokey hole emerges as an apt metaphor for the kind of intimate reading that Ghosh’s novel demands, one that requires the reader to go as close to the text as the novel’s characters must go to the chokey hole. 29 “Chokey” is slang for prison and is an anglicized version of the Hindi word “caukī” meaning a shed or lock-up. 30 A lascar is a sailor from India or Southeast Asia. 115 In order to execute the kind of intimate reading I am proposing, I will first discuss how Ghosh employs global Englishes to illustrate how travel, especially when associated with empire, seeps into what we know and how we communicate. Second, I will expand my discussion of the chokey hole, initiated above, and show how the structure of the Ibis itself is a physical embodiment of the very concerns that are currently under discussion in global studies of race. Third, through the character of Zachary Reid, the only U.S. American aboard the ship who happens to be passing for white, I will examine how the complex construction of race and U.S. American identity evolves through interactions with the larger world, which the novel and the Ibis both navigate. The centrality of Zachary as a character and the ensuing complexities of racial identification complicate any nationally bounded conception of race, particularly as understood in the United States. Zachary emerges as worldly by the end of the novel in no small part because of the evolution of how he understands and negotiates both his particular racial identity and the larger categories of race used to create human difference.31 Finally, I will return to the larger implications for this reading of the novel as one that worlds our understanding of race in the United States. By examining how the novel and its characters encounter foreignness, we, as critics, can literally poke holes into the seemingly impenetrable divisions between specific 31 During the writing of this dissertation, Ghosh published the final book in his Ibis trilogy, Flood of Fire (2015). By the end of the novel, Zachary is not only living as white, but is participating in and a beneficiary of the opium trade and its ensuing predatory practices through his intimate associations with the Burnhams. His emergence as an operative of British imperialism complicates how Zachary is a character who worlds race throughout the trilogy. Zachary’s progression in the third novel also provides a possible way of imagining the life of Johnson’s ex-colored man after the conclusion of The Autobiography and some of the consequences of passing successfully. 116 nations and the rest of the world; black and white; high caste and untouchable; coolie and lascar. Global Englishes and the Defamiliarization of Language The use of language in Ghosh’s novel is tied to the function of the Ibis: both alter the scale of intimacy and knowledge through the process of travel. In addition, the ship and language themselves also shift as the narrative moves across the Indian Ocean. Among the categories that Ghosh unsettles is the idea of a standardized version of the English language, one that connotes privileged knowledge and understanding based upon Western conventions. Perhaps the most blatant example of this deprivileging occurs in “The Ibis Chrestomathy,” compiled by Neel and found after the novel has concluded. Neel is a wealthy nobleman who participates in the opium trade with China. When he finds himself unable to pay off his loans, he is tried for forgery and found guilty, then sentenced to seven years of indentured servitude. Neel compiles this document in an effort to record the etymologies of anglicized words that have their origins in the subcontinent, tracing how they have traveled from the subcontinent to England, and changed in the process: “Words! Neel was of the view that words, no less than people, are endowed with lives and destinies of their own” (Ghosh 501). Upon first glance, the Chrestomathy appears to be a kind of glossary, meant to guide readers with unfamiliar words used within the narrative. With closer inspection, however, the reader realizes that the Chrestomathy is not a glossary at all insofar as it does not clarify meaning the way one would expect: 117 The Chrestomathy, then, is not so much a key to language as an astrological chart, crafted by a man who was obsessed with the destiny of words. Not all words were of equal interest, of course, and the Chrestomathy, let it be noted, deals only with a favoured few: it is devoted to a select number among the many migrants who have sailed from eastern waters towards the chilly shores of the English language. It is, in other words, a chart of the fortunes of a shipload of girmitiyas: this perhaps is why Neel named it after the Ibis. (Ghosh 501) In this characterization of the Chrestomathy, Ghosh creates a material link between the evolution of these anglicized words and the physical travel of those who carried the language on their journeys westward. The English language becomes a metonym for the place of England when Neel describes the girmitayas sailing “towards the chilly shores of the English language.” Language emerges as a destination and a space in which one can dwell, a space with a geography and a material presence within the world, much like the Ibis itself. Ghosh himself later refers to Neel’s project as “the vessel of migration that was the Chrestomathy” (502), further underlining the Chrestomathy as an analogue to the Ibis itself. The linking of the Chrestomathy with “the fortunes of a shipload of girmitiyas” illustrates how the fates of those who speak the language are inseparable from how that language is understood, categorized, and catalogued. As Rajesh Rai and Andrea Marion Pinkney observe in their essay, “The Girmitiyas’ Journey in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies”: 118 Beyond concerns over exploitation, the focus on subalterns’ experiences has been particularly revealing for its insights into aspects of everyday life and of wider issues of identity and change in the diaspora. It is at this site that historical and anthropological accounts have come to intersect most intimately with the voluminous literary works on the Indian diaspora that seek to represent the “voice” of those indentured—an articulation that figures prominently in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. (68) The words in the Chrestomathy are not merely those that the girmitayas used, but they encompass their fates as played out through travels aboard the ship and therefore, illustrate much more than a dictionary meaning. The Chrestomathy emerges as a representation of how language itself functions within the world it inhabits. The Chrestomathy’s relationship with the Oxford English Dictionary or, as Neel refers to it, the Oracle further illustrates the parallel fates of language and those who utter its words: Indeed the epiphany out of which it [the Chrestomathy] was born was Neel’s discovery, in the late 1880s, that a complete and authoritative lexicon of the English language was under preparation: this was, of course, the Oxford English Dictionary (or the Oracle, as it is invariably referred to in the Chrestomathy). Neel saw at once that the Oracle would provide him with an authoritative almanac against which to judge the accuracy of his predictions. [….] He was to be 119 disappointed, for decades would pass before the Oxford English Dictionary finally made its appearance: all he ever saw of it was a few of the fascicules that appeared in the interim. But the years of waiting were by no means wasted: Neel spent them in collating his notes with other glossaries, lexicons and word-lists. (501) Though Neel’s initial inspiration to begin his project is rooted in the promise of a definitive “authoritative almanac” on the English language in the form of the Oxford English Dictionary with the power to measure the accuracy and validity of his entries, Neel never sees the dictionary realized during his lifetime. As a result, the current form of the Chrestomathy exists without the validation of the OED, so its legitimacy and the reverence with which Neel’s descendants view it is based solely upon its own contents, independent of any Western authority on the English language. Despite the fact that Neel never gets to see the compiled Chrestomathy, Neel and his descendants continue to compile entries: [T]he Chrestomathy is also, in its very nature, a continuing dialogue, and the idea of bringing it to an end is one that evokes superstitious horror in all of Neel’s descendants. Be it then clearly understood that it was not with any such intention that this compilation was assembled: it was rather the gradual decay of Neel’s papers which gave birth to the proposal that the Chrestomathy (or what there was of it) be put into a form that might admit of wider circulation. (502) The Chrestomathy as an ongoing process rather than a complete and static account of language is completely antithetical to how the OED accounts for English. While the 120 OED as an authoritative text relies upon set histories that do not shift or evolve, the Chrestomathy insists upon the unpredictable nature of language and its inherent tendency to adapt to the context in which it is being used. As such, in Neel’s account, words are subject to transformation. Even though Neel intended for the OED to legitimize the Chrestomathy, the fact that it never happens leaves us with the Chrestomathy as existing independently of the OED. That the Chrestomathy does not function in relation to the OED only speaks further to the ways in which it offers an alternative, equally valid mode for understanding, circulating, and accounting for the English language. Due to the complex ways in which Neel accounts for the words he catalogues, the Chrestomathy actually does very little to aid readers in understanding the language of the novel’s characters. Like the novel itself, the Chrestomathy calls attention to the foreign origins of English words, challenging the origins of the English language as rooted in one geographical space. The dissemination of foreign words and their anglicization provides an apt metaphor for investigating how racial difference is constructed and circulated beyond the geography with which they are associated. The shifting nature of language mimics the ongoing processes of racialization illustrated in the novel. Ghosh’s use of language, and English in particular, refuses to privilege the conventional and the standardized. Rather, the English spoken within the novel oftentimes confuses rather than clarifies, unsettling Western speakers of English with the unexpected unfamiliarity of their native tongue. That Ghosh employs multiple languages and multiple variations of English leads to the undercutting of language as a means of identification and knowledge. While 121 language is traditionally understood as a vehicle of communication, Ghosh uses the confusion of language in order to draw attention to the assumptions surrounding how we use, understand, and disseminate language. In order to delve more deeply into the significance of Ghosh’s use of language, I turn to Emily Brown Coolidge Toker’s discussion of global Englishes, which she defines as “multiple distinct and fluid (but mutually intelligible) dialects or strands of English adapted to the specific locale and usage of a given population” (113). She goes on to argue: [T]he global Englishes view opens avenues of agency and ownership unavailable when global standardized English is imposed as an ideal. The allowance of agency and consequent development of ownership are crucial to the extent that, increasingly, English truly is to be a common language of communication in a postindustrial world. (Toker 113) Going against a model of a standardized version of the English language, what Toker distinguishes as “globalized Englishes” (113), allows, and even insists upon, alternate ways of gleaning meaning and knowledge from language. These alternatives flourish rather than flounder amidst variation, forcing the characters to rely upon collaboration and alternate forms of knowledge building in order to achieve understanding, and also forcing the readers to be active in engaging with the text and its language. The reader’s introduction to these globalized Englishes is through Zachary Reid, the only character who survives the voyage from Baltimore, Maryland to India aboard the Ibis. Upon its arrival, the first order of business is to acquire a new crew. 122 When Serang Ali and his crew of lascars come aboard the ship, Zachary’s acclimation is likened to his experience of learning how to be a sailor. Zachary’s knowledge of seamanship is intimately tied to being physically aboard the ship. Similarly, Zachary’s knowledge of the new crew comes about through direct interactions. Ghosh writes, “Once under sail, Zachary was forced to undergo yet another education, not so much in seamanship this time, as in the ways of the new crew” (15). Furthermore, the shift in the crew of the Ibis, from the nineteen who leave from Baltimore, “of whom nine were listed as ‘Black’, including Zachary” (12) to Serang Ali’s crew who joins the Ibis when the majority of the original crew dies has effects both materially on the physical ship and linguistically in how Zachary is able to communicate with the other sailors: [T]he very smell of the ship began to change, with the odour of spices creeping through the timbers. Having been put in charge of the ship’s stores, Zachary had to familiarize himself with a new set of provisions, bearing no resemblance to the accustomed hardtack and brined beef; […] he had to memorize a new shipboard vocabulary, which sounded a bit like English and yet not: the rigging became the ‘ringeen’, ‘avast!’ was ‘bas!’, and the cry of the middle morning watch went from ‘all’s well’ to ‘alzbel’. The deck now became the ‘tootuk’ while the masts were ‘dole’; a command became a ‘hookum’ and instead of starboard and larboard, fore and aft, he had to say ‘janna’ and ‘dawa’, ‘agile’ and ‘peechil’. (15) 123 The presence of Serang Ali and his crew alters the environment of the ship, from how the ship smells, to what provisions it provides, to how those aboard communicate with one another. That Zachary must adjust his Western sensibilities to accommodate the lascars speaks to the ways in which the physical space of the ship requires cross- national, -cultural, and -linguistic exchanges that result in material alterations of the surrounding environment and those who inhabit it. The undercutting of language as a means of identification is also significant because once he arrives in India, the rest of the crew and the other characters who come aboard speak in such a way that is never completely intelligible to Zachary. Interestingly, Zachary is able to communicate much more effectively with Serang Ali than with Mr Doughty, an Englishman who comes aboard as the ship’s pilot. Ghosh describes Zachary’s first encounter with Serang Ali: Zachary came on deck at dawn to be greeted with a cheerful: ‘Chin-chin Malum Zikri! You catchi chow-chow? Wat dam t’ing hab got inside?’ Although startled at first, Zachary soon found himself speaking to the serang with an unaccustomed ease: it was as if his oddly patterned speech had unloosed his own tongue. (16) Zachary’s ability not only to understand Serang Ali, but to respond verbally in kind despite the lack of familiarity with this version of English speaks to an ability to communicate that goes beyond language. As I will discuss later in this chapter, Serang Ali feels a deep sense of racial solidarity with Zachary and Zachary, eventually, reciprocates. 124 In contrast, while having dinner with Mr Doughty, Zachary finds himself struggling with the unfamiliar vocabulary that the pilot has integrated into his own English usage: Zachary could no longer sustain the pretence of omniscience. Knitting his eyebrows, he said: ‘Cu-cuzzanah? Now there you go again, Mr Doughty that’s another word I don’t know the meaning of.’ This naïve, if well-meant, remark earned Zachary a firm dressing-down: it was about time, the pilot said, that he, Zachary, stopped behaving like a right gudda — ‘that’s a donkey in case you were wondering.’ This was India, where it didn’t serve for a sahib to be taken for a clodpoll of a griffin: if he wasn’t fly to what was going on, it’d be all dickey with him, mighty jildee. This was no Baltimore — this was a jungle here, with biscobras in the grass and wanderoos in the trees. If he, Zachary, wasn’t to be diddled and taken for a flat, he would have to learn to gubbrow the natives with a word or two of the zubben. (47-48) Mr Doughty places strict geographical boundaries upon language and its implications — “This was India […] This was no Baltimore” — which renders the language used inaccessible to Zachary. Furthermore, the way that Mr Doughty speaks exhibits his conscious decision to incorporate unfamiliar vocabulary into his own lexicon in order to communicate effectively with “the natives” in this “jungle here” known as India. Zachary’s difficulty understanding Mr Doughty signals a difficulty in understanding that which his language is meant to signify: by using words from the native 125 vocabulary as a means of exhibiting dominance, Mr Doughty uses the very words of the people he is trying to dominate against them. Ghosh himself privileges the variant of English used by Serang Ali over that used by Mr Doughty by incorporating Serang Ali’s own terms to infiltrate the narration. When describing Captain Chillingworth and Mr Crowle coming aboard the Ibis to inspect it before it sets sail, the narration switches the way in which it addresses certain characters: Captain Chillingworth becomes “the Kaptan,” Mr Crowle becomes “Burra Malum,” and Zachary becomes “Zikri Malum” (222-226), ways of naming that are otherwise only used in dialogue. As critic Julia Hoydis observes in her monograph “Tackling the Morality of History”: Ethics and Storytelling in the Works of Amitav Ghosh (2011), conventional categories of identity are destabilized through the fluidity of identities and languages aboard the ship: “Through the characters’ switching of names (e.g. Paulette, Pugli, Putleshwari), clothes, and languages, the novel shows traditional markers of identity as deceptive and calls for a suspension of judgment according to those categories” (329). Ghosh uses the Ibis as his vehicle for transgressing both physical and figurative borders in the novel, resulting not only in an alternative use of language, but also in alternative modes of identification and solidarity that result in little intimacies among individuals from disparate cultural, geographical, racial, social, and linguistic backgrounds. Through the Chokey Hole: The Problem of Scale Aboard the Ibis Ghosh’s use of global Englishes complicates the use of language as a mechanism of understanding and communication, requiring alternate methods for 126 knowledge acquisition. Similarly, the Ibis itself, through its material structure, provides alternate modes of access and intimacy that are usually restricted. Ghosh explores how labor and trade within the context of empire produce alternative historical accounts of migration and diaspora through the Ibis. As a former slave ship that was initially repurposed to transport opium, but then used to transport coolies, the Ibis is a physical embodiment of the entwined histories of slavery, colonialism, migration, and the opium trade. The novel begins in the year 1838 amidst events that will eventually lead to the Opium Wars. With the passing of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which abolished the slave trade in the British Empire, there emerged the need for a new form of labor, answered with an increased demand for indentured servants. In her 2012 ACLA Presidential Address, Françoise Lionnet writes, “The Ibis, with its crew and passengers from varied backgrounds, is a microcosm of the creolizing dynamics, alliances and conflicts, dangers and hopes of the colonial world” (454). The Ibis is a site for exploring these alternative histories and interactions among disparate peoples, cultures, and continents. Anupama Arora echoes Lionnet’s account of the ship: The body of the ship itself—deck, timbers, and hold—carries inscriptions of different histories (of non-Western sailors, the slave trade, indentured labour). Cross-cultural, caste, class, gender, and national collaborations blur all sorts of boundaries and enable the formation of new alliances (both oppressive and liberating) and emergence of reconstituted families within contexts of domination and resistance. The crisscrossing oceanic trading routes offer up an 127 affective map of the world of unlikely kinships and intimacies formed on the fluid world of the ocean as a consequence of the machinations and practices of Empire. (22) The compressed space of the ship fosters unexpected interactions that lead to little intimacies between individuals who would otherwise never come into contact. These foreign encounters challenge societal expectations of what is accepted and appropriate because they infringe upon divisions between groups of people. While my discussion of boundary-crossing focuses upon the American character of Zachary, it is important to note that there are several other characters who challenge strict definitions of race, class, gender, and heteronormativity. There is Ah Fatt, the half- Parsi and half-Chinese convict who is the illegitimate son of a Parsi opium trader and a Chinese boatwoman; Paulette Lambert, the young daughter of a French botanist masquerading as an older Indian woman to gain access to the Ibis; Baboo Nob Kissin, the agent of the ship’s owner, who believes that the soul of his uncle’s widow is being housed in his body and begins to exhibit female characteristics; and Deeti, an Indian woman who escapes the ritual of sati32 when rescued by a man of the untouchable caste, then further breaks the laws of the caste system by living as his wife. Through these stories, Ghosh connects the issues of passing and miscegenation as understood in the United States to other global understandings of race, class, and gender in such ways that encourage a worlding of race. 32 Sati is an obsolete funeral custom during which the widow would throw herself upon her husband’s funeral pyre, effectively immolating herself, or commit suicide in another fashion shortly after her husband’s funeral. 128 The air ducts and peepholes on the Ibis serve as literal access points for the characters into different spaces aboard the ship. These holes are first mentioned at the beginning of the novel: “Then she hit the heavy seas and her timbers were found to be weeping: it fell to Zachary to discover that the ‘tween-deck, where the schooner’s human cargo had been accommodated, was riddled with peepholes and air ducts, bored by generations of captive Africans” (12). In this first description, the holes become a way for the outside—the heavy seas—to enter the ship. When the water leaves the ship, Ghosh’s narrator describes it as “weeping,” a reference to the Africans who made these holes while onboard this same ship during the middle passage. These holes lead Zachary to discover not only a problem in the Ibis’ utility because it is leaky, but also that this lack of utility is a result of conquest, which has caused the defectiveness of the ship in the first place. Though the ship has been repurposed, it bears the traces and marks of its past: As the slave ship becomes a coolie ship, the histories of the indentured labourers will be written on the hold of the ship that contains traces of those older histories of slavery. The depressions made on the wood by the bodies of slaves will now be occupied by other “disposable bodies” of Empire: those of the colonial subjects herded as cattle to islands in need of their labour. (Arora 29) These marks upon the body of the ship tell the story of the ship’s past and in the present, emerge as potential tools for new forms of communication for those aboard the ship, translating trauma into the possibility for intimacy. 129 The chokey hole plays a particularly significant role in fostering such alliances among those aboard the Ibis. As described in this chapter’s introduction, we first encounter the chokey hole through Jodu. Paulette, the French orphan whose mother raised Jodu, also notices the chokey hole when she boards the ship, and her actions mirror those of Jodu: “as she was making her way to the women’s enclosure, Paulette noticed a small air duct, in the chokey’s bulwark; if she stood on tiptoe it as on a level with her eye” (354). Ghosh’s use of nearly identical language to describe Jodu’s and Paulette’s individual encounters with the chokey hole is a metaphor for the kind of intimate reading I am advancing. Jodu and Paulette, who come from two disparate backgrounds but consider themselves like siblings, inhabit different spaces aboard the ship and choose to use the chokey hole as a means of access and communication. This access becomes even more significant near the end of the novel when these two characters use the same air duct to communicate with each other in a moment when such communication is officially denied by the authorities of the ship (469-471, 482-483). Though these areas are meant to be closed off from one another, these characters cannot help but get drawn into these illicit spaces. Looking through the air duct for the first time, Paulette overhears a private conversation and realizes, “she could not only hear what was being said, but understand it too—for, amazingly, the two convicts were conversing in English” (355). The chokey hole provides access from both sides, for not only can Paulette hear what happens inside the chokey, but those inside can also hear Paulette. This leads to a conversation between Paulette and Neel, the topic of which Paulette finds to be “of so intimate a matter upon such a brief acquaintance” (383). As such, the chokey hole and other air ducts are significant not 130 just as access points, but also as tools for coming into contact with other spaces and encountering immediately and intimately the experiences of others. The various incidents in and around the chokey hole exhibit how space and experience is compressed aboard the Ibis, resulting in a shift of scale. The shifting viewpoints of the chokey hole suggest how scale shifts in the literary spaces of the novel. As Nirvana Tanoukhi argues: [T]he discussion about literary globalization has already launched us, however slowly or implicitly, on a disciplinary critique of the very concept of scale, which by necessity moves us away from metaphorical deployments of ‘space’ toward concrete discussions about the materiality of literary landscapes. I suggest that the concept of scale, properly theorized, would enable a more precise formulation of the role of literature, and literary analysis, in the history of the production of space. (600) This critique of scale enables a productive method for examining Ghosh’s novel, especially for the ship itself. The problem of scale is also important to keep in mind when enacting an intimate reading practice; while it is tempting to try to understand all the networks that make up the world, the vast scale of such a project would prove daunting, to say the least. Instead, using the problem of scale to inform our reading, rather than trying to solve the problem of scale provides a more useful critical tool for worlding race by focusing on relationships between individuals. The scale of the novel, however, results not from the vastness of a singular space but rather, the various spaces Ghosh includes in the novel. The Ibis 131 simultaneously navigates and defies these spaces and their boundaries. Though the Ibis maintains certain boundaries through hierarchies, it is also the vehicle for breaking down those very same hierarchies, enabling the characters aboard to challenge socially constructed categories of identity—Zachary becomes second mate by passing for a white gentleman, Paulette is able to come aboard the ship by passing for an older Indian woman who speaks Bengali, Deeti and Kalua escape the restrictions of caste by posing as a married couple, and Neel and Ah Fatt form a deep bond despite their vastly disparate backgrounds. Zachary is yoked to the ship and its passage from the beginning of the novel to its conclusion. Zachary himself declares to Mr Crowle, the captain of the ship, “I’m not going anywhere the Ibis isn’t going” (342), stressing that his navigation of the world and his fate are all entwined with the ship itself. Zachary resists the boundaries of the spaces that the Ibis navigates, which results in Zachary emerging as a worldly character, particularly through his ability to world race as he travels the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. A review of Sea of Poppies, written by Cathleen Schine in the New York Review of Books, hints to the issues of space and scale that Tanoukhi raises in her essay: “Ghosh’s India could never fit on a map; it requires a globe, a spinning three- dimensional sphere extending in every direction at once, where every path circles back to its starting point” (Schine). If this multi-directional globe has a starting point, it would be Baltimore, Maryland. Though the novel begins with Deeti in India, the collective plot of the novel embodied by the ship has, as its beginning, the port of Baltimore, Maryland, from where the Ibis departs with Zachary as part of the crew for Calcutta. Within the fictional world of the novel, the Ibis begins in the United States, 132 traveling to Mauritius, Calcutta, and then heading back to Mauritius. The Ibis, which the narrator describes through Deeti’s perspective as “this vessel that was the Mother- Father of her new family” (348) represents the juxtaposition of two parents, which, rather than creating a third, hybrid figure, maintains the separate and distinct figures of both, resulting in independent genealogies and histories. This separation, I would argue, represents the various narratives of conquest that are embodied aboard this singular ship that was used first for the transportation of slaves during the Atlantic slave trade, then intended for opium (though this purpose never materializes) and simultaneously, other goods, and finally, for coolies. In this way, the novel acknowledges the importance of the Black Atlantic while simultaneously expanding to the Indian Ocean by tracing the routes of the ship and its passengers. Another way of thinking about the problem of scale in relation to the novel is Ghosh as a writer. As a Bengali Indian writing in English, Ghosh seems to advocate not only reading his novel in the realm of world literature or postcolonial literature, but in relation to American literature. Indeed, Ghosh himself stated in an interview, “The writers who have profoundly influenced me and my project are Americans, Melville most of all. To me, Melville is the greatest writer that America has ever produced” (Radio Open Source). He continues with a discussion of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851): Melville has a level of curiosity, a level of engagement with the world that is completely absent from 19th century English writing. Even though England has a long connection with Asia, it is so rare actually to find a believable representation of an Asian in English books. In 133 Melville, on the other hand, you remember in Moby Dick, the 40th chapter, all of the sailors sing in different languages, and then suddenly you discover that this ship, which is a Nantucket whaling ship, actually has forty different nationalities on board, including Indians. (Radio Open Source) This attention to the United States stems, interviewer Christopher Lydon notes, from Ghosh’s project “to recapture the cosmopolitan vision of the American” (Radio Open Source), which Ghosh sees as embodied by Melville and, I would argue, is solidified in Ghosh’s novel through the character of Zachary. Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies translates the whaling ship of Moby Dick into the Ibis, where the location of the story shifts, but the issues being explored—race, language, nation, empire—remain the same, but on a larger scale. Both Zachary and Ishmael help the reader navigate the worlds of their respective novels, yet the comparison is complicated through Zachary’s classification as black, his sense of kinship with the lascars, and his move to pass for white. Even though Zachary’s racial identity is a result of U.S. constructions of racial difference, his presence on the Ibis, which not only holds people of various backgrounds, but also traverses the globe, expands U.S. racial formations to a larger global scale. This larger scale, in turn, informs Zachary’s own actions, which are no longer solely informed by the fixed geography of the United States. Ghosh’s engagement with Moby Dick through writing Sea of Poppies emerges as Ghosh’s own worlding of Melville. In writing Sea of Poppies and attributing part of his inspiration to Melville and Moby Dick, Ghosh highlights the productivity of a worldly reading practice applied to U.S. literature. If Ghosh as an author is worlding American texts, and if the 134 world is a multi-directional exchange of relations, then our own worldly reading of Ghosh’s novel, and particularly the character of Zachary, allows us to return to the United States with a deeper, more worldly understanding of U.S. literature, race, and identity. Ghosh’s novel invites truly comparative study of racialization by showing how the various geographies depicted within the novel are intimately tied through the course of the ship itself. Reading Between the Color Lines: Zachary and the Worlding of Race As the son of an enslaved black woman and her white slave master, Zachary symbolically embodies the ship’s history as a slave ship. Zachary functions as the reader’s access to a figurative chokey hole into the world of the novel because his experience with the languages and cultures of the wide cast of characters most closely mimics our own sense of disorientation. Through Zachary, we can enter spaces that would normally be inaccessible—not just the space of the Ibis, but also the various historical realities that Ghosh represents simultaneously in different locales. Crane discusses how the Ibis’ travel past the Black Atlantic challenges social constructs of race and identity, calling for the need to rethink such categories: Only beyond the borders of Gilroy’s and Roach’s black Atlantic system, within an alternative oceanic ecology that Deeti’s vision identifies as the Kala-Pani or Black Water, do the monolithic discursive structures of race in modernity start to break down. [….] Beyond the cape, the slave ship becomes a vehicle for the articulation 135 of polyphonic diasporic associations across cultures that overcome but do not entirely erase territorialized forms of identity. (9) Because Zachary is the only character who is aboard the Ibis for the duration of the novel, he also becomes the means through which we, as readers, observe how Ghosh reveals the instabilities of race, diaspora, and identity as Zachary, the ship, and the text travel. As a product of American racial essentialism, both in his identification as black even though he appears white and his desire to hide that perceived blackness, Zachary opens the possibility to use race as a critical aperture to rethink race globally as it informs U.S. racial formations. Zachary’s relationship to the reader is analogous to how Baboo Nob Kissin imagines Zachary to be the reincarnation of the goddess Krishna. While talking to Paulette about Zachary’s worn clothing, Baboo Nob Kissin says, “If avatar is new, how clothes can be old? Height, weight, privates, all must be changing, no, when there is alteration in externalities?” (430). While Baboo’s belief is represented as delusion and also linked to his own perceived transformation as the host for the soul of his uncle’s deceased wife, the characterization of Zachary as the embodiment of another who does not exist within the narrative replicates the reader’s own access into the world of the novel, albeit an uncomfortable one, as he is the product of both miscegenation and master-slave relations. Using Zachary as our avatar allows us as readers to witness the process of worlding that Zachary undergoes, equipping us with the ability to initiate a worldly reading of what we see through Zachary as a means of rethinking American identity. And, as Baboo Nob Kissin points out, Zachary’s inner transformation—for Baboo, into Krishna and for the reader, into a worldly 136 character—begins with an external transformation, beginning with his clothes, then with his social and racial passing, and finally, with his repudiation of the yoke of race upon his identity as worldly and as American. Though Zachary is an American, he holds the status of foreigner aboard the ship and is the product of United States imperialism. Furthermore, as the son of a black enslaved woman, Zachary’s designation as the American (105) becomes literally muddied by race, especially considering the time period of the novel when blacks were denied citizenship in the U.S. and slavery was thriving. Ghosh chooses this particular character to represent Americanness in his novel; rather than representing the U.S. solely as an imperial presence imposing itself upon the world, Zachary reveals that the United States also becomes an object of imperialism through the subjugation of its own people. Zachary is deemed American by the outside world even as he is denied the political status that comes with that designation at home. Furthermore, Zachary, who is a product and object of United States imperialism, decides to pass for white, enabling him to become a subject of imperialism through his eventual elevation to second mate aboard the Ibis. Though being seen as white still has clear privileges outside of the United States, Zachary’s decision to pass, especially within a non-American space, allows Zachary to inhabit the role of imperialist, making race his primary tool for accessing subjectivity in the project of empire.33 33 This is similar to my argument about The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in Chapter One, where I examine the narrator’s imperialistic gestures as expressions that forego his blackness for personal advancement. Johnson’s narrator and Zachary both pass and disavow race in different ways that speak to the complexities of U.S. definitions of race across space and time. However, by the third novel of the Ibis 137 Zachary’s precariousness within both the world of the novel and the world of U.S.-world relations is reflected in his interactions with the other characters aboard the Ibis, especially with the lascars. Ghosh writes: This was Zachary’s first experience of this species of sailor. He had thought that lascars were a tribe or nation, like the Cherokee or Sioux: he discovered now that they came from places that were far apart, had nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese. [….] The Captain declared them to be as lazy a bunch of niggers as he had ever seen, but to Zachary they appeared more ridiculous than anything else. (13) By conceiving of the lascars as a “species of sailor” or “a tribe or nation,” Zachary’s initial understanding of them is not only inaccurate, as he quickly learns, but also based upon vocabulary that is often used for racialized categorizations. Arora also discusses this moment in the text: The novel employs the figure of Zachary […] to introduce the lascars—their language, clothes, foods, and method of functioning as a unit—and this device allows the reader to see these sailors through non-judgmental eyes. They might be as unfamiliar to the reader as they are to Zachary, but this unfamiliarity does not carry negative valence. (28) trilogy, Zachary has fully embraced being an agent of British imperialism, made possible through fully immersing himself in the white side of the racial divide. 138 While Arora is right to identify Zachary as the reader’s point of access to the lascars, to call that introduction “non-judgmental” overlooks Zachary’s classification of the lascars as appearing “ridiculous.” The narration continues Zachary’s reaction to the lascars in even more blatantly racialized terms: How could a man climb a mast in bare feet, swaddled in a length of cloth, like a newborn child? No matter that they were as nimble as any seaman he had ever seen—it still discomfited Zachary to see them in the rigging, hanging like monkeys on the ratlines: when their sarongs blew in the wind, he would avert his eyes for fear of what he might see if he looked up. (14) Zachary relies upon familiar stereotypes of black Americans to describe the unfamiliar lascars and establish his perceived superiority. By comparing them to children and monkeys and exhibiting anxiety about seeing their genitalia, Zachary is projecting the very same racialized language of difference to which he would be subject as a black man in the United States, and using such language to make sense of those who seem foreign. These descriptions immediately follow the Captain identifying the lascars “to be as lazy a bunch of niggers as he had ever seen” (13). The initial difference that Zachary identifies between himself and the lascars is complicated and even further racialized through the invocation of the word “nigger.” Though widely used in a British context as a pejorative term for dark-skinned colonized peoples of the British Empire in Africa and Asia, the specifically American connotations of the term elicits an uncomfortable affinity for Zachary between himself and the lascars. Zachary tries 139 to distance and differentiate himself from the lascars by projecting other familiar vocabulary—the racialized stereotypes discussed above—in order to insist upon his superiority. Rather than relying upon understandings of race based upon blood, which are the very definitions of race that categorize him as black, Zachary privileges appearance over language, how the lascars dress and their physical characteristics over their designation as “niggers.” In so doing, Zachary uses his physical appearance of whiteness, despite his legal classification as black, in order to elevate himself above the lascars, whose appearance becomes more important “than anything else.” Zachary’s use of whiteness as a means of creating racialized difference is a symptom of his being in the world without yet emerging as worldly. Zachary is imposing his American views of racial hierarchy onto the world as a means of negotiating his own discomfort with his own racial and imperialized background. Zachary’s approach to the lascars is an example of what Kaplan describes as a means of solidifying American—in this case, not-lascar—identity. The issue of Zachary’s affinity reemerges when Serang Ali makes Zachary look like a gentleman by dressing him in fine clothes in an attempt to get Zachary promoted to captain. When Serang Ali tells him that all of the lascars want him as their captain, Zachary has a moment of realization: Now, in a sudden, bright flash of illumination, Zachary understood why his transformation meant so much to the serang: he was to become what no lascar could be—a ‘Free Mariner’, the kind of sahib officer they called a malum. For Serang Ali and his men Zachary was almost one of themselves, while yet being endowed with the power to 140 undertake an impersonation that was unthinkable for any of them; it was as much for their own sakes as for his that they wanted to see him succeed. (49) For Serang Ali and the other lascars, Zachary’s transformation becomes a personal victory because they feel a sense of kinship to him. Serang Ali uses the same privileging of physical appearance—specifically, of clothing and grooming—that Zachary previously used to define the difference between himself and the lascars in order to transform Zachary into a gentleman, or malum. The identification is still one sided, however, for Zachary still maintains his superiority according to the hierarchies of the ship. The lascars, too, still maintain a certain degree of difference between themselves and Zachary; the “impersonation” is something that is “unthinkable for any of them” because of their racialized bodies and Zachary is still only “almost” like them. The lascars do not know that Zachary is actually black, but that does not matter because he appears white, allowing him to pass as a “Free Mariner.” Zachary realizes the lascars’ motivation for helping him is, in large part, self-motivated, but decides to play along, showing his development from the prior moment above with the Captain. While in his first encounter with the lascars, he is fixated on creating difference, in this moment, Zachary is beginning to accept a level of kinship, even if it is limited and he maintains a level of distinction, especially when he is with other crew members who outrank the lascars. Immediately following the above moment with Serang Ali and the lascars is one of the few moments when we see Zachary dwell upon his past. Specifically, he reflects on race in the U.S. through a fictionalized encounter with Frederick Douglass: 141 Zachary closed his eyes, and for the first time in many months, his vision turned inwards, travelling back across the oceans to his last day at Gardiner’s shipyard in Baltimore. He saw again a face with a burst eyeball, the scalp torn open where a handspike had landed, the dark skin slick with blood. He remembered as if it were happening again, the encirclement of Freddy Douglass, set upon by four white carpenters; he remembered the howls, ‘Kill him, kill the damned nigger, knock his brains out’; he remembered how he and the other men of colour, all free, unlike Freddy, had held back, their hands stayed by fear. (50) This scene at once describes on a literal level a specific instance of racial violence and on a metaphorical level, the shared experiences of the middle passage (“travelling back across the oceans”). The passage illustrates both a literal and psychological crossing so that travel is suggestive of more than physical movement. Furthermore, the initial description of Douglass’ injuries are generalized and not immediately identified as belonging to Douglass. The narrator describes this scene as a moment of self-reflection for Zachary. It is also the first time we see him meditating on the issue of race in the United States. Another important aspect of this passage is the invocation, once again, of the term “nigger.” In the prior instance above, the Captain uses the slur to identify the lascars and Zachary distinguishes himself from them by privileging appearance. In this moment, however, the slur is used racially to identify blacks. Despite sharing this identity with Douglass, the narrator shows Zachary’s same inclination to separate himself from the categorization that the slur incites. In 142 this case, Zachary uses his status as a free black man, “unlike Freddy,” to distinguish between himself and Douglass. Arora identifies this moment as essentially linking Zachary’s decision to embark upon the Indian Ocean and leave the United States to the legacy of the slave trade, “this history of disenfranchisement on land” (33). Crane also discusses the role of Frederick Douglass in the novel, identifying the incident as an anachronism based upon Douglass’ actual autobiographies: “Douglass serves as both a historical figure in the Atlantic world and an anachronistic metonym for the conceptual foundation on which Ghosh develops his project of postcolonial recovery and revision” (Crane 5). Zachary’s remembering of this moment while he is upon the Indian Ocean reveals that his experience with Douglass will inform how he reads other moments of racial discrimination and violence. Both Zachary’s literal crossing of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and his psychological crossing through a return to the scene with Douglass speak to how colonialism and global systems of labor materially affect how race is understood within and beyond national borders. Furthermore, the narrator states that it is this incident and Douglass’ subsequent comments that provide Zachary with the motivation to leave the United States and sign onto the crew of the Ibis: And he remembered, too, Freddy’s voice afterwards, not reproaching them for their failure to come to his defence, but urging them to leave, scatter: ‘It’s about jobs; the whites won’t work with you, freeman or slave: keeping you out is their way of saving their bread.’ That was 143 when Zachary had decided to quit the shipyard and seek a berth on a ship’s crew. (50) Douglass reveals to Zachary that one’s status as enslaved or free is meaningless to whites, rendering Zachary’s differentiation of himself from Douglass futile in the eyes of white America. While the obvious resonance of Douglass’ words for Zachary is the issue of employment in a country where racial hierarchy dictates all aspects of everyday life, what Zachary is really trying to escape is the erasure of what he believes distinguishes him from Douglass: his status as free. While Zachary remains silent, not just when witnessing the beating, but throughout the entire incident, Douglass’ voice emerges, standing in as a critique of and corrective to Zachary’s silence. Douglass’ words not only fill the silence left by Zachary, but also encourage Zachary to leave the United States, a crucial first step on his journey to achieve worldliness. By juxtaposing Zachary’s realization concerning Serang Ali’s desire to dress him as a malum to Zachary’s flashback to Frederick Douglass, Ghosh not only essentially expands the traditional model of the black Atlantic as Crane describes, but he also shows how black Atlantic memory is recast in an Indian Ocean context. This worlding of Douglass invites feelings of racial kinship and solidarity among subjugated populations that are made possible because Zachary has traveled beyond the Atlantic. The expansion of the black Atlantic not only emerges in the fictional world of Ghosh’s novel, but also in its historical archive. Crane points to recent scholarship on Douglass, which has drawn attention to his advocacy for various oppressed groups: 144 [Douglass’] activism extended far beyond the immediate sphere of the North American abolitionist movement. In the last ten years, scholarship on Douglass has increasingly been focused on his transatlantic and transnational activism, particularly his role in English anti-slavery activities, his advocacy for Irish labor and his travels in the Caribbean. In at least one case, during an 1871 trip to Jamaica, Douglass saw first-hand the conditions of indentured South Asian laborers. [….] In Douglass we see not only the paradigmatic black Atlantic figure, but also the potential for the expansion of Gilroy’s web of associations beyond its heuristic focus on the Middle Passage and its African victims. (7) The fictional Douglass emerges as worldly not only because he understands the intricacies of race domestically and globally, but also because he expands rather than limits the scope of Gilroy’s model of the black Atlantic. What Douglass says, and even what he does not say concerning his lack of reproach towards the other blacks present, even in the face of violence, points to an understanding of the world that he encourages Zachary to pursue. Zachary reads his memory of Douglass and in so doing, repurposes his experience for his current situation, much like how Ghosh repurposes Douglass’ autobiography for a broader scope beyond the Atlantic. Taking the memory of Douglass beyond its Atlantic context to navigate the Indian Ocean demonstrates how Zachary is beginning to world race through his interactions with other racialized minorities. 145 Ghosh’s choice to use Douglass as one model of worldliness early in the novel invites us to rethink how we imagine the United States interacts with the rest of the world; by having Douglass, an enslaved black man who is denied American standing at home, emerge as an example of the worldly American, Ghosh is promoting a new way of negotiating the relationship between United States imperialism and the world. The implications of Ghosh’s novel go beyond understanding the United States as an imperialistic power and how that power affects its presence in and relations with other entities in the world, to interrogating how the “reading” of the United States globally can contribute to our understanding of various issues that are focalized in American literary studies, specifically for my purposes, race and racism. The invocation of Douglass opens the avenue for interrogating how we should reimagine American identity. Couched in Ghosh’s novel is not a critique of Americanness, per se, but rather, what we privilege in the construction of American identity. This critique culminates towards the end of the novel in a moment reminiscent of the scene with Douglass. Kahlua is badly beaten after killing Bhyro Singh, Deeti’s brother-in-law. In this instance, Zachary does speak, protesting the brutality of what he is witnessing, arguing, “surely we can’t let him be flogged for [his choice of wife] while he is in our custody” (468), eliciting the following response from the Captain: ‘I am amazed, Reid, that you of all people—an American! —should pose these questions. Why, what do you think would happen in Maryland if a white woman were to be violated by a Negro? What would you, or I, or any of us, do with a darkie who’d had his way with our wives or sisters? Why should we expect the subedar and his men 146 to feel any less strongly than we would ourselves? And what right do we have to deny them the vengeance that we would certainly claim as our due? No sir…’ The Captain rose from his chair and began to pace up and down the cuddy, as he continued: ‘…no sir, I will not deny these men, who have served us faithfully, the justice they seek.’ (468) The Captain reinforces Zachary’s identity as an American, believing that as a result, Zachary will not only understand, but also be complicit in the brutality that is occurring. Of course, the Captain believes Zachary is white and as such, plays into the widespread white fear of miscegenation in an attempt to appeal to him. By using miscegenation as a means of explaining the gravity of breaking caste in an Indian context, the Captain not only analogizes the two offences, but also reinforces the identification that Zachary feels towards Kalua through their shared status of “darkie.” Zachary’s identification with Kalua as racially different from himself, however, does not cause the adverse reaction that it had in previous moments. Rather, the implicit association of the present situation with the memory of Douglass provides Zachary the opportunity to speak when previously, he could not. Crane argues, “the global Zachary Reid becomes the surrogate for the Atlantic Douglass in the novel” (6), a becoming that I would locate in this moment of Zachary’s voice emerging like that of Douglass. Rather than thinking of Zachary as a surrogate, though, I would argue that Zachary replicates not the figure of Douglass, but his worldliness, which grants him a greater understanding of how race functions in the world and results in identification with other minority subjects through kinship rather than aversion. 147 While Zachary’s ability to speak is, in part, due to his standing as a seemingly white mate aboard the Ibis, Zachary nonetheless seeks to correct his past mistake of remaining passive, finally using his perceived whiteness not just to advance himself, but also to attempt to aid another in need. Along with his attempt to change the course of Kalua’s fate and in so doing, change how he inhabits American identity, Zachary also makes the choice not to let his racial identity dictate his actions or his sense of Americanness. Towards the end of the novel, various characters discover that Zachary is black. When Mr Crowle confronts Zachary with the ship’s original manifest of its crew, Zachary refuses to let his designation as black dictate the course of his actions: His eyes sought out the piece of paper that he was holding between his fingers, and he was amazed to think that something so slight, so innocuous, could be invested with so much authority: that it should be able to melt away the fear, the apparent invulnerability that he, Zachary, had possessed in his guise as a ‘gentleman’; that it should so change his aspect as to make him appeal to a man who could desire, evidently, only that which he held in his power; that the essence of this transformation should inhere in a single word—all of this spoke more to the delirium of the world than to the perversity of those who had to make their way in it. (493) That a single piece of paper, which emerges as its own text demanding a certain kind of reading, has the same transformative power as changing one’s appearance and demeanor in an act of social and racial passing speaks to the instability not only of the 148 socially constructed categories of class and race, but also of textual representation. Mr Crowle’s misreadings of both Zachary and the ship log stem from “the delirium of the world” that the characters inhabit. This invocation of the world is significant, for it is the world that leads to “the perversity of those who had to make their way in it,” so that simply existing in the world fails to be an adequate way of navigating the world. Ghosh’s examination of the United States and figure of the worldly American emerges in this moment when Zachary makes the crucial distinction between the world, people inhabiting the world, and those, like himself, who challenge the former two in a gesture of worldliness. Prior to this confrontation, Baboo Nob Kissin also comes across the ship’s manifest in a moment that stresses such instability through misreading. He interprets the inscription of “black” next to Zachary’s name as signifying that he is the Dark Lord Krishna’s messenger, unbeknownst to Zachary himself (163). Crane identifies this moment as “a scene of productive ‘misreading’ parallel to that of the Ghosh’s own reproduction of Frederick Douglass” that reveal the shifting categories of race and ethnicity (10-11). Zachary redefines how his memory of Douglass and the inscription of black next to his name on the ship’s manifest should be read. While both events originate in the port of Baltimore—within the national borders of the United States—the Ibis takes them beyond, altering not just the texts’ location, but how they should be read, providing opportunities for rereading as opposed to misreading. In both cases, it is Zachary’s revised approach to and subsequent challenging of racial categories—a “movement away from exclusionary 149 racial/colonial dynamics and the articulation of diasporic hybridity” (Crane 12)—that allow this kind of worldly rereading. Ghosh establishes a link between being worldly and being a good reader; Mr Crowle is not worldly because of his inability to read Zachary and the significance of his designation as black. Zachary responds to Mr Crowle’s threat of blackmail by saying, “Whatever that paper is, it’s not a letter of indenture. Take it to the Captain— believe me, I’d be glad of it” (494). Zachary’s willingness to reveal his racial identity to the Captain and even be “glad of it” (494) signals his shift from simply existing in the world to emerging as worldly. Zachary was yoked to this piece of paper that stated unequivocally his racial identity and it is not until he repudiates its power over him that he is able to emerge as worldly. The ship’s manifest provides a metaphor for the field of literary studies, particularly in an American context, through which Ghosh urges an active mode of reading that seeks first to understand the world, then to navigate the world productively based upon that acquired knowledge. Zachary’s journey around the world, unlike other travelers, is more than a physical journey. Zachary emerges at the end of the novel a character who has become worldly through reading and acting. Conclusion: Sea of Poppies as Disciplinary Critique Though Sea of Poppies is often categorized as postcolonial literature or South Asian literature, reading it instead as a text that worlds U.S. literature allows us to illuminate larger issues of race that go beyond Zachary and the U.S. Each of these different perspectives informs a larger understanding of how race functions in 150 American literature and culture as part of the larger world. Several scholars have recently called for such a de-centering of nation in our studies of American literature, including Wai Chee Dimock, Paul Giles, and Janice Radway.34 Each of these critics has questioned the sovereignty of the United States as a national entity, both politically and as the subject of what we call American Studies. This worldly approach to Sea of Poppies invites a consideration of the novel not only as world literature, but simultaneously, as American literature because of its contribution to an American understanding of race, calling into question the nativist tendencies of canon formation. Reading the novel as participating in while also challenging both these categories allows for the consideration of how other literatures outside of the United States contribute to understanding constructions of racial difference within the United States through foreign encounters that often occur outside of the confines of the nation. Through the character of Zachary, we can examine not only the role of the United States in nineteenth-century imperialism largely thought to be the province of Britain, but also how the little intimacies between characters illuminate the complex constructions of American identity and race as informed by the larger the world. Sea of Poppies opens the avenue for a critical rethinking of our approach to American literary studies, which seeks to break away from the limits of American exceptionalism and insularity that have so informed the field since its inception. In examining how global authors conceive of and represent American identity in relation to empire and race, scholars of American literature have the opportunity to grapple 34 See Dimock’s Through Other Continents and the anthology, edited with Lawrence Buell, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007); Giles’ The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011); and Radway’s 1999 American Studies Association Presidential Address. 151 with these issues in a more worldly context and as a result, achieve a better understanding of race and American literature and culture. While current studies in the field have been concerned with how the United States functions within the world, particularly in relation to questions of imperialism, I want to encourage other scholars to take the example from Ghosh to push that concern even further by advocating for a more worldly approach to our critical practices not only by examining global authors in relation to the United States, but also how these texts have equal authority in informing our understanding of what it means to study American literature. By broadening our scope to the world as a first step, we can achieve not just a greater understanding of how American literary studies fits into the larger context of the world, but also how that larger context then allows us to reexamine the specificities of American identity in the field of literary studies. Taking such a step in our critical approaches to literary studies not only becomes a more productive way of critiquing American imperialism and hegemony, but also of allowing the engagement with multiple readings of the United States on a global scale to inform our understanding of American literature as a whole. It is not until we take both of these steps outside of the physical boundaries of the United States that we, too, as critics, can claim worldliness in our reading and critical practices in the field. 152 Part Three: Queering as Worlding: The Immigrant Narrative in Contemporary U.S. Fiction Chapter Four: Consuming Intimacies and Queer Racialization in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt Indeed, the barely submerged histories of colonialism and racism erupt into the present the very moment when queer sexuality is being articulated. Queer desire does not transcend or remain peripheral to these histories but instead it becomes central to their telling and remembering: there is no queer desire without these histories, nor can these histories be told or remembered without simultaneously revealing an erotics of power. -Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005) For a traveler, it is sometimes necessary to make the world small on purpose. It is the only way to stop migrating and find a new home -Monique Truong, The Book of Salt (2003) Introduction In my previous two sections, I showed how African American characters encounter the foreign in ways that disrupt and extend how we understand minority subjectivity and racial formations domestically. Specifically, Part One features characters who travel outside of the United States only to return with newfound understandings of racial difference and solidarity that help them navigate their racial and national identities. In Part Two, Zachary Reid begins in the United States and travels the globe, carrying with him his country’s definitions of race. In Part Three, comprised of Chapters Four and Five, I continue my investigation of U.S. racial formations by reading two contemporary U.S. novels as immigrant narratives. I argue here in Part Three and throughout the dissertation that examining how minority subjects negotiate foreignness provides a crucial lens into U.S. processes of 153 racialization. In Part Three, decentering the United States emerges as a crucial way of rethinking race, nationality, migration, diaspora, and intimacy. The Book of Salt (2003) by Monique Truong and Monkey Hunting (2003) by Cristina García navigate the world in ways that constitutes various non-U.S. geographies as countersites of immigration: global spaces that explore the realities of U.S. immigration and the Asian diaspora. While the protagonists of these two novels experience their Asianness (and by extension, their otherness) in different ways and locations, their shared marginal status provides an alternative, worldly way of reading the immigrant narrative. Even as these characters subscribe to the social and political ideologies of the dominant culture—democracy, capitalism, colonialism—they quickly learn that these beliefs are unattainable. Through their characters, Truong and García illustrate the impossibility of assimilation and the inadequacies of dominant narratives of migration, colonialism, and racial subject formation. I argue that Truong and García not only show the importance of queerness within narratives of diaspora, migration, and minority subjectivity, but they also queer the form of the immigrant narrative. They do so by not just by featuring queer bodies that circulate beyond their countries of origin (whether by choice or not), and altering the very terrain upon which to investigate experiences of immigration and calling into question its assumed narratives. Furthermore, by insisting on the importance of non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality, both authors revise and extend the tendency to define minority subjectivity solely around racial and ethnic identities and concerns. By queering the immigrant narrative, these novels also queer the liberal promise of 154 progress by undermining its basic principles and providing an alternative definition of progress that does not serve to uphold white, heteropatriarchal, and colonial power. The following two chapters provide my most expansive iterations of worlding race in American literature by focusing on novels whose characters are not U.S. citizens. Their foreign perspectives demonstrate a truly global understanding of race; while they are susceptible to U.S. racialization, they also provide undocumented knowledge cultivated from the little intimacies forged among minority subjects in non-U.S. settings. Both authors take under-explored topics—Truong examines the importance of French colonial subjects for Gertrude Stein’s literary achievements and García explores the chino-cubano diaspora—and shift them from the margins of the story to the center, insisting on their importance to broader U.S. understandings of racial and national identities. I pair these novels because they illuminate the exploitation of racialized labor across continents, bringing together discussions of the Atlantic slave trade and Asian indentureship, and demonstrating how such experiences are crucial for understanding larger global processes of migration, labor, and culture.35 By setting their narratives in foreign locations, both authors defamiliarize American ideas of race and immigration, allowing for a different 35 As Kandice Chuh identifies, these larger global processes are largely driven by capital: “The current moment includes globalized practices of capital that have instituted demographic and immigration patterns in such ways as to prompt deliberate attention to how the ‘national’ articulates to the ‘global’” (Chuh 6). Lisa Lowe writes in Immigrant Acts: “Culture is the medium of the present—the imagined equivalences and identifications through which the individual invents lived relationship with the national collective—but it is simultaneously the site that mediates the past, through which history is grasped as difference, as fragments, shocks, and flashes of disjunction. It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as ‘American.’ It is likewise in culture that individuals and collectivities struggle and remember and, in that difficult remembering, imagine and practice both subject and community differently” (2-3). 155 perspective that complicates the ways in which we understand American literature, American identity, and the place of the United States in the larger world. By observing how the characters read their foreign surroundings in unconventional and even “queer” ways, we, too, adjust our reading practices and are able to trace alternative narratives and histories that were previously obscured, bringing them to the fore of our understandings of U.S. literature, history, and identity. Queering the Immigrant Narrative In recent years, theorists have interrogated the state of queer theory in the twenty-first century and called for its expansion beyond the study of sexuality and sexual preference, which still maintain binaries and often exclude other marginalized identities. The convergence of area studies and queer theory is central to my investigations in the chapters that follow. Like the processes of comparative racialization and worlding race, queer theory is fundamentally yoked to its status as unfixed and ongoing. Thinking about race both globally and queerly reconfigures how opportunities for kinship provide a framework for reading the little intimacies between minority subjects from different vantage points. This section of the dissertation examines how romantic relationships world race by queering racial, gendered, geographical, and cultural boundaries. These two novels illustrate what David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz describe as “an ethical attachment to others” (15) in their introduction to the 2015 special issue of Social Text. The ensuing little intimacies at once reveal existing processes of racialization 156 and change how we can think about race globally and queerly as unbound from geographical or temporal limitations. One place to locate the definition of queer is in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Tendencies (1994). She writes, “That’s one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (8). Sedgwick continues by explaining that while her own usage of “queer” centers “same-sex sexual object choice, lesbian or gay” (8), theorists of color have extended the use of queer to examine “the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses [….] to do a new kind of justice to the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state” (9). More recent scholarship expands this work by bringing together area studies with queer theory. Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz write, “queer studies now more than ever needs to refocus its critical attentions on public debates about the meaning of democracy and freedom, citizenship and immigration, family and community, and the alien and the human in all their national and their global manifestations” (2). In their introduction to the 2016 special issue of QED, Laurie Essig and Sujata Moorti argue for the importance of “queer world making”: [Q]ueer world making must involve not just queer worlds, but queer ideas, queer lectures, and queer methodologies as way of imagining a world beyond hegemonic heteronormativity. […] We must encourage the inclusion of queer ways of seeing in critical race theory, feminism, 157 and postcolonial theory, to name a few, not just to make queer worlds intersectional, but to infuse these fields with queerness. (4) Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel similarly call upon queer theory to engage with other areas of study such as postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and feminist studies in their introduction to the 2016 special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. The authors discuss the marginalization of non-Western epistemologies of queer and identify three possible ways that area studies can inform queer theory in the twenty-first century—a reading of empire that is not limited to British colonialism, a move beyond the Atlantic model in the study of race, and a need to unsettle colonial trajectories by looking beyond Western histories rather than returning to familiar contexts for criticism. This section reads The Book of Salt and Monkey Hunting as queer immigrant narratives to think globally about race through queer diasporas and queer world making. In the United States, racial minorities are always differentiated not just by skin color but also as deviations from sexual norms.36 Many contemporary queer theorists have critiqued the dominance of Western thought and objects as central to queer studies even as we face the realities of globalization in the twenty-first century. Recent scholarship on queer diasporas provides important context for how we might illuminate the complex intersections among race, sexuality, diaspora, and colonial histories. Cindy Patton and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler discuss the subversive potential of the queer body as it traverses officially designated boundaries, allowing for 36 I also discuss the mutually constitutive relationship between racial formations and sexual formations in Chapter Two, where I cite Somerville’s book Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. 158 “intricate realignments of identity, politics, and desire to take place” (3). Gayatri Gopinath continues the investigation into the queer body, arguing for its centrality in the histories of colonialism and racism as “a historical archive” for both individuals and communities, one that is excavated through the very act of desiring the racial Other” (1). These critics point to the ways in which the queer racialized body bears and rearticulates histories of colonialism and racism, particularly when in movement. In reading these novels as queer immigrant narratives that world our understanding of race in the United States, I explore how minority subjectivity is intimately tied to nation-building and understandings of citizenship. As Lisa Lowe argues in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, “Understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized foundations of both the emergence of the United States as a nation and the development of American capitalism” (ix). As a result, the Asian subject, regardless of citizenship or lineage, is forever viewed as the “foreigner-within,” perpetuated by what Lowe calls “a national memory [that] haunts” the United States, rooted in a history of exclusionary laws at home and wars fought in Asia (Immigrant Acts 5-6). Both The Book of Salt and Monkey Hunting engage with Asian/American subjects in their respective historical settings, but also as informed by foreign affairs between the United States and the rest of the world throughout the twentieth century. U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Cuba represent two series of foreign-relation catastrophes on the part of the United States during the Cold War era, which illustrate not only a desire to disseminate American ideas of freedom and democracy, but precisely the failure of that desire. 159 The Book of Salt and Monkey Hunting explore the unfulfilled promises of American democracy and liberalism for minority subjects using countersites of immigration: spaces that replicate the United States outside of national boundaries. The novels as traveling texts portray foreign geographies, providing alternative spaces that stand in for the nation, which problematizes the idea of nation as a stable entity. In The Book of Salt, the Steins’ salon, though not part of the United States in any official or legal capacity, replicates the United States through the habits and beliefs of its Mesdames, who exhibit and perform American modes of racial discrimination. Similarly in Monkey Hunting, the U.S. military bases in Guantánamo Bay and Vietnam are legally American soil because they are under the sovereignty of U.S. law and custom. These locations replicate American practices in foreign settings, including how Asian/Americans are always read as foreign. In so doing, both authors uncover how the United States’ interactions with the larger world are informed by and implicated in domestic assertions of immigrant racialization and foreignness. The racialization of Asian/Americans is intimately linked to reactions to immigration as well as how the United States as a global power interacts with and imagines Asia economically, politically, and militarily.37 37 As Colleen Lye argues in America’s Asia (2004), “By the middle of the twentieth century, the cultural production of the Asian American enabled by U.S. political investments in Chinese national independence still indicated the ongoing intimacy between Asiatic racial form and the contradictions of U.S. globalism, if of a different kind. Where the unassimilable alien had emerged as an effect of misdirected resistances to U.S. economic dependency on transnational migrant labor and foreign markets, the cultural production of the Asian American became a feature of U.S. geostrategic necessity: postwar multiculturalism and the hegemony of a Pax Americana went hand in hand” (10-11). 160 Consuming Intimacies In this chapter, I examine how practices of consumption illuminate larger concerns that arise out of colonialism, migration, and a global system of racialized labor. The Book of Salt is a fictional account of the experiences of Bình, a gay Vietnamese chef who works for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas while they are living in Paris during the 1920s. The majority of the novel follows his time in Paris with occasional flashbacks to his time in Vietnam and his journey on the South China Sea. As Bình navigates different parts of the world—Vietnam, the South China Sea aboard the Niobe, and France—he cultivates various intimacies that illuminate how global understandings of race shift and expand as he travels, including his relationship with Marcus Lattimore, called “Sweet Sunday Man,” an American writer who is passing for white. Bình’s movements around the world illuminate the idea of “queer diasporas”: [A] queer diaspora mobilizes questions of the past, memory, and nostalgia for radically different purposes [than conventional diasporic discourse marked by this backward glance to the past]. Rather than evoking an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history, what is remembered through queer diasporic desire and the queer diasporic body is a post time and place riven with contradictions and violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles. (Gopinath 4) By using Gopinath’s theorization of queer diasporas as a framework, I show how “an erotics of power” (2) permeates the queer little intimacies in the novel while 161 simultaneously showing how those little intimacies world understandings of race, migration, colonialism, and national identity. Reading The Book of Salt as a queer immigrant narrative shows how the novel mobilizes queer diasporas as both “an object of knowledge” and “a critical methodology, a reading practice that responds to queer liberalism and its racialization of intimacy by imagining otherwise, and by providing alternative knowledge and possibilities” (Eng 13). Such an approach revises the binary between nation and diaspora, illuminating how global processes of consumption, food production, and labor maps the uneven routes of racialized, sexualized, and queered bodies, and the intimacies that develop among them. Like Just Above My Head and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, The Book of Salt begins at the chronological end of the story with Bình seeing his Mesdames off for their journey back to the United States: “It had been eleven years since I had made a true ocean crossing. For my Mesdames, it had been over thirty. The ocean for them was only a memory, a calming blue expanse between here and there. For me it was alive and belligerent, a reminder of how distance cannot be measured by the vastness of the open seas, that that was just the beginning” (3). Bình’s crossing of the South China Sea aboard the Niobe is a crucial part of the plot because it is the originary moment of the narrative and the protagonist’s chosen name of “Bình.” As we discover in the final pages of the novel, “Bình” is a pseudonym, a narrative choice that echoes the near invisibility of the Indochinese cooks in Stein’s own writing, as well as an act of resistance that denies Western audiences complete access to Bình’s identity and story. In addition, the novel’s title also has a doubled meaning, for it is also the title of the fictional manuscript written by Stein and about 162 Bình within the novel. The tension between Stein’s manuscript, written in a language that Bình cannot read, and Bình’s opaque narrative in the novel reveals how minority subjects are cast as consumable by Western audiences, a desire that Bình sabotages. Some critics have argued for a degree of affinity between the two romantic pairs, Stein/Toklas and Bình/Sweet Sunday Man, due to their shared marginal status as queer and the gender dynamics present in both relationships. Such readings, however, use heteronormative tropes in order to render these relationships legible, problematically framing such relationships through patriarchal norms of sexuality and domesticity.38 Denise Cruz claims that 27 rue de Fleurus is a “queer domestic household” that allows for “temporary, queer affiliations” between Bình and his Mesdames (61). Wenying Xu similarly argues: “With both Alice and Bình cooking for their lovers, Gertrude Stein and Marcus Lattimore are the beneficiaries of the formers’ labor. Never vice versa. […] Revealed in their culinary and sexual relationship is a congealed asymmetrical power relation that is no different from the hegemonic norm of heterosexuality” (160). Reading the power dynamics of each relationship through domestic tropes of caregiving and cooking obstructs the racial politics that exist in these relationships as mechanisms of maintaining social order.39 Bình is the only character who must labor for all the others, while Stein is the sole 38 As Naomi Edwards writes, “Truong complicates Stein and Toklas’s status as outsiders, as they position themselves as normative against the exclusion of racial and class others” (179). 39 As Y-Dang Troeung notes: “[T]he hierarchy or imbalance of power that Truong calls attention to in The Book of Salt is not so much the one that exists between Stein and Toklas or between Binh and Sweet Sunday Man; rather it is the one that exists between Stein and Toklas on the one hand—white, educated, and privileged Americans—and Binh and Sweet Sunday Man on the other—visually and/or socially marked racial subjects” (120). 163 beneficiary of Toklas’s labor. Furthermore, such an equivalence renders invisible what Eng identifies as the “colonial detour, through the forgetting of both Asia and Africa [….] and the histories of exploitation and domination that unevenly bind Asian indentureship and African slavery to Euro-American modernity” (73-74),40 which allow for Stein to function as the epitome of queer liberalism.41 Eng raises crucial questions for considering how individuals like Bình do not fit into larger progress narratives of queer liberalism and individualism because his existence challenges their very underlying principles. The novel challenges those narratives through Bình and his position not just as a queer and racialized colonial subject, but also as a laborer who, as a cook, literally sustains the Steins. Bình’s employment with the Steins in Paris is a symbolic entry into the United States. Within the walls of 27 rue de Fleurus, U.S. racialization and French colonialism converge and affect how minority subjects occupy the apartment. While the Steins embody queer liberalism, they cultivate their social status by subscribing to and benefitting from Western hierarchies of race, class, and nationality on a global scale. In his article that is part of Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz’s special issue of Social Text, Hiram Perez discusses the politics of race in queer theory and 40 Eng continues: “[W]ithout discounting the radicality of Stein and Toklas in their time, we still need to ask how they are conscripted as the poster children for queer liberalism. What possible pasts and what possible futures must be denied in order for this particular narrative of queer freedom and progress to take hold? […] At a moment when discourses of colorblindness evacuate all racial content in favor of a re- ascendant form of the abstract individual—the liberal human—The Book of Salt insists on a consideration of what remains unassimilable, unrecognizable, and untold in the making of the political and aesthetic realm of Euro-American modernity” (74- 75). 41 Eng defines queer liberalism as: “a contemporary confluence of the political and economic spheres that forms the basis for the liberal inclusion of particular gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before the law” (4). 164 communities: “Queer theorizing more resolutely needs to investigate how dominant Euro-American formations of gay, lesbian, and queer cultures (not only during this era of normalization but also historically) collude with a hegemonic white masculinity” (179). Though Stein and Toklas are queer subjects, their race and class provide them with a degree of mobility and status that is denied to Bình, particularly in the safe space of Paris, which welcomes the Steins despite their sexuality because of their social and artistic clout. Bình’s entry into 27 rue de Fleurus renders him a kind of immigrant, one who will forever be viewed as foreign because of his race. Bình’s migration to Paris contrasts that of the Steins, who have come to Paris by choice to increase their social capital, whereas Bình must leave Vietnam after he is dismissed from his position in the Governor General’s kitchen and disowned by his father because of his homosexuality. The distinction between exile and ex-patriate navigating the same city is indicative of the unevenness of minority subjectivity and experience. While Bình and his employers are queer subjects, their differences across race, class, and nationality draw attention to the ways in which racism and colonialism are intertwined with sexual politics. Bình lives in Paris not as a citizen, but as a laborer, a colonial subject who is forced to leave his homeland because of his sexuality. As such, I examine how the minority body is itself subject to consumption as an object of sexual desire and subject of colonial power. In The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture (2014), Vincent Woodard provides a useful index for how we might think of consumption as a series of metaphoric acts, “which encompass starving, flesh-seasoning rituals, and sexual modes of consumption” (6). While Woodard’s monograph is specifically about U.S. 165 slave culture, his discussion provides valuable critical context to the practice of eroticizing and desiring to consume the racial other. Reading these practices beyond the U.S. plantation is one way Truong’s novel worlds race. Like many Asian immigrants to the U.S., Bình comes to Paris as a foreigner and enters the food industry to survive in a country whose language he does not know. Food emerges as a crucial component to immigrant narratives, not just as a part and means of accessing individual cultures, but also by providing a need for labor that in turn offers opportunities for employment and survival.42 The role of food was especially crucial for the survival of minority immigrants into the United States.43 While food is often associated with community and family, as a mode of bringing individuals together, it also serves as a means for individuals to distinguish themselves from others, as individuals and as members of a particular culture, and even in terms of ethics and values. Specifically, Xu discusses how food deeply informs the nation’s political enterprise concerning immigrants and their families: “Homogenizing immigrants’ and minorities’ foodways was part and parcel of the 42 As the editors of Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader write in their introduction: “One notable gap in the literature on food systems is the relationship of food to labor, especially as it relates to Asian Americans. While social and labor historians have long documented the movement of migrant labor from Asia to work in the agricultural fields in the United States as the beginning of Asian American immigration history, food studies scholars have often overlooked this crucial topic. Instead, Asian American labor is related to food service more than food production, dissemination, and consumption in America. The banality attributed to such persons as “the cook,” “the dishwasher,” “the busboy,” and the “delivery boy” hides the racializing tendencies of such tropes and images.” (Ku, Manalansan, and Mannur 5) 43 As Xu states, “In history the Asian American relationship with food had little to do with the thrill of creation and discovery or even profit (although creation and discovery did take place). It was survival and adaptation that governed the lives of generations of Asian immigrants and their descendants. Food production and service allowed the immigrants to gain a foothold in their adopted country” (Xu 10). 166 project of assimilation” (5). Jennifer Ho discusses the doubled nature of food for Asian Americans who are under pressure to assimilate: “Food is a critical medium for compliance with and resistance to Americanization, a means for enacting the ambiguities of an Asian-ethnic American identity that is already in a constant state of flux” (Ho, Consumption 3). Bình begins working for the Steins as a cook and meets Sweet Sunday Man, who first hires him, then becomes his lover. Bình’s relationships with these American characters rely upon a level of intimacy that must be fed in literal and metaphoric ways. Throughout the novel, Bình negotiates his desire to maintain these levels of intimacy while simultaneously undermining their desire to consume him in ways that deny him consent. Bình sabotages these attempts, first through his role as cook, meant to be solely one of servitude, by controlling what they eat and its effects, subverting the power dynamic through his preparation of food. The Colonial Sensibilities of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas The Book of Salt recovers histories and individuals that are suppressed in larger narratives of modernity, globalization, and capitalism by exploring the relationship between French colonialism in the novel’s 1920s present with U.S. imperialism in the 1970s expressed through the Vietnam War and the politics of U.S. immigration post-1965. Bình’s role as narrator and protagonist forefronts his historical and fictional significance as a queer racialized subject who contributes to an American literary tradition via Gertrude Stein. As several other scholars have noted, the figure of Bình is a fictionalized composite of the various Indochinese cooks that 167 Stein briefly discusses in her various non-fictional works.44 Eng discusses “Bình’s dim presence in the archive” as necessary to “the high modernism exemplified by Stein and Toklas” (Eng 60). Naomi Edwards similarly discusses the “dim presence” of figures like Bình and the real-life servants that inspired his character: “[J]ust as the novel is haunted by the untold stories of Trac and Nguyen, the text is also haunted by its own future […] inevitably inflected with our knowledge of what is yet to come in Vietnam” (169). Though the novel is set in the 1920s and 1930s, it is written and published in the post-1965 moment and is therefore informed by United States immigration politics at home and imperialism abroad. While the Mesdames enter Paris from above as elite subjects, Bình enters Paris from below as a colonial subject, a difference that highlights Bình as exile and the Mesdames as expatriates. That all three characters are queer subjects does not provide any opportunities for solidarity or alliance across race, class, and nationality precisely because the Mesdames subscribe to French colonial and American racial hierarchies. As a racialized, queer laborer, Bình’s status is intimately tied to the expectation that he feeds those who hire him as a cook, both physically and metaphorically. Because the novel is written after the Vietnam War, its memory lingers in the novel’s pages. This haunting is especially clear in Bình’s interactions with The Man on the Bridge, who the reader comes to discover is a young, pre-revolutionary Ho Chi 44 See Naomi Edwards’s “Melancholic Ghosts in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt,” Catherine Fung’s “A History of Absences: The Problem of Reference in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt,” and Wenying Xu’s Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature for discussions of employed Indochinese cooks in Stein’s nonfiction. 168 Minh.45 Such textual clues show that Truong explores not just French colonialism in relation to Vietnam, but also U.S. imperialism in relation to the larger world. Even Bình serves, for his employers, as a stand-in for various other colonial subjects: “And I am but one within a long line of others. The Algerian orphaned by famine, the Moroccan violated by his uncle, the Madagascan driven out of his village because his shriveled left hand was a sign of his mother’s misdeeds, these are the wounded trophies who have preceded me” (19). Despite Bình’s precarious social position as a queer and racialized subject, his ability to navigate his surroundings and “his awareness of imperial epistemologies” (Cruz 357) signal his worldliness in the face of exile and colonial subjugation. Part of this worldliness is understanding his Mesdames’ American sensibilities, their “imperial epistemologies” in such a way that equips him with the necessary knowledge to secure his long-term employment in their household and by extension, his livelihood. Like her protagonist, Truong is unable to escape the larger history of which she is a product, a history of colonialism, war, exile, and racialization. She is reluctantly marked by her country of origin, which is “not a home” (5).46 Herself a Vietnam War refugee, Truong has expressed her ambivalence towards Vietnam as her homeland: 45 William J. Duiker and Sophie Quinn-Judge discuss Ho Chi Minh’s life in their monographs, Ho Chi Minh: A Life and Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years 1919-1941, respectively. Both authors discuss Ho Chi Minh’s employment in various kitchens aboard ships, in the United States, and in the United Kingdom. 46 This language echoes the experience of Roy Williams upon his return to the United States in Langston Hughes’s “Home” in which one’s country of birth is at once foreign and views you as foreign. 169 It’s true that if I met you at a dinner party or on a plane the last place I would want to go with you, conversationally, is Vietnam. It’s because I’m too often dragged there, politely but insistently, by people who barely know me but who know all about the country where I was born and where I had lived during the first six years of my life. I am now 35 years old, which means I have spent more than three-quarters of my life away from that S-curve stretch of land that I bear on my body like a tattoo. (Truong, “Into Thin Air” 2) Truong describes Vietnam as being inscribed upon her body, not just as someone whose appearance invites such inquiries, but also as having the actual geography of the nation—“that S-curve stretch of land”—permanently marking her skin like a tattoo. The correlation between “appearing” Vietnamese and having Vietnam the country as a tattoo on one’s body, a scar, points to the false equivalencies between outward appearance and national identity, as well as the fallacy of racialized assumptions based upon physical markers, which are not inherent like one’s natural physical features, but forcibly inflicted like a tattoo or a scar, the residue of a past marked by trauma. Bình is also caught between two countries, neither of which is quite home, and bears the physical marks of his journey. When potential employers question Bình’s work history, they force him to reveal where his body has traveled: [They] behave as if they have been authorized by the French government to ferret out and to document exactly how it is that I have come to inhabit their hallowed shores. [….] And so, like a courtesan, 170 forced to perform the dance of the seven veils, I grudgingly reveal the names, one by one, of the cities that have carved their names into me, leaving behind the scar tissue that forms the bulk of who I am. (16) Exiled from Vietnam because of his sexuality and treated as inferior in France because of his race and class, Bình bears the routes of his exile upon his body, unable to hide away that history because of his status, made visible because of the “permanent racial tattoo imprinted on Binh’s skin” (Fargione 138). This “racial tattoo” is not just subject to the scrutiny of the French, but to the “two American ladies” (Salt 11) who come to employ Bình. The overt, visually ascribed racialization of Bình—and by extension, Truong herself—is in direct contrast to that of Sweet Sunday Man, who appears white but who the Mesdames desperately want to render visibly black. Stein and Toklas occupy a position of privilege and power with which they ascribe racial difference to Americans and French colonial subjects alike, despite being outside of their country of citizenship. Though the Steins are Americans, their complicity with French colonial attitudes is on display throughout the novel: “I know, GertrudeStein, that that is what Miss Toklas calls me when her anger gets the better of her. Her Little Indochinese? Madame, we Indochinese belong to the French, but you are still Americans, after all. Little Indochinese, indeed” (142). Bình challenges Toklas’s claim on him by distinguishing between French colonial power and American racism. In so doing, he uses the same imperial logic that marks him as a colonial subject in order to deny the Steins’ ownership of him. The Stein’s denial of Bình’s subjectivity because of his race is analogous to the French denial of citizenship based upon his colonial status. 171 Bình’s parallel entries into Paris and 27 rue de Fleurus are conditional upon his marginalization, which he must accept in both spaces for his survival. As Troeung observes, “Although Binh never steps foot in the United States in the narrative, The Book of Salt unmistakably addresses concerns of Asian American identity that relate to, among other issues, the continuing struggle of Asian Americans against exclusion, exploitation, and homogenization or orientalization” (124). By metaphorically extending the United States to Paris, Truong shifts the scale of the American immigrant narrative from one that typically shows the foreigner entering the United States and their struggle to assimilate, to the colonial subject ejected from his homeland accessing the replicated space of the United States as represented by 27 rue de Fleurus. Bình, who struggles with the issues that Troeung associates with Asian Americans, uses his outsider status in order to establish a level of intimacy and, by extension, recognition and equality, with the American citizens in the novel. Part of the imperial logic that attempts to deny Bình his subjectivity is his consumption as a colonial and racialized subject. He is part of “a long line of others” who serve to satiate the appetites of his past employers: “They have no true interest in where I have been or what I have seen. They crave the fruits of exile, the bitter juices, and the heavy hearts. They yearn for a taste of the pure, sea-salt sadness of the outcast whom they have brought into their homes” (19). Bình uses food imagery to describe that which his employers wish to consume. Their hunger for “the fruits of exile, the bitter juices,” however, are one-sided for all of these objects are the results of a traumatic past, which only produces something palatable for the Western colonizer who feeds on the pain of the colonized. Bình recognizes that he is expected to feed 172 his employers with food and “enough pathos and cheap souvenir tragedies to sustain them” and initially plays his part until he is “driven out by [his] own willful hands”: It is only a matter of time. After so many weeks of having that soft, steady light shined on me, I begin to forget the barbed-wire rules of such engagements.[….] I forget how long to braise the ribs of beef, whether chicken is best steamed over wine or broth, where to buy the sweetest trout. I neglect the pinch of cumin, the sprinkling of lovage, the scent of lime. And in these ways, I compulsively write, page by page, the letters of my resignation. (19-20) The language of this passage omits any mention of his employers, suggesting that Bình takes ownership of how he is consumed and the repercussions of not adequately feeding them. When he does not make himself consumable in the ways that his employers desire, the food he produces is similarly affected and less palatable. While Bình is initially willing to partake in the exchange that is expected of him, there comes a point when he refuses to continue. Bình undermines the appetites of his employers, but the consequence is a loss of employment, and he repeats this cycle “compulsively,” revealing the inescapability of this imperial appetite. When Bình begins working for the Steins, he similarly subverts their desire to consume him through his “habit,” which is self-cutting. By infusing his blood into the food he serves his employers, he literalizes the violence of their desires to consume him in such a way that is distasteful. Bình first discusses the ways that bodily secretions end up in the food that is prepared: 173 Most Messieurs and Mesdames do not want to think about it. They would prefer to believe that their cooks have no bodily needs, secretions, not to mention excrement, but we all do. We are not all clean and properly sterile from head to toe. We come into their homes with our skills and our bodies, the latter a host for all the vermin and parasites that we have encountered along the way. (64) Bình then discusses the possibilities for his habit as a way of defying his position: “When placed in such context, my habit is not so bad. I have, of course, thought about it. The satisfaction that could be drawn from it. Saucing the meat, fortifying the soup, enriching a batch of blood orange sorbet, the possible uses are endless, undetectable. But that is an afterthought. I never do it for them. I would never waste myself in such a way” (64). Bình continues his habit under the employment of the Steins even after Toklas confronts him, then goes on to describe how the Steins explain the presence of blood in their food: “They thought I drank, that I could not hold my liquor, that I was sloppy because of it. When I was inebriated and in their kitchen, a sort of knife fight with myself, they imagined, ensued, and they had tasted the aftermath” (71). Bình does not challenge the Mesdames’ understanding of his habit because he “never [does] it for them” but for himself: “It gives me proof that I am alive, and sometimes that is enough. I want to say that it is more complicated than this, but it is not” (65). Bình purposefully denies the Steins knowledge of his motivations for his habit. By letting them believe it is a result of accidental carelessness, he is able to continue his habit for himself and as an act of defiance that forces the Steins to literally consume him on his terms. 174 The ingestion of Bình’s blood bypasses the metaphoric consumption of Bình that the Steins desire. Bình maintains his employment with the Steins because he is able to navigate this desire by establishing a level of intimacy with them through food. Bình describes the most important lesson that his older brother, Ahn Minh, taught him while working in the Governor-General’s kitchen: “[Ahn Minh] knew that to be a good cook I had to first envision the possibilities. I had to close my eyes and see and taste what was not there. I had to dream and discern it all on my tongue. Slowly, gradually, I was able to do just that” (66). Bình then applies this lesson when he works for the Steins: Miss Toklas is a Madame who uses her palate to set the standard of perfection. In order to please her, her cook has to do the same, an extremely difficult feat. Her cook has to adopt her tongue, make room for it, which can only mean the removal of his own. That is what she demands from all her cooks. Impossible, of course, and so eventually they have all had to go. I have stayed this long because I am experienced, qualified, in such matters. (211) The double meaning of tongue as both language and discerner of taste speaks to the doubled expectations of Bình, both as an immigrant who is expected to assimilate while always being deemed foreign, as well as a servant who is expected to provide physical and metaphoric sustenance to his employers. Bình’s ability to navigate “such matters” grants him a degree of longevity in the Stein household. His success as a cook also entails an intimate knowledge of their routines and how different foods affect them: 175 I know when my Madame and Madame wake up in the morning. I know the sounds that come from behind their bedroom door when they think that I am not around. I know the cigars they smoke. I know the postcards that they collect and the women who recline naked on them. I know the old-woman gases that escape from them, and the foods that aggravate them. Brussels sprouts, if you must know. I know the faces of those who are invited to dinner. I know the backs of those who are asked never to return. (144) Bình learns how to manipulate his role as cook to his advantage by garnering this intimate knowledge of the Steins, largely undetected. Bình cultivates his own kind of social capital that functions covertly thanks to his status as a racialized laborer. By understanding the routines and practices of the Steins, especially around food, he is able to resist their subjugation and keep hidden aspects of himself from view even as he is expected to provide his labor and body for Western consumption. “Lovey and Pussy are still Americans, after all.” Bình’s relationship with practices of consumption and their associated labor is quite overt for he is a both a chef and a colonial exile. His class directly informs not only the way he accesses food—as a laborer—but also how food is his means of both literal and financial sustenance directly exposes him to those individuals with whom he involves himself sexually and romantically.47 Bình’s position as servant and cook 47 Cruz argues, “In The Book of Salt, the culinary also offers, at least for ephemeral moments, access to nonnormative communities and intimacies that work against imperial and heteropatriarchal structures” (340). While food does allow for intimacies 176 in the Stein household enables his intimate relationship with Sweet Sunday Man. Living in Paris, both Bình and Sweet Sunday Man leave their homelands because their respective fathers refuse to acknowledge them. In both cases, the denial of legitimacy is not based upon biology. Though Bình’s “Old Man” is not his biological father, he does not disown him until Bình’s homosexuality is discovered. In the case of Sweet Sunday Man, his white father never recognizes him as his son because he is the product of miscegenation. The convergence of Sweet Sunday Man’s ambiguous racial identity and the ensuing fascination on the part of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas invites a re-examination of racial differentiation and hierarchies when considered in a non-American setting and in relation to other racialized individuals who are neither black nor white. In so doing, as Edwards argues, “Truong challenges and queers concepts of diaspora and national belonging” (181). Though Troeung argues that Sweet Sunday Man’s ability to pass affords him a level of social mobility and privilege, these benefits are complicated in his relationships with Stein, Toklas, and Bình, for all three know, or at least suspect, his “true” racial identity.48 As the illegitimate son of a wealthy white landowner and his light-skinned black mistress, Sweet Sunday Man has the ability to pass for white not only due to his physical appearance, but also because of his considerable economic stability: You will tell me that you are southern but that you are not a southern gentleman, that your father owns land, which you will never inherit, between subjects across race, class, and nationality, such relationships remain imbued with hierarchies of power based on those very same axes of identity. As such, food reveals rather than elides existing power dynamics among the novel’s characters. 48 Troeung argues, “Truong suggests in The Book of Salt that the ambiguity of Sweet Sunday Man’s racial status gives him a kind of ability to move between social strata that Binh does not have” (121). 177 that you are a son in blood only. [….] Your mother’s money has paved your way to this city. It first sent you to the north of your America for college. It knew that there the texture of your hair, the midnight underneath the gauze of your skin, were more readily lost to untrained eyes, you say, tracing the line of my collarbone as it rises to meet your shoulders. You are tempted to call it his money, but, when you think about it, it is hers now. She has earned it, fair and square. Squarely on her back, that is, you say, closing my eyes with a lock of your hair. (111-112) It is Sweet Sunday Man’s class standing that grants him access to 27 rue de Fleurus, where Bình first encounters him. Though the setting is Paris, the salon serves as a microcosm of the United States. Though Sweet Sunday Man comes to Paris because he believes the physical markers of race will be less detectable in a non-Southern and non-American setting, but when he enters into the home of the “two American ladies,” such markers become visible once again. The Steins’ fascination with Sweet Sunday Man reflects a larger culture that sexualizes black men. The Steins plan for Bình to seduce Sweet Sunday Man under the guise of food and in so doing, confirm that he is black. As Perez writes, “This white desire for a black male body, alternately manifested as love, disgust, fear, and murderousness, resides at the heart of U.S. sexual cultures, straight and queer” (185). In wanting to reveal that Sweet Sunday Man is black, the Steins divulge their fixation on what Woodard calls the “delectability of the black person” (18). In their mission to uncover Sweet Sunday Man’s racial identity, the Steins deploy the social 178 consumption of the racialized body as well as the racialization of queer intimacy. Perez continues: “The ambiguities of brownness function to unburden fantasies of black sexuality from their troubling histories; those same fantasies, and new ones, may be revisited on the brown body” (185). The Steins rely upon the brown body to discover the black body in order to fulfill their own fantasies of racialized sexuality and consumption while simultaneously seeking to maintain racial hierarchies as defined in the U.S. When Sweet Sunday Man arrives in Paris and the Steins’ salon, his racial passing is intimately tied to his gastronomy. Doris Witt identifies the association of food with racialization: “appetite would betray him in the end; at the dinner table the truth of his racial identity would inexorably come out” (4).49 Stein relies on this same logic when proposing that they invite Sweet Sunday Man to dinner: “The tendency to equate racial features with gastronomic expressions is so persistent that a person’s race is commonsensically equated with what he or she ingests” (Ku, Manalansan, and Mannur 1-2). The Mesdames conspire to uncover Sweet Sunday Man’s racial identity and Stein proposes inviting him to dinner: “GertrudeStein, too intrigued to be offended by your disregard, wanted to invite you immediately to dinner and examine you over some braised grouses. Miss Toklas knew that GertrudeStein’s menu choice had little to do with the availability of game birds during the month of December. For GertrudeStein, it had more to do with the hunt” (186-187). The grouse is a game bird, 49 In the prologue to her monograph Black Hunger: Soul Food and America, Witt discusses comments made by Fuzzy Zoeller, a veteran golf player, concerning what Woods should serve at the championship dinner after Woods won the U.S. Masters tournament in 1997. Zoeller is quoted as saying, “That little boy is driving well….You pat him on the back…and tell him not to serve fried chicken next year. Got it? … Or collard greens or whatever the hell they serve” (Witt 3-4). 179 historically hunted by members of the upper class for sport. In this passage, the grouse serves two purposes. First, the grouse is a culinary dish often reserved for special occasions and preferred by members of the elite. The dish speaks to the taste of a certain social class, which implies an ability to discern such class by observing the bird’s consumption. Second, grouse is tied to an upper class sport such that hunting grouse is a metaphor for hunting Sweet Sunday Man not just to reveal his racial identity, but also speaks to the Steins’ desire to consume him. Underlying what Stein plans to serve, of course, is what she plans not to serve—food that is associated with blackness, what Witt refers to in shorthand as “chicken and greens” (4). This seemingly mundane choice—what to serve for dinner—discloses the ways in which food is used not only to create taste as a precondition to various identities, but also to discern whether an individual is indeed posing—or in this case, passing—as a member of a group to which he or she does not “belong.” For Toklas, however, the serving of the braised grouses would also reveal the Mesdames’ motivations and their associated assumptions about the correlations between consumption and racial identity, undermining the purpose of the dish before it has the chance to be consumed: Miss Toklas decided that they should not stray from their usual routine. They would invite you to the next Saturday tea but nothing more. Nothing should appear as if it had changed. Everything, of course, did once my Mesdames had their eyes on you, Sweet Sunday Man. Miss Toklas was delighted when you approached her that 180 following Saturday with your inquiry for a cook. Such a convenient confluence of self-interest, she thought. (187) Bình provides his own account of this very exchange much earlier in the novel: [Y]ou whispered to Miss Toklas that you were looking for a cook. You accompanied my Madame into the kitchen, bestowing upon her all the while compliments and congratulations for the composition of her tea table. The cakes are almost as sublime as their settings, you said. […] Leaning in, you explained in a conspiratorial tone that some friends are visiting and that you want to host a dinner party in their honor. (37) Sweet Sunday Man subverts the efforts of Toklas and Stein through his own ability to manipulate food and its associated meanings for his own purposes. He uses the same vehicle meant to discern his “true” identity and turns Bình, the preparer of that food, to his advantage: “Miss Toklas intended that I be an offering to you, a little mouse who could enter your kitchen, invited but otherwise unnoticed. From there, I could examine its cabinets and shelves and report their contents to the two curious Mesdames back at 27 rue de Fleurus” (189). However, it is Stein’s cabinets and their contents that Bình reports to Sweet Sunday Man. As is clear by the novel’s end, Sweet Sunday Man uses Bình to access Stein’s writings, and he gains that access by constructing a particular appearance tied not just to race, but also to class and taste via food. Stein and Toklas first become suspicious of Sweet Sunday Man’s racial identity for two reasons: first, because they do not believe he is a writer and second, because he abruptly leaves a conversation between Stein and Paul Robeson: 181 They saw your hands and immediately knew that you are no writer. Too clean and well-groomed, they thought. Writers rarely have clipped nails. They tend to use their teeth. Too smooth and callus-free, they noted. You are not a laborer either, they knew. Yes, I know that they could have concluded that just from hearing you speak, but my Mesdames are in this way like me. They never assume that words can tell them the whole story. But, Sweet Sunday Man, it was not your hands that first give you away. It was your back. GertrudeStein saw it twice during your first visit to 27 rue de Fleurus. It was such an unexpected sight because those who gather around GertrudeStein never depart while she is in midsentence. Never. (186) The Mesdames use bodily markers in order to determine what he is not—a writer—in such a way that evokes the ways in which bodily markers are used to determine race. They believe that Sweet Sunday Man’s physical characteristics betray that he is covering up his “true” occupation, leading them to deduce that he must be hiding other aspects of his identity through purposeful deception, “a man who makes his living by hiding himself away, [Miss Toklas] thought” (187). Sweet Sunday Man’s sudden departure raises suspicions concerning his racial identity. Toklas explains: “Maybe it is Robeson who is the subject that Lattimore has no interest in, or maybe Lattimore has too much interest and does not want to let it show” (188). Robeson’s fictional presence in the text not only serves as an explanation for the Mesdames’ suspicion that Sweet Sunday Man is black, but also as a means of exposing the 182 insidious racism of the two women, racism that is fundamentally yoked to their Americanness: “Is Lattimore a Negro?” is what they, in the end, want to know. My Mesdames tell me that they just want to be absolutely sure. All these years in France, you say, and Lovey and Pussy are still Americans, after all. Of course, they are, Sweet Sunday Man. Of course, they are. (189) The Mesdames’ racism is not contained by the geographical boundaries of the United States. Despite being in Paris for an extended period of time, they “are still Americans,” a national designation that signifies their anti-black racism. While Sweet Sunday Man seems somewhat surprised by their fixation, Bình is not. In Bình’s account of the Mesdames’ conversation concerning Sweet Sunday Man’s abrupt departure from Stein’s conversation with Robeson, both women provide an account of Robeson’s words by using a bastardized version of black vernacular, meant to mock Robeson and entertain the two women: My Mesdames looked at each other, and their laughter rose up and consumed them. It climbed the walls, turned the corner, and followed me as I walked back into the kitchen. Malice, I was afraid. On second thought, that was not what I heard. Their laughter was not configured in that way. I know malice well, and it is a more meticulous, laboriously constructed thing. Theirs had a wormy center, a now-and- then upkeep. Unsettling to hear all the same. Unsettling because such 183 things have no natural barriers, nothing that can contain their spread. Like my Mesdames, they can be born elsewhere and then taken abroad. That is how they seed. That is how they grow. (188-189) Bình points to the unsettling nature of the Mesdames’ racism, which he identifies as such because it is impossible to “contain.” Bình’s language especially resonates in light of the U.S. policy of containment during the Cold War era and specifically during the Vietnam War, a policy that not only failed as a military tactic, but also as a political ideology. The way that racism circulates in the larger world—in this particular case through the physical movement of the Steins to Paris—is put in contrast to the fear of the spread of communism, with the implication that the former is the true threat to peace, justice, and democracy. Queer Desire, Queer Reading Through the juxtaposition of Bình, whose is immediately identified as “Indochinese,” and Sweet Sunday Man, who is passing for white, the novel explores the equally harmful effects of overt racialization and racial indeterminacy as methods for making minority bodies legible. Both Bình and Sweet Sunday Man experience moments of invisibility—Bình because of his social status and Sweet Sunday Man because his blackness is not readily identifiable. Sweet Sunday Man strives for that invisibility as a means of successfully passing while Bình’s invisibility is that of servitude. However, Bình also uses his invisibility to his advantage: After years of the imposed invisibility of servitude, I am acutely aware that I am being watched, a sensitivity born from absence, a grain of 184 salt on the tongue of a man who has tasted only bitter. [….] I looked up, and I saw you standing next to a mirror reflecting the image of a wiry young man with deeply set, startled eyes. I looked up, and I was seeing myself beside you. (37) The taste of salt invoked in this passage echoes Bình’s earlier description of his employers, who “yearn for a taste of the pure, sea-salt sadness of the outcast whom they have brought into their homes” (19). The “sensitivity born from absence” also invokes Anh Minh’s lesson about needing to imagine how food tastes in its absence in order to construct a dish successfully and ensure continued employment. In each instance, the absence is associated with the conditions of racialized labor. In the earlier moment, it is the sadness of unbelonging because of one’s servitude and in the second, it is the invisibility associated with that servitude. In this second passage, Sweet Sunday Man’s gaze intrudes upon Bình’s invisibility and gives him the opportunity to imagine a different kind of relationship that transcends his position as a cook and colonial subject. Bình does not choose to be invisible, but he is able to use that invisibility to gain access to spaces and information that would normally be denied. In so doing, he challenges the social structures that denied him access in the first place, destabilizing the foundations that uphold such hierarchies and institutions, and repurposing them for his own gain. Bình is not only aware of what is happening around him, but as this instance shows, he is able to manipulate what he sees and knows in order to alter the course of social interactions, leading to his relationship with Sweet Sunday Man. Bình’s mode reading is not only subversive, but specifically, queer: both his position as a servant and his queer racialized body 185 provide the means to advance his reading of the scene—“I was seeing myself beside you”—that ultimately eclipses social, economic, and national hierarchies as illustrated by the ensuing intimate relationship between Bình and Sweet Sunday Man. When Bình first meets Sweet Sunday Man, he is torn between his desire and his experience, which has taught him that love cannot overcome his status as servant. When Miss Toklas first tells Bình that Sweet Sunday Man is looking for a cook, he says, “I had no hope so I had no suspicion. I looked at the name on the card and saw nothing there but a fine pair of boots for winter” (38). However, when they meet the following day, Bình cannot hide his desire: Your French was flawless but with a slowness to its delivery, unctuous and ripe. I wanted to open my mouth and taste each word. “Interview,” though, slapped me in the face. The word was a sharp reminder that I was a servant who thought himself a man [….] I followed you up four flights of stairs, and with each step I was a man descending into a place where I could taste my solitude, familiar and tannic. (40) In describing his desire through metaphors of consumption, Bình mirrors how the Steins and his other employers have rendered him consumable and desirable as a racialized object. He longs to experience the pleasure of taste that is consistently denied; “the fruits of exile” (19) that he produces do not bring him the pleasure that it brings to Western audiences. Similarly, his status as servant denies him the pleasures of tasting what he cooks, leaving only the taste of solitude. Bình interweaves the events leading up to his relationship with Sweet Sunday Man with memories from his time working in the Governor-General’s household with 186 his brother, Anh Minh. During his time employed there, Bình has a romantic relationship with Chef Blériot, the discovery of which leads to his exile: “Madame is a snob but not a prude. She did not care about the relations of two men, just as long as they were of the same social standing and, of course, race” (132). The memory of the racial politics in his previous relationship haunt his current desire for Sweet Sunday Man, and as he imagines the dinner that Sweet Sunday Man has hired him to prepare, he also envisions the unknown dining companion: “I make a mental list of the ingredients for the dinner that I will cook and that you and someone else will eat. I was expecting a much larger party. Your French, though, was clear, and even I could see that your garret would not hold more than two or three comfortably for a seated dinner” (75). Through his planning of the menu, he plays out the seduction that he imagines between Sweet Sunday Man and his unknown companion: “The figs and the port I will place in an earthenware jug “to get to know each other,” as my oldest brother would say. Anh Minh, though, did not teach me this recipe. [….] Twelve hours will be sufficient for a long and productive meeting. By then the figs will be plump with wine, and the wine will be glistening with the honey flowing from the fruit” (76-77). Bình again inserts his brother into the narrative as a reminder of the shame he brought to him and his father when his affair with Chef Blériot was made public, yet he continues his narrative of seduction through the planning of the meal over four pages, resisting the knowledge that his past has taught him concerning the ramifications of queer interracial intimacy. After he finishes describing the meal and its preparation, Bình imagines the eating of the meal and the ensuing gastronomic and sexual satisfaction: 187 My departure will signal that intimacy has joined the party. Civility has called it a night. You two can now dispense with the forks, knives, and spoons. Your hands will tear at an animal whose joints will know no resistance. The sight of flesh surrendering, so willing a participant in its own transgression, will intoxicate you. Tiny seeds from heat- pregnant figs will insinuate themselves underneath your nails. You will be sure to notice and try to suck them out. You will begin with each other’s fingers. You will end on your knees. (79-80) This imagined scene, while occupied by Sweet Sunday Man and an unknown companion, is a clear projection of Bình’s own desires. Bình craves not just sexual satisfaction, but the ability to ingest what he has cooked for others. His sexual desire mirrors the desire to have access to the foods he makes, not just in their preparation, but in their consumption. The imagery of the duck, “an animal whose joints will know no resistance,” exhibits the violence with which his employers feed on his trauma in order to sustain their racial and social superiority. He imagines being able to feed on the duck as “a willing participant” rather than someone who must perform their racial and sexual politics as a mode of survival. When Bình’s desires are realized—he eats the dinner he has prepared with Sweet Sunday Man and consummates their relationship—he assumes that their relationship will not extend past that evening, but represents the experience as an equal exchange: “Last night was freely given, I tell myself. Pleasure for pleasure is an even exchange. Lust for lust is a balanced scale” (83). However, when he feels a roll of cash in his pocket, he does not investigate and instead, takes it as a sign that Sweet Sunday Man has paid him for his 188 culinary and sexual services, again relegating him to the status of servant. This repeats the “slap in the face” from their first interview, and Bình once again feels like a fool. However, he eventually takes the money out of his pocket and discovers a note inviting him to dinner again the following Sunday. The ensuing relationship between Bình and Sweet Sunday Man—their little intimacy—is forged through their shared racialization, a discovery made possible through consensual consumption as the fulfillment of mutual desire. Sweet Sunday Man’s constructed identity serves to advance his goals in Paris, in the Steins’ salon, and in the larger world. In the privacy of Sweet Sunday Man’s garret, however, away from the Mesdames and the rest of Parisian society, Bình and Sweet Sunday Man not only forge their physical and romantic intimacy, but also are able to suspend the limits of race and class—albeit temporarily—in racial solidarity over their shared meals. However, it is only inside those rooms that the two lovers are able to foster their kinship. After Sweet Sunday Man reveals his racial and family history to Bình, he reflects upon how Sweet Sunday Man navigates Gertrude Stein’s salon: Sweet Sunday Man, I marvel at the way that you can change from room to room. I envy the way that you carry yourself when you are in the studio, surrounded by the men who think of you as one of their own. […] You, Sweet Sunday Man, take full advantage of the blank sheet of paper that is your skin. You introduce yourself as a writer. You tell stories about a family that you do not have, a city in which you have never lived, a life that you have never fully led. (150-151) 189 Sweet Sunday Man’s ability to pass is a stark contrast to Bình’s racially marked body and by extension, Truong’s “S-curve” tattoo. In addition, while Bình describes his body as bearing the marks of his past, Sweet Sunday Man’s skin obscures that past in its indeterminacy. Bình identifies the racial performance that Sweet Sunday Man reserves for the salon and the outside world, one that does not hold up within the confines of the garret when the two are together. Xu reads this moment as Bình being envious of Sweet Sunday Man’s ability to pass: “Truong makes Lattimore less a villain than he could be by having him reveal his history to Bình, exposing his vulnerability to his lover. [….] Bình’s envious marvel at his lover’s successful passing only deepens his own pain and feeling of alienation” (Xu 132-133). Xu’s reading attributes Bình’s envy to Sweet Sunday Man’s racial capital: not only does he appear white and therefore, grant him access to various spaces and social circles, but his almost-whiteness also grants him economic prosperity. However, Bình’s envy is short-lived and he quickly challenges Sweet Sunday Man’s purported superiority. As Bình continues his silent address to Sweet Sunday Man, his envy quickly gives way to a declaration of their likeness: You are in the end a gray sketch of a life. When you are in the studio, I see your stance, its mimicked ease and its adopted entitlements. When we are together in your garret, I recognize it as an assumption that you try to rid yourself of, shaking it free from where it clings to your body. In there, in the only rooms in this city that we in truth can share, your body becomes more like mine. And as you know, mine marks me, announces my weakness, displays it as yellow skin. It flagrantly tells 190 my story, or a compacted, distorted version of it, to passersby curious enough to cast their eyes my way. [….] To them, my body offers an exacting, predetermined life story. It cripples their imagination as it does mine. (151-152) Bình defiantly asserts that he and Sweet Sunday Man are alike despite racial, social, and economic disparities. While Xu differentiates between Bình’s body, which he identifies as “an antitext” that robs him of his humanity (Xu 134), and that of Sweet Sunday Man, who “take[s] full advantage of the blank sheet of paper that is [his] skin. (Truong 151), such a reading overlooks the subversive nature of Bình’s embodiment: “While Binh’s inability to function in French enables those around him to stereotype him as an ignorant laborer, the stereotype of assumed ignorance also permits Binh’s defiance to go undetected, so blinded are his employers by their own sense of superiority” (Peek 4). Bình’s defiance also extends to his status as narrator. Though Bình is addressing Sweet Sunday Man in the passage above, he never says the words out loud because they are meant for the reader. Bình makes similar narrative gestures throughout the novel, especially in his commentary on the Mesdames. In so doing, Bình is not only centering his marginalized voice in telling a story, one that is part of the American literary archive, but also withholding that story from the American characters in the novel so that it, too, goes undetected. Bình uses his queer reading practice once again when he first sees Stein’s books, a moment that further illustrates the parallels between the passing body and the racially marked body. While the two are in his garret, Sweet Sunday Man shows Bình various copies of Stein’s work: 191 I see a spine covered in flowers, one in the yellow of banana peels before they are freckled by the sun, one in the gray of my mother’s best áo dài. I pick up a book wrapped in the blue of a Bilignin summer sky, and I leaf through its pages. Like rice paper, I think. “It’s vellum,” you say, as you try to take the book from my hands. “Vellum?” I repeat. Paper resembling the skin of a calf, you explain with hand gestures and playful caresses against my own. I gladly give the book back to you. “Only five,” you tell me with the outstretched fingers of your right hand, “deluxe copies were printed.” Words printed on skin, I am still thinking. (145) Bình associates the book’s pages with skin, alluding to his prior description of his past as “scar tissue” (16) as well as Truong’s own identification of Vietnam as a kind of tattoo. Though Sweet Sunday Man is the one whose skin is likened to a blank page, Bình, too, has meaning inscribed upon his body based upon his non-white skin. In addition, the use of food imagery to describe the notebook—the spine “the yellow of banana peels” and the pages “like rice paper”—are suggestive of the notebook that Bình eventually steals for Sweet Sunday Man, which he discovers uses him as its subject . Stein produces literary works for consumption, but writing about Bình without his consent extends that consumption beyond the object and to the human. These metaphors come together most overtly in Stein’s manuscript that Bình steals 192 for Sweet Sunday Man. When he takes the notebook out of the cupboard, he decides to look through it before handing it over to Sweet Sunday Man, despite not knowing how to read English: I return to my room, close the door, and open the notebook. I see inside an unbroken string of words. My eyes scan them for ones that I may know, that I may recognize, like the face of a brother in the blur of a passing crowd. No, nothing, I think. Then I see the word “please”—one of the few English words that Sweet Sunday Man has taught me—and I see it again. I turn the page and “please” is there as well. [….] My index finger jumps from “please” to “please.” Here…it is a question. There…it is a response. Here…it is an act, and there…it is a plea. I am following a story line that I may be alone in finding, but for an instant I tell myself that I, like Sweet Sunday Man, am reading my Madame’s writings. (214) Like in the earlier moment when Bình first sees Sweet Sunday Man in the Steins’ salon, here, Bình enacts queer reading, which results in the potential for alternative knowledge production. The manuscript’s title, “The Book of Salt,” is of course identical to that of Truong’s novel, yet each book’s pages tell remarkably different stories. Bình’s process of claiming his story reflects this process of overwriting and preservation. Once he finds out that he is the story’s subject—“I turn the page, and I see there the word ‘Bin.’ […] I find my American name written again and again on the following pages as well (214)—Bình’s surprise and panic quickly give way to 193 defiance and asserting ownership: “I did not give you permission, Madame, to treat me in this way. I am here to feed you, not to serve as your fodder. I demand more money for such services, Madame. You pay me only for my time. My story, Madame, is mine. I alone am qualified to tell it, to embelish [sic], or to withhold” (215). Bình distinguishes between his role as cook and Stein’s co-opting of his story for her own profit for which he is not compensated. Bình no longer provides sustenance just in his role as a chef. In using Bình as the subject of her notebook, Stein also consumes him “as fodder” in her writing, a narrative made possible through the various ways that Bình’s queer racialized body is subjugated to violence, and that violence feeds Western audiences from Bình’s individual employers to the global readership of Stein’s literary works. For the Steins, Bình’s former employers, and even Sweet Sunday Man, it is not enough that Bình sustains them through food; they also desire his history and his stories. Bình’s queer diasporic body emerges as a colonial archive sought after by the Americans in the novel in order to be consumed, a way of making Bình’s otherness reinforce their colonial, racial, national, and social hierarchies, and providing a source of economic and literary capital. Once Bình is in possession of the notebook, he decides to give it to Sweet Sunday Man, fully aware that he is the subject. He uses his mode of reading in order to claim the story as his own, rendering the story his to give away: “Here, Sweet Sunday Man, here. This notebook may belong to my Madame, but the story, it belongs to me. Look, it has my name all over it. Here and here and here” (215). What began as a plan to steal from Gertrude Stein for his lover transforms into a radical transformation of the story itself, from one that Stein appropriates without Bình’s 194 consent, to Bình’s recovery of that story to serve his own purposes, undermining Stein’s original intention to circulate the story to a specific Western audience for consumption. Bình rejects his passive role in the story and asserts his agency: “A story is a gift, Madame, and you are welcome” (261). Troeung argues, “The gift, then, is the story of Binh’s intimacies, secrets, and memories that he gives, not to Stein and Toklas, but rather to his imagined community of the underclass, the long line of servants, migrants, and queer exiles who have preceded him through the master’s door and who have laid claim to this gift in the past” (Troeung 130). By recasting the notebook as a means of fostering solidarity among this “underclass,” Bình undercuts Stein’s exploitation of his story, reclaiming it and passing it onto Sweet Sunday Man as another marginalized subject who the Steins deem racially inferior. Bình agrees to steal the notebook for Sweet Sunday Man in exchange for a photograph of the two of them. Once Sweet Sunday Man receives the notebook, however, he betrays Bình, vacating his apartment in Paris without fulfilling his promise, leaving only the receipt for the photograph, the cost of which has not been paid in full, and a brief, hastily written note: “Bee, thank you for The Book of Salt. Stein captured you, perfectly” (238). The chapter ends with Bình narrating how he imagines the events leading to Sweet Sunday Man’s abrupt departure, purposely devoid of his own reaction to the betrayal. Instead, the narrative shifts to Bình’s time at sea and his confession that he has withheld his real name, not just from the other characters he encounters upon leaving Vietnam, but also the reader. After discovering Sweet Sunday Man’s note in his abandoned garret, Bình reveals that he adopted this name when he was at sea en route to Paris and speaks directly to the reader: “I never 195 meant to deceive, but real names are never exchanged” (243). By following Sweet Sunday Man’s betrayal with one of his own, Bình rewrites the assumed narrative that relegates him to naïve victim. That Sweet Sunday Man, the Mesdames, and the reader do not know Bình’s real name destabilizes any attempt to know Bình’s life and story, as told by Gertrude Stein in her manuscript and as narrated by Bình in the larger novel. By revealing his narrative as unreliable in any conventional sense, Bình queers not just the narrative itself but also how we as readers need to approach the text. By looking beyond Bình’s narration as simply unreliable and queering our own reading method, we can see how the novel worlds our understanding of race in the United States insofar as its relation to colonialism, diaspora, exile, and a global system of labor. Unable to afford the remaining balance for the unwanted photograph with Sweet Sunday Man and unable to convince the photographer to sell him a different photograph that he actually wants, Bình claims a picture of his Mesdames, clipped from a newspaper, instead: “This photograph of [GertrudeStein] and Miss Toklas, the second of two that I have from that day, was taken on the deck of the SS Champlain. It captures my Mesdames perfectly. I am over there, the one with my back turned to the camera. I am not bowing at GertrudeStein’s feet. I am sewing the button back onto her right shoe” (261). Bình mirrors Sweet Sunday Man’s language concerning the stolen notebook when he describes the photograph, literally claiming the role of reader. In so doing, he inverts his role from a passive and unknowing subject to be consumed by Western readers, to an active reader whose queer methodology allows unconventional narratives to emerge from a position of subjugation that result in 196 opportunities for resistance and alternative modes of knowledge production. Such a queer reading practice empowers Bình not only to claim his story as his own, a gift he will pass on, but also to tell the story of his employers by including himself as a crucial component of the narrative. Conclusion When Bình is aboard the Niobe, he has already adopted his pseudonym when his travel companion, Bão, tells him he should use a different name when he arrives in France: “Bão told me on two separate occasions—one during our first night at sea and the second was during our last—that I should change my name the moment we reached French shores. He said that it was the perfect opportunity to adopt something new, something heroic, perhaps” (104). When Bình responds, “I like the name I have,” Bão responds, “I’m not talking about throwing away your name, you dumb ass. The new name isn’t for you. It’s for them” (107). The irony of this exchange becomes clear when the reader approaches the final pages of the novel and Bình reveals that he has not disclosed his real name. This confession comes right after we see Bão discovering for himself that Bình has withheld his real name. Bình’s choice to use a different name as a foreigner in Paris echoes how new immigrants often adopt new names when arriving in the United States. While this renaming is often seen as a way of assimilating, in Bình’s case, withholding his real name is an act of resistance. Like his habit—“I never do it for them” (64)—he keeps his name for himself. The new name—“it’s for them”—creates a false identity that protects himself from being further consumed by Western audiences. While he could not 197 avoid Stein writing about him in her notebook, and he could not foresee Sweet Sunday Man’s betrayal once he received the stolen notebook, by presenting a false name, Bình separates his identity from the narrative within its pages that he cannot read. Though Bình’s status as a queer, racialized, colonial laborer denies him many of the privileges from which Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Sweet Sunday Man benefit, Bình learns how to navigate his surroundings and his relationships through queer reading. Bình uses the same position used to marginalize him—his role as a cook—and uses it to gain information and access. While Sweet Sunday Man’s ability to read Stein’s books and manuscripts places him in a position of privilege over Bình, despite their shared marginalized status as queer, racialized subjects, it is Bình who is able to remain in Paris while Sweet Sunday Man flees to protect his racial identity. By the end of the novel, Bình claims Stein’s manuscript and his own personal history, rejecting his subject position in the process of literary production. In addition, he does not allow Sweet Sunday Man’s disappearance to force him back to Vietnam to face his brother and (literal) ghost of his father, a return that would subject him to admit shame and guilt surrounding his sexuality. By choosing to remain in Paris and take control of his story, Bình has learned how to navigate the world as a queer, racialized, colonial, and diasporic subject in such a way that does not relegate him to the margins of American literature and Western history, but rather reveals the centrality of figures and subjects like him in the historical and literary archives.50 Bình makes himself 50 As Edwards writes, “Truong’s Bình began as a footnote in the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, an afterthought, an inconsequential detail in the life of an icon. By interrogating that gap, by creating a story for those lost to history, The Book of Salt exposes the 198 literally unreadable to the very readers who seek to make him legible, demanding that we, too, queer our reading practices in order access his story. The Book of Salt offer queerness as a methodology for reading consumption, interracial intimacy, and diaspora. The intimacies forged within the novel are made possible through food and the labor needed to produce it, and the ensuing relationships challenge heteropatriarchal standards by providing alternate modes of knowledge acquisition and production. ways in which absences can be felt as profound presences, that silence can speak meaningfully in unexpected ways. Bình radically transforms his own melancholic ghostliness, his “imposed invisibility” under the social hierarchies of colonial domination, into a productive process of redefining the foundations of identity and belonging” (184). 199 Chapter Five: Diaspora and Global Intimacies in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting The story of the Chinese in Cuba leads insight into broader issues of labor and society post-emancipation era, the relationship between race and citizenship, and the interconnectedness of national and transnational identifications. -Kathleen M. López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (2013) Domingo wondered about these migrations, these cross-cultural lusts. Were people meant to travel such distances? Mix with others so different from themselves? His great-grandfather had left China more than a hundred years ago, penniless and alone. Then he’d fallen in love with a slave girl and created a whole new race— brown children with Chinese eyes who spoke Spanish and a smattering of Abakuá. His first family never saw him again. -Cristina García, Monkey Hunting (2003) Introduction In Chapter Four, I explored how queer relationships with American characters outside of the U.S. provide alternative geographies for understanding race and nation that challenge liberal accounts of equality, inclusion, and democracy. This chapter continues Part Three’s exploration of contemporary U.S. fiction that decenters the nation in explorations of race and identity. Monkey Hunting (2003), written by Cuban-American Cristina García, traces the routes of the chino-cubano diaspora to the United States. Following five generations in four countries—China, Cuba, the United States, and Vietnam—the novel has three protagonists: Chen Pan, his granddaughter Chen Fang, and his great grandson Domingo. García’s novel provides a logical conclusion to this dissertation by expanding the scale of race, not just geographically, but temporally. In so doing, the novel invites a worlding of race through an investigation of what Lowe identifies as “the intimacies of four continents [….] the connections, relations, and mixings of Asian, African, and native peoples in 200 the Americas” (“Intimacies” 191-192). Monkey Hunting is a text that travels across continents and time periods; it interweaves Chen Pan’s transatlantic journey from China to Cuba, with Chen Fang’s imaginative wanderings from China to Cuba, with Domingo’s travels from Cuba and to the U.S., then to Vietnam as part of the U.S. army. All of these foreign locations emerge as countersites of immigration in exploring the effects of U.S. immigration, diaspora, and imperialism. García’s three protagonists and their various relationships expand nationally- bound narratives of diaspora, illuminating the intersecting complexities of global systems of labor and migration, and the little intimacies they elicit and disrupt. Chen Pan, a Chinese coolie, creates “a whole new race” (209) with Lucrecia, a formerly enslaved woman, and fosters coalitions with the Africans on the plantation and later, with Afro-Cubans during the liberation wars for Cuban independence and the Negro Rebellion in 1912. Chen Fang, his queer Chinese granddaughter, is raised as a boy in the absence of her father in order to receive an education and to provide financial support to her mother. Once her father is unable to send funds, her mother forces her to marry. As an adult and teacher, she is imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, accused of being a traitor. Domingo, Chen Pan’s great-grandson, flees to the United States from Cuba with his father, Pipo Chen, who has been accused of anti- revolutionary activities. After his father’s suicide, Domingo enlists in the U.S. military though he is not a citizen and is deployed to Vietnam, where his experiences with both black and white U.S. soldiers leave him with a sense of unbelonging. The interaction between U.S. imperialism and the world through the experiences of the characters reveals the interconnectedness of racial formations abroad and within the 201 U.S. Monkey Hunting expands our understandings of racial formations both geographically by traversing four continents, and temporally by narrating experiences across five generations. The novel centers these alternative narratives and histories that were previously obscured, making them crucial to our understandings of U.S. literature, history, and identity. García shows how such intimacies complicate and alter the scale of Americanness across time and space and provide crucial archives of knowledge that world our understandings of race, nation, migration, and diaspora. Recuperating the figure of the Chinese coolie for my project of worlding race involves examining the network of relations—the intimacies—that helped forge coalitions with other minority subjects. Monkey Hunting is a queered immigrant narrative—one that explores U.S. immigration through queer diasporas and thereby, centers foreign perspectives and non-Western epistemologies—that blurs the distinction between Latine/Latinx and Asian American literatures.51 Monkey Hunting begins the important work of uncovering obscured histories and individuals by beginning an American story with a Chinese coolie and pairing the histories of the coolie trade and Atlantic slave trade.52 The novel’s first protagonist, Chen Pan, boards 51 Jennifer Ho, for example, argues for Monkey Hunting as an Asian American text that challenges purity and the separation of minority cultures: “The nature of these multiple migrations makes Garcia’s work a uniquely Asian-American text, one that challenges previous understandings of hybridity and interraciality. Garcia’s representation of real mestizo cultures, embodied through this one particular lineage of the Chen family, emphasizes that purity is a myth—how one identifies as Cuban or Chinese or African or Spanish or Vietnamese is never constant and is certainly not based on phenotype or genetics.” (Ho “Transgressive Texts” 213) 52 In her monograph Migrant Sites, Dalia Kandiyoti discusses the potential of reading national literature through the lens of diaspora literature, a way of reading that I would identify as “worlding” national literature. She writes, “Migrant Sites offers a transformed understanding of the relation between migration imaginaries and consciousness of place in U.S. writing: it repositions national literature as diaspora 202 a ship leaving China for Cuba in 1857, unknowingly having signed himself into indentured servitude. Lowe discusses “the particular obscurity of the figure of the transatlantic Chinese ‘coolie’ […] in the historiography of the early Americas,” a silence that she argues “permits an entry into a range of connections, the global intimacies out of which emerged not only modern humanism but a modern racialized division of labor” (“Intimacies” 192). In this chapter, I explore how the transatlantic coolie provides a point of entry into worlding race. Specifically, I am interested in how the relationship between global systems of racialized labor in the nineteenth century and emergent nationalism in the United States illuminates the complex and contradictory place of minority subjects in defining American identity domestically and abroad. Chen Pan’s narrative begins and anticipates those to come from the other two protagonists, Chen Fang and Domingo. Like his descendants, Chen Pan survives being in a hostile environment by forging interracial coalitions with those around him. Yu-Fang Cho describes Chen Pan’s journey to Havana as “simultaneously referenc[ing] two narrative traditions — immigration and diaspora — that typically hinge on a singular nation state as the origin of the destination of presumably uni- directional movements or the point of belonging and attachment” (3). She continues: However, framed as an immigrant story that also alludes to the sojourner myth, García’s narration of Chen Pan’s journey refuses to privilege either tradition: this sets the stage for the emerging connections among disparate routes of global histories of literature and highlights spatial enclosure and translocality as central to the spatialization of diaspora experiences created in fiction” (3) 203 (im)migration, travel, and forced relocation evoked by the three main characters’ developing stories. (3) The stories of Chen Pan and his descendants queer the immigrant narrative by defying its conventions. While Chen Pan’s life can be read as an immigrant success story—he assimilates to Cuban society, runs a prosperous business, and raises a family—he is only able to thrive in a foreign country in the face of racial discrimination because he forges alliances with other minority subjects. In addition, Chen Pan abandons the idea of returning to China, unlike many of the other chinos in the novel who cling to the idea as a means of coping with being viewed as forever foreign, and claims Cuba as his home. The figure of the coolie is crucial to and invisible in the history of American national identity and progress, as well as the political presence of the United States in the larger world.53 How the coolie was imagined was critical to American ideas of race and national identity during the nineteenth century.54 Chen Pan’s fictional 53 As Lisa Yun points out: “The political maneuverings and debates that surrounded the coolie took place in the global theater of abolition, progress, and emergent nationalisms. The politics on all sides were multivalent, multilayered, and globally imbricated” (Yun Xv). 54 As Jung discusses, “the imagined coolie profoundly shaped American racial, class, and national identities. The racialization of Asian workers as coolies vis-à-vis the Caribbean and the South—either as a conduit toward freedom or a throwback to slavery—served to upset and secret social and cultural dualisms at the heard of race (black and white), class (enslaved and free), and nation (alien and citizen, domestic and foreign) in the United States. The impetus to extirpate slavery in the South, whether rooted in abolitionist zeal or racist animus, gave birth to the foundational logic that would lead to the eventual exclusion of Asian laborers. The construction of coolies, moreover, formed a crucial ingredient in redefining blackness and whiteness—and Americanness—when equality under the law (Reconstruction) and wage labor (industrialization) seemed to erode their meanings. The portrayal of Asian “dependence” and “servility” had the dual effect of reifying white “independence” and quelling black “insolence.” In such ways, locating, defining, and outlawing 204 passage from China to Cuba occurs in the same year as the pivotal Dred Scott Decision, which creates an association between the instability of racial definitions in the United States and the larger global market of racialized labor. Because the coolie trade was a response to the end of the Atlantic slave trade, how coolies were imagined as racialized subjects, as laborers, and as foreigners had implications for U.S. racial formations and ideas of freedom in the nineteenth century. As Moon-Ho Jung argues, “Coolies were never a people or a legal category. Rather, coolies were a conglomeration of racial imaginings that emerged worldwide in the era of slave emancipation, a product of the imaginers rather than the imagined” (5).55 The figure of the coolie was also significant in national debates surrounding Asian immigration. As Jung discusses, Asians in the United States were often categorized as either coolies, at home and abroad, became an endless and indispensable exercise that resolved and reproduced contradictory aims—racial exclusion and unbridled imperialism—of a nation deeply rooted in race, slavery, and empire” (9). 55 Jung also provides an important etymology of the term “coolie”: “The word coolie was largely a product of European expansion into Asia and the Americas, embodying the contradictory imperial imperatives of enslavement and emancipation. Of Tamil, Chinese, or other origin, coolie was initially popularized in the sixteenth century by Portuguese sailors and merchants across Asia and later was adopted by fellow European traders on the high seas and in port cities. By the eighteenth century, coolie had assumed a transcontinental definition of an Indian or Chinese laborer hired locally or shipped abroad. The word took on a new significance in the nineteenth century, as the beginnings of abolition remade coolies into indentured laborers in high demand across the world, particularly in the tropical colonies of the Caribbean. Emerging out of struggles over British emancipation and Cuban slavery in particular, coolies and coolieism—defined as “the importation of coolies as labourers into foreign countries” by the late nineteenth century—came to denote the systematic shipment and employment of Asian laborers on sugar plantations formerly worked by enslaved Africans. It was during this era of emancipation and Asian migration [end 13] that the term cooly entered the mainstream of American culture, symbolized literally by its relocation from the appendix to the main body of Noah Webster’s American dictionary in 1848.” (Jung 13-14) 205 coolies or immigrants, creating a “false binary” (4).56 In other words, the term “coolie” emerged as a racialized categorization rather than as one based upon labor status. Jung continues, discussing the long-term implications of how coolies were imagined in the United States past the age of emancipation: The exclusion of Asians from naturalization and their cultural location opposite immigrants, however, did not yet prohibit their migrations. And the demand for coolies would continue to flourish in light of black political and labor struggles. The allure and rejection of coolies rechristened the United States as the “nation of immigrants” after emancipation, helping to sustain both the legal mirage of racial equality and the harsh reality of white supremacy in American culture. (145) These continuing migrations of Asians, whether by choice or coercion, speak to the ways in which travel emerges as an opportunity for contesting exclusion and denial, as well as for continued encounters with other minority subjects. Bình from The Book of Salt is exiled from Vietnam and yet, he uses both his entry into Paris and his mobility within the city itself as modes of resistance and pathways to intimacy. Similarly, the protagonists in Monkey Hunting, have varying degrees of choice or ability when it comes to their migrations, but they use their movements to challenge dominant narratives that marginalize their place in historical, national, and immigrant 56 Jung elaborates on this point: “In a nation struggling to define slavery and freedom, coolies seemed to fall under neither yet both; they were viewed as a natural advancement from chattel slavery and a means to maintain slavery’s worst features. Coolies confused the boundary between slavery and freedom, between black and white, causing the mass demand for Asian migrant laborers as well as appeals for their exclusion in the postbellum United States” (6). 206 narratives. For Chen Pan and his descendants, such disparate routes are most readily apparent by tracing how migration and diaspora foster interracial coalitions and intimacies. Interracial Coalitions from the Plantation to Emancipation Chen Pan is crucial to opposing colonial power both on La Amada plantation and in the wars for Cuban independence from Spain. By making Chen Pan a central figure of resistance on La Amada plantation, García illuminates the obscured history of chino-cubanos in larger narratives of Cuban nationalism and liberation.57 The novel begins with a brief prologue describing how Chen Pan decides to leave China for Cuba. The first chapter narrates the three-month journey aboard the ship, immediately establishing similarities with the Middle Passage: “That evening at sea, the coast of China gradually faded behind them. A haloed moon rose on a swell of wind, but this hopeful omen didn’t alter the facts of the ship. It was outfitted like a prison, with irons and grates. The recruits were kept belowdecks, like animals in a pen. The shortest among them couldn’t stand upright. Soon Chen Pan’s neck ached from stooping” (8). García establishes the similarities between the Atlantic slave trade and the coolie trade, not just in terms of labor and conditions, but also in terms of oceanic scale: “The ship passed through the Straits of Sunda without incident, then followed the verdant curve of Africa before veering west across the Atlantic. In St. Helena they stopped for fresh water, continuing on to Ascension, Cayenne, the 57 As Sean Moiles similarly argues, “Through the actions and reflections of Chen Pan, García inserts into historical narrative the Chinese contributions to anticolonial struggles in Cuba. Coupled with this is a critique indicting Cuba for its racism against the Chinese” (174). 207 Barbadian coast, and Trinidad” (19-20). By tracing the ship’s route, García worlds race by expanding beyond the black Atlantic both geographically to Asia and the Caribbean, as well as conceptually to other forms of forced labor that include but are not limited to chattel slavery originating from Africa. Upon arriving in Cuba, Chen Pan is sold to a Spanish landowner to work in the sugarcane fields. Despite the horrible conditions aboard the ship, Chen Pan does not realize his status until he arrives on the plantation: “From his first hour in the fields, it was clear to Chen Pan that he was in Cuba not as a hired worker but as a slave, no different from the Africans. That he’d been tricked into signing his life away” (24). Chen Pan quickly learns that in the eyes of the slave masters and overseers, he is equal in status to the Africans, but they seek to maintain a sense of hierarchy among the laborers based upon race and status. Chen Pan defies this model and fosters friendships across these divides, challenging the mock hierarchies that are meant to keep the Africans and the chinos from uniting58: Chen Pan liked the Africans. They showed him how to swing the machete, shared the yams they roasted in ashes. [….] In turn, Chen Pan taught his friend Chinese exercises to begin his day, to gather energy from the heavens to strengthen his body. The other Chinese ridiculed Chen Pan. They said they wanted nothing to do with the 58 As López writes, “Indentured laborers, who on paper possessed more rights than slaves, initially had less access to social networks. Given the rupture from their homeland, harsh conditions of indenture, and relatively short time in Cuba, they lacked immediate kin and patronage connections within their own ethnic group. However, during the post-indenture period, the possibilities for cross-racial alliances multiplied” (“Afro-Asian Alliances” 65). 208 Africans. They said the black men were liars, that they stank like monkeys and stole their food. But Chen Pan paid them no mind (26). Chen Pan not only ignores the clearly racialized objections to the Africans by the other Chinese, but he also ignores the particular claim that the Africans steal food from the Chinese, an accusation that reveals the extent to which food is used as a tool to perpetuate oppression, division, and hierarchy. In pursuing friendships with the Africans, Chen Pan ignores the racialized objections by the other Chinese and chooses to create a system of reciprocity and camaraderie. Chen Pan’s friendships with the Africans grants him protection when he kills the overseer: Late one afternoon, a magnificent thundershower obscured the fields. The slaves couldn’t see to the end of their machetes, but they were forced to keep cutting cane just the same. In the blurring confusion, Chen Pan caught sight of El Bigote shouting orders at a field boss. He picked up a sharp stone, aimed carefully, then hurled it at the overseer’s temple—the very spot, Chen Pan knew, that if hit correctly would instantly kill a man. Every slave was whipped in retribution for El Bigote’s murder, but nobody confessed to the crime or to having witnessed it. No one said a word to Chen Pan either, but the slaves offered him small tributes. (32-33) Chen Pan risks his life and well-being for himself and his fellow laborers. Significantly, these lines discuss how the African slaves respond: they endure 209 whippings and offer Chen Pan gifts. Chen Pan’s act of resistance forges interracial coalitions that we see replicated historically in various freedom movements, in Cuba specifically and in the greater Americas—including the United States—more broadly.59 In the novel, killing El Bigote not only materially changes the lives of the Africans and the chinos as laborers, but also actively undermines the established hierarchies of the plantation. Chen Pan has the necessary knowledge to kill El Bigote thanks to a previous experience in China: Years before, a traveling acrobat had come to Chen Pan’s village with an enormous macaque monkey on a leash. It was summer and the macaque broke loose and claimed his family’s kumquat tree, gorging, uninvited, on the fruit. No amount of coaxing could get the monkey down. Then it tried to mount all the local dogs, including the little helpless ones like his great-aunt’s Pekingese. Chen Pan had killed that monkey, too, with a single throw of a stone. (33) While late in life, Chen Pan acknowledges “[h]ow useless [Chinese customs and manners] had been outside their own geography” (245), in this moment, he is able to distinguish between what can be made useful despite being in a completely different place. This ability to repurpose his experience speaks to Chen Pan’s ability to use alternative forms of knowledge in order to fight colonial power. 59 As Channette Romero argues, “The novel contends that Cuba’s historic interracial alliances can be used as models to resist injustice in contemporary times. By showing readers how effective interracial alliances have been historically, it encourages them to see their present political usefulness. Focusing on alliance making does not deny the importance of cultural difference; it shows how separate cultures can work together to achieve greater results” (74). 210 Chen Pan repurposes this knowledge once again when he flees the plantation and is fighting to survive in the jungle: Above him, lumbering high along a branch of a cedar tree was a fat jutía. If he succeeded in killing it, Chen Pan decided, he would remain in Cuba. He picked up speckled stone and threw it with all his strength. The rodent seemed to hover in midair before collapsing to the ground. It would make an excellent breakfast. (41-42) Chen Pan makes his decision to stay based on the utility of his knowledge in the foreign landscape of Cuba, which is tied to his ability to physically sustain himself. Chen Pan’s decision to stay in Cuba separates him from his Chinese peers in Cuba who long to return to a lost homeland. However, his decision to stay is not guided by the usual desire to assimilate, but his worldly ability to apply his knowledge in different scenarios as a strategy for resistance, social progress, and solidarity through interracial alliances. After surviving the jungle, Chen Pan makes his way to Havana, where he refurbishes furniture to make a living and eventually opens his own shop, the Lucky Find, selling “all manner of heirlooms and oddities” (63) in what will become Chinatown.60 Chen Pan’s shop and status as an entrepreneur acknowledges the inescapability of capitalism while simultaneously subverting its role in colonialism and racism. Both Chen Pan and Lucrecia suspend racial hierarchies by participating 60 López discusses how places like Havana’s Chinatown were transnational spaces that fostered interethnic and interracial contacts: “Chinese settlement in the Cuban provinces were rather porous. The Chinese interacted with native Cubans, European immigrants, blacks, mulattos, and other Chinese on a daily basis” (Chinese Cubans 99). 211 in economic exchanges that were designed to exclude them for alternative purposes that lead to their lifelong partnership.61 When Chen Pan sees an advertisement selling a “negress (with her first child) young and robust, birthed six weeks ago” (60), he purchases her. Though Chen Pan views slavery as clearly unethical, Cuban society has foreclosed any traditional possibilities for female companionship, with brothels and mail-order brides as the only other options given the lack of Chinese women in Cuba at the time and strict racial codes. Because he cannot avoid the exchange of money for any form of female companionship, he chooses to buy Lucrecia, but does not subscribe to the conventions of slave trade: “One thousand pesos was too much money, Chen Pan knew, but for once he didn’t bargain. [….] If he bought the girl and paid her a small salary, would she still be considered a slave?” (67-68). Though Chen Pan is participating in the slave trade, he does so because money is his only mode of exchange. Purchasing enslaved women was a common practice on the part of Chinese men, who did so as a means of accessing companionship rather than labor. This distinction illuminates one of the ways racialized laborers in Cuba and the larger Americas resisted established hierarchies and fought oppression: “Like African slaves, Chinese coolies protested the labor regime through forms of resistance and rebellion, engagement with the legal system, marriage and godparenthood, interracial 61 As López writes, the fictional relationship between Lucrecia and Chen Pan represents a historical reality and possibility because of the kind of intimacy Lowe describes—that between colonized people—and materially changed not just their individual ways of living but also how race and class were understood in Cuban society: “Across the Americas, the overlapping African and Asian diasporas produced new dynamics on the ground during the age of emancipation. As former indentured laborers and former slaves formed alliances, they also made claims about class and caste in society, such as a mulata’s refusing to accept her mother’s opposition to her marriage to a Chinese, or a former indentured laborer officially recognizing his children with a former slave” (“Afro-Asian Alliances” 69). 212 alliances, and participation in ethnic associations” (López, Chinese Cubans 6).62 By using the legal and financial means granted to him in order to purchase Lucrecia while simultaneously refusing to participate in conventional slave ownership, Chen Pan attempts to challenge both the existing oppressive systems that enslave Lucrecia and deny him the kind of intimate companionship that the “criollos” take for granted.63 Like Chen Pan, Lucrecia takes knowledge acquired elsewhere in order to advance herself in her current situation. Lucrecia learns to make candles when Don Joaquín, who is both her master and her father, impregnates her, then banishes her to a convent until after the baby is born: “As her baby grew and fattened inside her, Lucrecia dipped hundreds of candles in the bubbling vats” (135). While Lucrecia is living with Chen Pan, he discovers her skill for making candles, which becomes her source of income: In July, Lucrecia announced to Chen Pan that she’d gone to the magistrate to have herself evaluated. Chen Pan knew what that meant. Una coartación. Lucrecia wanted to buy her and Víctor Manuel’s freedom. 62 In her comprehensive study Chinese Coolies: A Transnational History (2013), López discusses the history of such interracial unions: “Despite official and social opposition, Chinese men did settle and form families. From their time as coolies on plantations, through their transition to freedom in Cuban society, Chinese mixed with local women. In her novel Monkey Hunting, Cristina García evokes the possibilities for interracial marriages between Chinese ex-coolies and black slave women. The relationship between Chen Pan and Lucrecia begins with a former indentured laborer purchasing the enslaved women for help with domestic chores and business and gradually evolves into a lifelong partnership” (90). 63 “Criollo” refers to an individual in Latin America who is of European descent and therefore, racially white. 213 “You’re free to go today,” he told her. “I won’t hold you here against your will.” Lucrecia didn’t answer him, but she also didn’t leave. (78) Making and selling candles equips Lucrecia with the same economic power that allowed Chen Pan to purchase her in the first place, despite Don Joaquín “trying to take [Chen Pan] for a fool” (67) because of his race. The trajectory of enslavement and indentureship to freedom for Lucrecia and Chen Pan mimics the historical trajectory of abolition and Cuban liberation, speaking to the ways cross-racial coalitions contributed to anticolonial efforts and nation building in Cuba and the larger Americas. The Ten Years’ War was the beginning of the gradual process of abolition in Cuba. After Lucrecia’s son, Víctor Manuel, tragically dies from plague, Chen Pan leaves Havana in order to deliver weaponry to Commander Sian during the Ten Years’ War (1968-1978), the first of the three wars for Cuban independence from Spain. While Chen Pan is away, Lucrecia opens a bank account and eventually saves enough money to buy her freedom: “A year after Chen Pan returned from war, Lucrecia gave him the seven hundred pesos she’d saved to buy her freedom. He took the money. What choice did he have? He knew she couldn’t have loved him otherwise. But instead of leaving, Lucrecia told Chen Pan that if it pleased him, she preferred to stay” (130-131). Lucrecia’s decision to stay with Chen Pan despite buying her freedom coincides with Chen Pan showing his commitment to interracial solidarity and justice. Later in the novel, Chen Pan also expresses his solidarity with Afro-Cubans during the Negro Rebellion in 1912: “Chen Pan wanted to explain to 214 Meng that los negros were protesting for their right to form a political party, that they would pay for their protesting with their lives and the lives of many innocent others. What choice did they have? Revolutions never took place sitting quietly under a mango tree. Men grew tired of tolerating misery, of waiting for better days” (193- 194). Chen Pan’s relationship with Lucrecia and his participation in Cuban independence movements illustrate his commitment to social justice and racial solidarity. Chen Pan’s lifelong commitment to Cuban liberation and racial democracy is fostered through his interracial coalitions, first with the Africans on La Amada plantation, then through his relationship with Lucrecia and solidarity with Afro- Cubans fighting for racial equality. Chen Pan asserts the crucial role that he and other chino-cubanos have played in Cuban liberation and national identity formation: “Chen Pan knew it was only a matter of time before the Chinese no longer would be welcomed in Cuba. In times of economic necessity, they were usually the first scapegoats. This infuriated Chen Pan because thousands of chinos had fought hard for the country’s independence” (246). Chen Pan’s ability to navigate the social, economic, and legal systems that are meant to exclude him results in his success both as a businessman and as a respected member of his community. His legacy may not shield him, Lucrecia, or his descendants from myriad forms of racism across oceans and continents, but his stories and those of his descendants provide a multi-layered account of what it means to be American in the most expansive sense by centering minority subjects in crucial historical trajectories that have come to define how we understand race, nationality, and diaspora. 215 Gender Passing, Queer Desire, and Cognitive Border-Crossing In Chen Fang’s chapters, García illustrates how reading and consumption are linked to the physical body—its traumas and its pleasures. Chen Fang’s narrative forefronts her queerness as the mechanism through which she relates to others and the larger world. García’s choice to give voice to the one character who, within the historical, social, and political context of her life, would have been completely denied such a voice, speaks to Chen Fang’s centrality to the issues at the heart of the novel. When Chen Fang is born, her mother, with the cooperation of the rest of the village, tells Lorenzo, her father, that Chen Fang is a boy in order to secure ongoing financial support. As a result, Chen Fang is raised as a boy and receives an education. However, when World War I breaks out and Lorenzo stops sending money, Chen Fang’s mother forces her to get married. Once she produces a son, her mother-in-law ejects her from the household and Chen Fang becomes a schoolteacher in Shanghai, where she has a romantic relationship with a Frenchwoman, Dauphine. Of the three protagonists in Monkey Hunting, Chen Fang stands out not just because she is the only female and her narrative defies conventions of gender and sexuality, but also because she is the only character who speaks as a first-person narrator. Chen Fang spends her entire life in China, but her life, story, and experiences cannot be bound by its national borders and is significant to a larger Asian diaspora. As Ho argues: Although Chen Fang’s fate is left uncertain (yet certainly dire and desperate—she is eighty and jailed in a Chinese communist prison), Garcia’s portrait of her as a woman influenced by forces outside of 216 China, in terms both global (Mao’s communist revolution) as well as intimate (her foreign lover) suggests that even a Chinese woman in China has an identity impacted beyond the borders of her nation-state. The last image of Chen Fang that Garcia leaves us with has her imagining a trip she will make to Cuba to find her father and to smoke a Cuban cigar on the balcony of Havana’s Chinatown. This portrait of Chen Fang is one of would be sojourner, whose own life has been intimately tethered to a larger Chinese-American diaspora. (“Transgressive Texts” 212) Though Chen Fang never leaves China, her queer imagination allows her to engage in what Keumjae Park calls “cognitive border-crossing,” which describes how Korean immigrant women forged transnational identities even while they were physically confined to the United States: “While their daily lives are organized without high level of transnational exchanges, the ways in which they define their social locations and identities often transgress geographical boundaries, as their sense of belonging stretches over several imagined communities (Anderson, 1991) in the United States and beyond” (201).64 Studying these “survival strategies” (Park 216) not only “challenge[s] the linkage between geographical space and social space” but also creates “a theoretical space to reconceptualize and elaborate social groups, 64 As Park elaborates: “[T]hese identity practices are part of women's survival strategies in the multiple communities which have become the contexts of their lives. My data suggest that postmigration identity construction did not occur in a seamless amalgamation, nor in hybridization, of multiple identities. Rather, identities were constructed by way of strategic organizing and selective usages of identity discourses, and reference groups. I maintain that these micro identity practices are organized within the dialectic interplay between structural forces and agency that resist them” (216). 217 communities, geographical units, and identity dynamics within interpenetrating local and transnational processes” (Park 204-205). While the other two protagonists, Chen Pan and Domingo, have physical migrations beyond their countries of birth, García insists that Chen Fang’s imagined migrations are just as crucial to understanding larger familial, national, and diasporic histories.65 The first time we encounter Chen Fang’s queer sexuality is when she is attending an all-boys boarding school and she, along with her male classmates, are taken to a brothel. For many of the boys, this is their first sexual experience and it emerges as a kind of initiation: One by one, my classmates were escorted into the same squalid room. It was big enough for a bedroll and a tray of steaming tea. No one remained inside longer than a few minutes. Each boy pretended to be more pleased than confused when he came out. When it was my turn, I was astonished to see the bare, slender back of a girl no older than me. (93) Like the other students, Chen Fang is not sure what to expect when she enters the room. Upon seeing the young girl, she immediately identifies with her because of her age. Once the girl at the brothel discovers that Chen Fang is a girl, she not only protects her secret so she can continue her studies, but also makes Chen Fang’s sexual exploits seem more impressive than those of the other students: 65 Cho similarly argues, “Through the pairing of Domingo’s and Chen Fang’s stories as equal representation of the Chen family’s past and future, Monkey Hunting contests this prevailing female invisibility and the artificial separation between narratives of male mobility and female immobility that inherently naturalizes patriarchal order” (5). 218 She opened her mouth and gestured with her tongue. I approached her slowly. She took my hand and rubbed it against her breasts. I felt a jolt go through me. Then she touched me between my thighs. “Who are you?” she asked me sharply, pulling her hand away. “A girl,” I told her. “Please tell no one.” We were silent a long time. “Why are you here?” “Everyone thinks I’m a boy. It’s the only way I can study.” To my surprise, the girl patted the bedroll beside her. “Stay a while,” she said. “This way the others will think you’re a man.” She began to giggle. (94) By plotting to make Chen Fang appear more of “a man” than the male students, the girl in the brothel is going beyond protecting Chen Fang and her secret; she subverts the politics of sexual exchange so that it is the absence of sexual intercourse that elicits a male-defined image of power and virility, an absence for which the girl is paid. Furthermore, the sexualized, heteronormative version of intimacy is challenged insofar as the intimacy shared between Chen Fang and the girl in the brothel, while having undertones of sexual desire, is based upon shared knowledge and deception to which the male students do not have access. The girl in the brothel is initially suspicious of Chen Fang upon discovering that she is not a boy, but once Chen Fang explains her disguise, the girl becomes a co- conspirator. For the first time, Chen Fang finds a female with whom she can be 219 herself. Through her arranged marriage, the birth of her child, and her expulsion from her husband’s home, Chen Fang does not feel that kind of kinship again until she becomes a teacher in Shanghai. Before she marries, Chen Fang must make her feminine body illegible to make it appear male. When she does marry, her “unfeminine” features, such as her unbound feet, her wavy hair, and her lack of gracefulness, all subject her to ridicule from her mother-in-law. After she is forced to leave her son behind, she continues to live as a woman, though she still hides her personal history: “In Shanghai, I was fortunate. I did not hide my gender and still the foreigners hired me, thanks to Professor Hou’s kind words. [….] I pretend to be a widow. I pretend to be childless. And so people do not concern themselves with my life” (101). Though she is able to live openly as a woman, part of that living also involves rendering her past as legible through an invented narrative of non- transgressive heteronormativity. An adult Chen Fang finds kinship with another woman after losing all that she knew before: her education, her life as a boy, her family, and her son. While working as a teacher in Shanghai, Chen Fang meets Dauphine de Möet, with whom she experiences Cuban culture for the first time: Her husband had been the French consul general in Havana during the Great War. [….] Dauphine had many photographs of Havana, including one of an old Chinese man in a doorway smoking an opium pipe. I liked to imagine that this man might have known my father or grandfather. She played Cuban records on her phonograph, too. At first the music sounded strange to me. But I grew to love the torrent of 220 drums, the torn-sounding voices of the singers. Dauphine showed me how to dance like the Cubans, clasping me tightly and making me swing my hips. (141) The way that Cuban culture makes its way to Shanghai and specifically, to Chen Fang, illustrates the complex global networks that contribute to the circulation of culture. While the problematics of a white European woman bringing Chen Fang in contact with part of her own culture cannot be ignored because that culture was made accessible through the capital of her husband, a powerful French businessman, the relationship between Dauphine and Chen Fang recasts that circulation in terms of queer diaspora. Much of this consumption of culture is achieved, literally, through the consumption of food. Like Bình and Sweet Sunday Man from The Book of Salt, Chen Fang and Dauphine establish their relationship through food. The intimacy they forge with their shared meals is in direct contrast to the forced consumption that Chen Fang endures from both her husband (in an attempt to abort their unborn child) and her mother-in-law (to ensure the health of her unborn grandson) while she is pregnant. Their first meeting is prompted by the poor performance of Dauphine’s sons, who are Chen Fang’s students. It is not until Dauphine provides Chen Fang with a traditionally Chinese meal, however, that their relationship becomes romantic: On my thirtieth birthday, Dauphine had her chef prepare for me the traditional longevity noodles. She knew I loved green plums and presented me with an exquisite jade bowl filled to the brim with them, although plums were long out of season. 221 “For my beloved Fang.” Dauphine whispered as she presented me with the fruit. “You are too kind,” I answered, lowering my eyes. That day, we became lovers. (142-143) Dauphine’s gesture touches Chen Fang and becomes the starting point for their intimate relationship. The use of foods that are not only familiar to Chen Fang, but also fall within her preferences, induces the progression of their relationship from the realm of friendship into the romantic. This meal brings these two women together; prior to this scene, all of their interactions were based on Dauphine introducing new experiences to Chen Fang. With the traditional Chinese meal, however, Dauphine enters into Chen Fang’s realm of knowledge and experience through food, marking an evolution in their relationship that allows for their relationship to become romantic through mutual cross-cultural discoveries. With Dauphine, Chen Fang finally experiences queer love and desire, the affect of which renders her body legible in its ability to feel. Queer intimacy frees Chen Fang’s body from the gendered expectations to which she was held in her earlier life, first as a boy, then as a wife and mother, allowing her to use her body for her own pleasure and consumption. In addition to increased exposure to different foods, Dauphine also provides Chen Fang with reading material: “Dauphine had a wonderful library of books and allowed me to borrow whatever I wished” (140). As their relationship develops into one that is romantically intimate, the literary continues to provide an escape from the harsh realities of Chen Fang’s life: “The hardships of the times receded for me. Our lives became hidden as if in a thousand-year dream. [….] Far from the bright 222 censoring light, I recited for her all the love poems I had memorized as a child” (143). Like her grandfather, Chen Pan, Chen Fang sees the value and utility in poetry. Chen Fang is able to use the literary to secure work as a teacher as well as to forge a deeper intimacy with the woman she loves, uncensored, in what emerges as an act of resistance to the political realities that will eventually lead to her imprisonment. When Dauphine must leave Shanghai to go back to Paris, the devastating effects on Chen Fang physically mark her body: “I did not sleep for a year. My face grew sallow, my eyes filled with ash. Where did history go, I asked myself, if it could not be retold?” (143-144). Chen Fang continues: “I felt raw with the knowledge of pleasure, charred by it. I understood finally the truth of the Tao Te Ching: The reason that we have great affliction is that we have bodies/ Had we not bodies, what affliction would we have?” (144). Chen Fang’s relationship with Dauphine emerges as a silenced history, one that cannot be spoken. This history, however, does not go unexpressed, for it manifests upon her body both as visible markers of trauma and as an affective response to such trauma. Chen Fang’s queer and racialized body becomes an archive of interracial intimacy and historical trauma linked to social, political, and economic phenomena that disproportionately affects diasporic characters of color within the novel. Like her grandfather, Chen Pan, and her father’s grandson, Domingo, Chen Fang’s physical body, and the love and labor it produces, subjects her to both emotional and physical trauma due to the threat of her own community ostracizing her. This familiarity with the body goes beyond Chen Fang as an individual and speaks to Gopinath’s concept of how “the queer racialized body becomes a historical 223 archive for both individuals and communities” (1). As Channette Romero writes, “The text upholds the spiritual notion that bodies carry history; however, the ‘scars’ of history, like rings on a tree, do not necessarily limit one’s ability to grow. Monkey Hunting suggests that not just scars and wounds are transmitted through the body, but also more fruitful stories from the past, like the memory of Chen Pan’s successful resistances to oppression” (68). Like Bình’s “scar tissue” (Truong 16) and Truong’s S-curve tattoo, Chen Fang bears the marks of a collective past upon her body. However, Chen Fang’s body carries more than her familial history. By experiencing queer love, Chen Fang gains an intimately personal understanding of her own body, which serves her as she progresses through more traumatic events in her life. Rather than being defeated by such trauma, as she was with the departure of Dauphine, Chen Fang chooses to embrace the ways in which her history mark her, defiantly claiming her body and its traumas as her own. Significantly, however, that past is not solely made up of trauma, but also the power of interracial coalitions and alternative forms of knowledge passed down from Chen Pan. When the Cultural Revolution breaks out in China, Chen Fang’s life is completely disrupted: “I have not been paid in months. How I live day to day, I cannot say. I go from home to school, from school to the market and home again. At the market, there is not much to buy: wilted cabbages, an ounce or two of dried noodles” (148-149). Though “there is not much to buy,” she goes to the market anyway because the market functions as a space of commerce, marking a sense of continuity and comfort in the midst of poverty, hunger, and political upheaval. The social realities of this historical moment alter the rituals surrounding food—how it is 224 procured, prepared, and consumed: “I make simple soups with what is available, or mix a bit of tofu with rice. I keep potato flour and sesame oil on hand for extra flavoring. Mostly, all food tastes the same to me” (149). While in Chen Fang’s earlier life, food and consumption were associated with and avenues for other desires, now, “all the food tastes the same,” suggesting the foreclosing of such desires. Chen Fang is constrained because of her gender and her social position, but she still cooks what she can to nourish her physical body in the midst of political and personal instability. Chen Fang’s only escape is through books: “In the evenings I correct my students’ papers, prepare tea, and read for hours. Reading is my one luxury. It does not save me from want, nor will it free me from death. Certainly, it prevents me from getting a full night’s sleep. But immersed in the shadows of other worlds, I find a measure of peace” (149). Like her grandfather, Chen Pan, Chen Fang discovers the value of books and reading early on, and uses that knowledge as a means of coping with her current harsh reality: As a woman alone, a teacher of literature, I lived simply, learning to endure absence like a continual thirst. I longed for my father in Cuba, for my kind older sisters, for the touch of my beloved Dauphine. In China women do not stand alone. They obey fathers, husbands, their eldest sons. I lived outside the dictates of men, and so my life proved as unsteady as an egg on an ox. (226) In the case of Chen Fang, the men who she would be expected to obey—“fathers, husbands, their eldest sons”—are absent in her life (her father Lorenzo) or she is forced to leave them behind (her husband and her son). All of her relationships with 225 men have been dictated by others. The unsteadiness of her life is not because Chen Fang herself does not fit into the dictates of femininity and domesticity as determined by Chinese tradition, but rather, because others cast her as such—an outsider who is not traditionally “feminine.” As Chen Fang gets older and her life is increasingly controlled by others, she comes to terms with her place in the world as a woman. When the Cultural Revolution reaches its height, Chen Fang is accused of “introduc[ing] students to contaminating foreign authors […] [and] brainwashing young minds to think for themselves” (228) and as a result, is imprisoned: “I was charged with being a Kuomintang spy, of working for French intelligence, of engaging in decadent behavior with the enemy (I wondered what they knew about Dauphine). I was denounced as a friend to foreigners” (229). The possible link between her relationship with Dauphine and her alleged criminal activity renders Chen Fang’s queerness not only subversive, but also threatening to the state. Despite being Chinese, her association with “foreigners” and their ensuing intimacy is enough for her to be imprisoned. Chen Fang’s body as an embodiment of the queer and the diasporic threatens those in power and casts Chen Fang as dangerous. And yet, it is precisely Chen Fang’s physical body and its assumed weakness that makes those who imprison her think she will simply die from the physical trauma and abuse: I do not think anybody expected me to last this long. Too genteel, they sneered. Too corrupted by Western ways. I am seventy- two years old. My hands are stiff, reddened with arthritis from months 226 of wearing handcuffs. My gums are black and bleed continuously. To eat, I must first press the blood from them. Twice I’ve been hospitalized—once for pneumonia, another time for rectal hemorrhaging. I fear I may have a tumor. To relieve myself is an anguish. Still, I must eat. There is only rice gruel, sometimes an extra mug of hot water when the kind female guard is on duty. Yesterday, the fat guard dislodged my shoulder when she twisted my arm behind my back. (224) The very process required for Chen Fang to eat—pressing the blood from her gums, eating only rice gruel, and the anguish of relieving herself—reveals how trauma has marked Chen Fang’s body and its ability to consume. While eating was associated with pleasure and intimacy with Dauphine, now it functions as a reminder of that trauma as inscribed upon the queer and gendered body of an aged Chen Fang. As a result, though this process causes discomfort and pain, Chen Fang also knows her own body in a way that she did not before: “Here in my cell, I live in my body more familiarly than before. Once my body existed outside of me, like a musty dress in the closet. Now each new discomfort brings it recognition and sympathy” (231). The image of the “musty dress in the closet” evokes closeted sexuality and how knowledge of her body does not rely on gender. Furthermore, whereas her relationship with Dauphine was about pleasure, Chen Fang also embraces her physical discomforts as another way of reading her body. At the various stages of her life, food and its consumption have served different purposes. Each mode of consumption gives Chen Fang a more intimate 227 knowledge of her body. In prison, she makes sure to eat in order to sustain her body and even exercises regularly: “Most days I try to exercise my arms and legs, clean my bed linen as best I can. I reconstruct poems in my head, patiently collecting each syllable. It pleases me to reclaim a few lines” (225). Chen Fang associates the physical exercise of her arms and legs with the recovery and recitation of poetry. Reading and literature are significant for Chen Fang not just to sustain her livelihood when she worked as a literature teacher prior to being imprisoned, but also to sustain her while she experiences extreme physical and emotional distress. As discussed above, reading provides Chen Fang with her only escape from the dim realities of her present moment after Dauphine’s departure. While in prison, however, reading becomes nearly impossible: “My eyesight is failing. The guards broke my reading glasses my first day here and they are still missing a lens” (225). Despite the physical barriers that may prevent her from accessing the literary, Chen Fang is able to alter her methodology from reading to reciting in order to maintain her ability to consume literature. Chen Fang’s literary ability shows a genealogical progression beginning with Chen Pan’s father, who was a self-proclaimed poet in China but is unable to secure employment to support his family: “Father had taken the Imperial examinations for twenty years without success. He’d been a good poet but incapable of composing verses on assigned subjects, as was required by the examiners. He’d blamed his absorption of useless knowledge for overburdening his imagination” (11). Chen Pan also learns to love poetry, but in so doing, takes a lesson from his father and cultivates knowledge that is useful, especially when he must survive in a new, unknown 228 country: “He was most grateful to Cuba for this: to be freed, at last, from the harsh cycles of the land. He’d carried both books and a hoe in his youth. He preferred the books” (81). Once the love of literature reaches Chen Fang, her approach goes beyond an unproductive desire to be a poet, like her great-grandfather, or a preference for literature cultivated through a comparison with hard labor, like her grandfather, Chen Pan. Chen Fang transforms the literary into something with utility, which even Chen Pan anticipates when he imagines that he will one day meet Chen Fang, who he still believes is a boy: “Perhaps one day the boy would come to Cuba and teach them all Chinese” (187) . She uses the literary as means for self-knowledge as in her relationship with Dauphine, and as a tool for survival when she is imprisoned. Chen Fang even composes a poem while in prison, signaling a progression from a passive act of reading, to reproducing existing poetry through recitation, and finally to the active production of a new poem: Last month the kind female guard asked me to write a poem for the occasion of her son’s birth. “This way I’ll remember you when you’re gone,” she whispered. [….] The other guards kick and push me until I fall to the floor. They take away my food before I finish (I cannot hurry my meals due to my gums). But this guard gives me ample time. I am not a poet, but I wrote something for her son. (226) Once again, Chen Fang draws a connection between the literary and the gastronomic as linked to the physical abuses and abilities of her body. Both texts and food serve as means of engaging with the larger world, so that Chen Fang becomes an active participant in the world rather than a passive recipient. As her final chapter nears its 229 conclusion, Chen Fang says, “Listen to me. I am old and very weak, but I want to live in the world again” (232). Though the end of Chen Fang’s narrative leaves little doubt that she will die while in prison, she still remains hopeful, making plans to find her family in Cuba should she survive. Though Chen Fang spends her entire life in China, she constructs a version of Cuba based upon the stories she hears and her own idealistic imaginings of the country. Cuba becomes a symbol of freedom and possibility, an escape from the realities of Chen Fang’s life at its various stages, even as a child: “From an early age I dreamed of running way, of joining my father in Cuba. Mother said that I looked like him, especially when unhappy” (91). She again dreams of running away when her mother writes to her at school, saying that she must come home and get married because her father’s financial support has ceased: “I stared at the black ink against the coarse parchment. Again I thought of escaping to Cuba, but I had no money and my father knew only that I was an intelligent boy” (95). The first instance shows Chen Fang’s embracing of her affinity to her father, not just in appearance, but also in gender because of her male upbringing. In the second instance, however, Chen Fang’s education, tied to her life as a boy, is cut short because the money is no longer available. Chen Fang makes the connection between capital and her mobility, not just in her ability to travel for her education, but also to go to Cuba (“but I had no money”) and by extension, access to a part of her family culture. The stories she hears about Cuba feed her desire to live there: There were other tales about Cuba. How fish that rained from the sky during thunderstorms had to be shoveled off the roads before 230 they rotted. How seeds dropped in the ground one day would shoot up green the next. How gold was so plentiful that the Cubans used it for buttons and boom handles. And when a woman fancied a man, she signed to him with her fan. In Havana, the women chose whom they would marry and when. Everything I heard about Cuba made my head revolve with dreams. How badly I wanted to go! (91-92) The villagers tell these tales as a means of rendering Cuba as uncivilized and strange, particularly in their discussions of the slaves and the women (both in general and the specific case of Lucrecia). However, such stories only further intensify Chen Fang’s longing. For Chen Fang, the plentitude of food and the fertility of the land are just as noteworthy and envy-inducing as the agency of women in matters of love and marriage. Chen Fang creates a version of Cuba where she is not constrained by her race, gender, or sexuality. Chen Fang ends her final chapter by imaginatively placing herself in Havana: “When I arrive, I will find a balcony overlooking the sea and watch the bats pour through the city at dusk (my father mentioned this in one of his letters). I will smoke a Cuban cigar (these are famous even in China), maybe two cigars. The rains will begin, splattering the city, replenishing the sea. Only then will I go inside and write to my son in Shanghai” (233). Though she is born in China and never has the opportunity to leave, she insists on her place in Havana and her family’s transnational history. Even as the only protagonist whose death seems imminent, Chen Fang is also the only character who is given a voice to narrate her own story. 231 Chen Fang is exceptional in the novel because she transgresses the boundaries that are imposed upon her using her queer imagination. Through her queer intimacies with other women along with her larger family history, Chen Fang illuminates how the “intimacies of four continents” come to bear on a woman confined to not just one continent, but one country. The U.S. Military in the World: the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War Domingo Chen, the third and youngest protagonist, is the great-grandson of Chen Pan and struggles with his sense of racial, cultural, and national identity. Born in Cuba in 1950, Domingo is of African, Spanish, Chinese, and Cuban descent, literally embodying “the intimacies of four continents.” Domingo witnesses the onset of revolution and its aftermath, for his country and his family. His father, a cook at the Guantánamo naval base, is institutionalized when he refuses to give up his job and is charged with anti-revolutionary activities, which leads to the father-son pair leaving Cuba for the United States. We learn that Pipo’s culinary skills also served as his livelihood. Pipo’s job at the naval base is the novel’s most explicit illustration of food as a political tool in the project of U.S. imperialism via Americanization. Pipo’s participation in and denial of such complexities associated with his culinary position have the very real consequence of exile for himself and his son, Domingo. The father- son pair do not fit in either in Cuba or the United States, even as part of the community in Chinatown because both spaces are extensions of the U.S. and therefore, deem Pipo and Domingo as foreigners. In the U.S., Pipo cannot adjust to his new life and eventually commits suicide, leaving Domingo unmoored. As a result, 232 he enlists in the U.S. army to fight in the Vietnam War. Domingo’s dark skin and non-citizen status complicate his role as a U.S. soldier fighting communism in and for a foreign country. Through Domingo, we can see the legacy of the coolie trade in Cuba and its far-reaching effects across generations and continents. Domingo’s racial and national unreadability illustrate how U.S. racial politics extend beyond the nation and into his ability to navigate the larger world, even as a soldier fighting in the name of democracy and freedom for the United States. Domingo’s chapters begin when he is already in the United States. It is 1968 and he is working at a restaurant called the Havana Dragon. Even before he enlists in the army and goes to Vietnam, his past, present, and future are linked in the national imaginary: “At the Havana Dragon, the music rumba-plenamerengued all night, ricocheted off the moon and bounced back to fry cutlets. And when the music wasn’t playing, the bad news was blaring—subway decapitations and hijackings to Cuba and all the tragic static of Vietnam” (44). The radio station connects what is happening in the United States to what is happening in Cuba and Vietnam, creating a global map of related events. These three locations bear particular significance for Domingo as a minority, racially ambiguous subject. The suspicion of Domingo’s racial identity is not limited to the United States. While living in Cuba and serving in Vietnam, Domingo is viewed as a threat because of his comparative blackness, in the form of an afro in Guantánamo and his dark skin that marks him foreign in Vietnam. Both foreign spaces are countersites of immigration, for their occupants are held to American ideas of racial hierarchy and difference as enforced by the U.S. military. As a result, Domingo’s blackness marks 233 him as foreign and threatening in both settings, particularly because U.S. projects of anti-communism and containment were highly racialized. Despite fighting for the Americans, the other soldiers do not treat him as a comrade and he is subject to American racism because of his appearance: “His biggest fear was that in the heat of a firefight, his fellow soldiers would mistake him for a Viet Cong and shoot him head. Enough of them were suspicious of him to begin with. With his heavy accent and brown skin, how could he be American?” (107). Domingo’s “heavy accent and brown skin” mark him not just as racially, but also nationally other. Despite this fear of misrecognition, Domingo wishes to be included in the camaraderie of the other soldiers: “Domingo was permitted into the officers’ club because he worked for General Bishop, but he wasn’t welcomed there. His skin was too dark, his features not immediately identifiable as one of them” (209). Despite the cold treatment he receives—the bartender gives him a warm beer instead of the mojito he orders—he goes to the club. However, García challenges official narratives of U.S. militarism when Domingo gets attacked by a group of monkeys while on night watch. With no one else present to confirm his story, the U.S. military rejects Domingo’s account of what happened: What’d happened had nothing to do with reasonable explanations or the military’s misplaced trust in precision (Domingo was no fan of logic himself). Yet the officers assumed that any experience could be summed up with a handful of right-angled nouns. 234 “We’ll give you another day to rethink your story,” the major said, snapping his folder shut. (118) Domingo never doubts his experience and bears physical evidence of what happened upon his body: “Domingo knew the monkeys were real. He knew this because they’d torn off his flak jacket and run off with his rifle. Coño, the monkeys had scratched and bitten him so badly, his arms looked like ripped sleeves” (119). Like Bình in The Book of Salt and author Monique Truong, Domingo bears history upon his body, first when the monkeys attack him and then later, when he is injured and hospitalized by a land mine.66 García points to the ways American ideas of difference based upon race and politics are also subject to a policy of containment through the physical reproduction of American spaces in foreign locales. American imperialism is linked not just to subjugation of bodies and political ideologies, but also in psychological manipulation as a part of a larger imperialist agenda, enforced through the delegitimizing of minority voices and stories. During his time in Vietnam, we see Domingo shift from trying to fit in with the white U.S. soldiers to deploying his racialization and perceived foreignness as a way to identify with other minority subjects. While facing racism from his fellow soldiers, Domingo experiences degrees of racial solidarity with the Vietnamese, who the U.S. has deemed the enemy. The first occurrence happens when he and a fellow 66 Tham Thanh Lan’s story echoes those of Lucrecia, who is raped by her father and master, and Chen Fang, who is raped on her wedding night and whose husband attempts to abort their child without her knowledge. As Romero writes: “The text upholds the spiritual notion that bodies carry history; however, the “scars” of history, like rings on a tree, do not necessarily limit one’s ability to grow. Monkey Hunting suggests that not just scars and wounds are transmitted through the body, but also more fruitful stories from the past, like the memory of Chen Pan’s successful resistances to oppression” (Romero 68). 235 solider capture “a VC [who] was barely fifteen, stringy-chested and half eaten by fire ants” (109): Domingo had climbed into the boy-soldier’s hole and felt oddly at home there. He’d found a few scraps of paper covered with poems. One was called “Nuóc,” “Water,” which he knew also meant “country.” He’d wanted to keep the poems, maybe translate them in his spare time. But the lieutenant had ordered him to turn them in with the maps and other military debris. Domingo liked to imagine Army code breakers racking their brains trying to make sense of a Vietnamese love poem. (109) Domingo elicits a sense of intimacy when he feels “oddly at home” in the quarters of the enemy and sees value in his poems. This sense of home is in contrast to the strangeness of home that Hall Montana, Roy Williams, and the ex-colored man feel when returning to the United States, as discussed in Part One of the dissertation. While Domingo’s superiors automatically deem them as threatening, he sees them as an expression of the enemy’s humanity, worthy of translation so that they can be shared with others. When Domingo imagines the army trying to decipher them as intel, he is drawing attention to how one’s biases and one’s mode of reading can prevent an understanding of the text itself. Domingo’s desire to translate these poems echoes similar moments with his ancestors, specifically of Chen Pan taking lessons from his father in how to employ poetry, and of Chen Fang altering one’s method when physical and official forces impede traditional ways of reading. By 236 misinterpreting the purpose of poetry, the U.S. army not only fails to see this Viet Cong soldier as a person, but also undermines their own efficacy through misreading. Domingo further identifies with the Viet Cong a few pages later: “Domingo considered the enemy, imagined them speaking to him in Spanish, fast and with a Cuban accent, hardly an “s” every hundred words” (116). By imagining that they can communicate specifically in Cuban Spanish, Domingo creates a national and linguistic connection. This desire to communicate through a common language echoes Domingo’s impulse to translate the found poems of the Vietnamese “boy- soldier.” In both cases, Domingo defies the U.S. military’s reduction of Viet Cong soldiers to simply the enemy and insists on both their humanity and the possibility for kinship across minority populations. Such imaginings of anti-colonial solidarities provide counter narratives to official and authoritative accounts, worlding our understanding of the racial politics of the Cold War and other U.S. imperial projects abroad. In addition, it provides a beginning point for Domingo’s personal development from seeing Vietnamese people as foreign to feeling a sense of kinship. The second instance of racial solidarity is with Tham Thanh Lan, a Vietnamese prostitute. Domingo gets her information from his friend and fellow soldier, Danny Spadoto, a mere two hours before being killed by a booby trap. Domingo decides to visit Tham Thanh Lan to deliver the news of Danny’s death and give her some mementos from his life. When Domingo asks if he can stay, Tham Thanh Lan asks: “Where are you from?” she demanded. 237 “Cuba,” he said. “I’m from Cuba.” He was tired of explaining this to everyone. (156) Tham Thanh Lan’s question echoes an earlier moment when Domingo has a sexual encounter with a “little nurse” who he knows “he couldn’t love” (47). After finishing his shift at the Havana Dragon in New York, Domingo meets the nurse at a nightclub, who “usually dated only white men but she’d make an exception in his case” (47): “Hey, where you from?” the nurse asked him when the music finally stopped. Domingo wanted to answer her, to say that his blood was a mix of this and that. So how was he supposed to choose who he wanted to be? “Cuba,” he said. “I’m from Cuba.” (47) The nurse’s question is not about geographical origins but rather, asking for clarification about the kind of racial difference that exists between them. Like the nurse, Tham Thanh Lan wants to know Domingo’s racial history, but the inquiry is based on a shared experience of racialization and colonial trauma rather than an effort to maintain a racial hierarchy. This question opens the avenue for the physically intimate encounter that follows in both scenes. Though Domingo responds to Tham Thanh Lan’s question simply with “Cuba,” the actual answer to the question of his origin remains more complicated. García writes: “He wanted to talk about the forests of rubber trees he’d seen, about the elephant grass and flame vines that reminded him of Cuba” (156) and later on the next page, “Domingo began thinking of stories to tell her” (157). As Domingo remembers stories of his family while growing up in Cuba— 238 “the time a pack of Jamaican Negresses had chased his Abuelo Lorenzo along the Bay of Santiago, determined to try his virginity powder. Or how his Tío Desiderio had owned the most notorious gambling den in Havana and kept a British pistol strapped to his calf. Or how his father had made the best shrimp dumplings in Guantánamo, maybe all of Cuba” (157-158)—García provides an alternate account of “where he comes from” that is not limited to a singular location or race but rather, draws from particularized experiences and how they illuminate the connections among Vietnam, Cuba, and the United States.67 Domingo finds ways of bridging the differences between him and Tham Thanh Lan through sharing personal memories and details of his life in Cuba. However, Domingo does not actually speak of these stories of the past, of Cuba: Instead he pulled up his shirt and showed Tham Thanh Lan where the shrapnel had torn him up and the Army doctor had stitched him back together. “Touch it,” he said. When she didn’t, Domingo took her hand and guided it along his scars. (158) By revealing his war-torn body, Domingo shifts the dialogue away from that which can be spoken in the form of stories, to that which cannot be articulated through words alone. In Domingo’s case, his wounds are a visual testament to the trauma he 67 As Cho notes, “Alluding to different forms of militarization in Cuba and Vietnam that entail U.S. involvement, this passage instantly evokes numerous possible routes that, in Domingo's mind, connect Vietnam, Cuba, and the United States, which remain largely unintelligible in official history. The instantiation of these unmapped connections later paves the way for the communication between Domingo's and Tham Thanh Lan that closes the gap between them” (Cho 6). 239 has faced in war, an experience he reveals to Tham Than Lan through sharing his physical body. Tham Thanh Lan has also experienced bodily trauma resulting from the conflicts of the Vietnam War, which she shows Domingo: A seam of numbers paraded along the inside of Tham Thanh Lan’s right thigh, smelling of enemy metal. She told Domingo that the numbers were the identity code of a jealous Republican general. And the scars between her legs—she opened them wide to show him—were from this same general, who had once tied her to the bed and penetrated her with his dagger. (159) While the experiences of Domingo and Tham Thanh Lan and the physical remainders bring them together, there are also stark differences. Domingo voluntarily joins the army, knowing in advance that his physical body may face extreme violence or even death. Tham Thanh Lan, on the other hand, engages in prostitution. In the context of U.S. military occupation in Asia, the question of agency is complicated, especially because it is racialized. It is clear that while Tham Thanh Lan commodifies her body, she does not voluntarily give up ownership of that body. The general forces the trauma upon her in a violent act of sexual assault that violates her body and personal freedom. In his marking of her body, the general is attempting to claim ownership of it. Domingo and Tham Thanh Lan, through revealing their respective traumas, experience a moment of intimacy that is not just sexual, but intuitive as well. The way these two characters share their respective experiences with each other points to the inadequacy of language to describe trauma and its effects, and the erasure of such 240 trauma from official accounts of the Vietnam War specifically and U.S. imperial efforts across the world more generally. Conclusion By forging relationships with other racialized characters, the protagonists of The Book of Salt and Monkey Hunting resist dominant narratives of U.S. exceptionalism, democracy, and immigration through the stories of minority subjects. In reading these two novels as queer immigrant narratives that world our understandings of race and migration, I have shown how foreign encounters provide another mode of understanding comparative processes of racialization in the United States. Furthermore, the characters in these novels challenge the myth of the immigrant success story by providing alternative definitions of progress. Chen Pan and his descendants are not failures for their lack of assimilation, but rather, their narratives illustrate the multiplicity of experiences associated with Chinese, Cuban, and American identities. Though Pipo tragically commits suicide and Domingo ends up fighting in the Vietnam War on the side of the Americans with no concrete sense of cultural, racial, or national identity, these facts do not point to their failures as minority immigrant subjects. Rather, García points to the failures of dominant narratives of migration and diaspora as illustrative of actual and diverse experiences. Through these three generations—Chen Pan, Pipo Chen, and Domingo Chen—García demonstrates the fluidity and precariousness of national, cultural, and racial boundaries in formations of minority subjectivity. 241 Both novels at once reveal the trauma inflicted upon racialized bodies and center the stories behind those traumas to challenge the ways in which war and racism have been justified in the name of freedom.68 Bình and Domingo both struggle with the inadequacies of language to express past experiences of trauma and violence, which leave physical and legible traces upon the body. Such embodied texts challenge the reading of racialized bodies through the lens of difference, meant to dehumanize and devalue, and instead, use the legibility of the body to promote inter- and intra-racial kinship and solidarity. Through this privileging of non-linguistic forms of communication, Truong and García provide alternative narratives to official histories and records, challenging the dominant modes and language used to describe and account for race, nation, and diaspora. 68 Moiles also comments on the significance of the García’s centering of alternative narratives: “Dominant representations—in this case, those twisted by the US military—disguise the actuality of things, according to García, who privileges Domingo’s narrative over that of the US military. García condemns the narrowness of the military’s vision, whose officers ‘assumed that any experience could be summed up with a handful of right-angled nouns’ (118). García’s polyvocal and imaginative historicism saves Domingo’s truth from oblivion while it also challenges an important upholder of US hegemony. More generally, Monkey Hunting argues for the need to recuperate the testimonials of people who have been historically marginalized by institutions of power” (172). 242 Conclusion: Notes of an Immigrant Daughter, Baltimore, MD It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. -James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” Notes of a Native Son (1955) I listen for your mother in your voice and cannot know if I find her. Not much lives on, from one generation to the next. Not much, but not nothing [….] I want to know what survives, what’s handed down from mother to daughter, if anything is, bond I cannot cut away, that keeps apart what it lashes together. And I want to know what cannot be handed down, the part of you that’s only you, lonely fist of sinew and blood, deep in your gut where cords lash bone, nerve, breath, the part of you that first began to sing. -Suji Kwock Kim, “Translations from the Mother Tongue,” Notes From the Divided Country (2003) Johns Hopkins University: 1977-1979 // 2003-2007 My maternal grandfather was a janitor at the very same institution that granted me my Bachelor of Arts degree. The thirty-year span between our occupations within this institution illustrate not just the generational gaps, but also the gaps in our opportunities in the United States and the gaps in my knowledge of my family history. I know that my grandfather was a refugee, fleeing the North in Korea and in the process, he was separated from his wife and infant son, who were supposed to meet him at the border but were never seen again. I know that my mother and her family—her parents and her three younger siblings—came to the United States from 243 an impoverished life in rural South Korea in 1975. My youngest aunt told me that her father, my grandfather, had spent years saving up enough money to buy a house in the States, but that their trip kept getting delayed due to various issues with the immigration office, forcing the family to live off of those savings. My mother always tells me and my brothers how her family arrived in this country with only thirty dollars, which they spent that day for the immediate need of buying food. My mother was particularly excited about the bananas at the market. The family of six stayed in a small city rowhouse with a friend of my grandfather, who had his own family sharing the close quarters, while they figured out how to earn a living and find housing. I know my mother, who was nineteen when she came to the States, worked three part-time jobs, including at a McDonalds, while attending community college full-time in order to help support her family. I know she wanted to stay in Korea and was angry with her parents when they left. When she graduated from community college, she wanted to continue her education and eventually, go to medical school. Instead, she was told she must marry and start a family. I know that my grandmother worked in a garment factory with horrible conditions, which paid by the item and so, she would bring home extra fabric and continue making clothes during what free time she could carve out at home. When I recently asked my mother about her father’s time as a janitor, she recalls feeling heartbroken that he had to work in such a position. She and her two sisters were gathered around the kitchen island at my parents’ house, catching up and exchanging variations of their shared frustrations with their mother, a staple of their conversations. One of my aunts mentioned that there were a number of Korean 244 janitors at the University, which made it a bit easier for my grandfather to adjust to a new country, a new language that he never quite learned, and a new reality of menial, low-wage labor. My other aunt talked about how the undergraduate students would always leave items behind when they moved out of the dorms for the summer, discarded in the haste and inconvenience of the end of the semester. My grandfather would bring some of these items home for his children, an event that elicited much excitement. My mother then recalled a particular story when my grandfather had found a young man’s wallet on campus as he was cleaning and, with some effort, returned it to its owner. The student, grateful that it was returned with all of its original contents, thanked my grandfather with a pack of cigarettes, a luxury that my grandfather would never have dared purchase for himself. The conversation abruptly ends, as my mother especially does not like to talk about the past. I try to formulate my own answers to the questions that remain on the tip of my tongue. I gather that my grandfather only left his job at Johns Hopkins when he went to Vietnam for the war, another story that remains untold. I only know that he was an army barber who did not engage in combat, and that during this time, my mother married my father, bringing him also to the land of opportunity, which would elude him for the majority of his adult life as it had for my grandparents. When it was time for me to apply to colleges, my mother insisted I apply Early Decision to Johns Hopkins University. At the time, I was eager to leave home, to explore other cities, to experience freedom from my parents’ strict rules, so the thought of attending college so close to home was unappealing, to say the least. In contrast, Johns Hopkins University was a glimmering symbol of possibility for my 245 parents. It represented a place where my mother could have pursued medicine, a dream my mother, for a time, had hoped to realize through me. Like my mother, I share the Kim gene of stubbornness and defiance, and yet, also like my mother, at certain rare moments, I find myself pushing my wants and feelings aside in order to please my parents. I begrudgingly agreed, with the caveat that I would apply to whatever schools I wished for the regular application cycle. I soon found out that I was accepted and would be attending the university. As I stepped foot in my dorm room for the first time in the Fall of 2003, I remember feeling chills, despite it being an especially hot August day even by Baltimore standards and the room lacking any air conditioning. My first thought— coming almost like a memory—was of my grandfather. He had passed away several years earlier, but in this moment, it was as if I was entering his presence. A few minutes later, my hall mate knocked on the door with his father. After introducing themselves, the father informed me that my room had, in fact, been his dorm room when he was an undergraduate. While the father-son pair assumed my astonishment stemmed from the coincidence of father and son living in the same hallway, decades apart, I was, in fact, thinking about how their family had occupied this space so differently from mine. At the time, I simply smiled, asking the father about his time at Hopkins and how it felt to be back in Adams House, for I did not yet know what it was I was experiencing. 246 Ednor Gardens (East Baltimore): 1985-2012 I remember that for a number of years, my father worked fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, and I only got to see him to say goodnight when he arrived at home and sat down to eat dinner, after which he would immediately go upstairs to bed, exhausted, only to have to repeat the whole process the next day. In October of 1985, just a few months after I was born, my parents purchased a commercial property in the neighborhood of Ednor Gardens in East Baltimore. I would spend more years here than in any of the homes where I was raised as my parents ran various businesses—a video rental store, a beauty supply store, a carryout, and a food market that also functioned as the neighborhood convenience store. The years that my parents spent running the carryout were especially difficult. I remember the pervading smell of grease on my parents’ hair and clothes for those few interim years, which brought in considerably less revenue than any of their other businesses. In the face of such hardship, my mother took immense pride in proclaiming that she made the best Western fries in the city, a small consolation for her physical and emotional exhaustion. I remember that during this time, our electricity was shut off, a fact I was not supposed to know because I was a child. I remember emptying my piggy bank on the carpeted floor of my parents’ bedroom because it was the only thing I could think of to help my parents, who were scaring me with their fear. I remember my parents crying because they had to take the rolled up dollar bills and coins, promising to reimburse me later, a promise we both knew was impossible. I wonder about the other impossible promises that my parents made—to their children, to each other, to themselves—that sustained them even as they knew that they could not be fulfilled. 247 Some I remember and many, I am certain, were kept behind their closed bedroom doors away from my ears. I also wonder what impossible promises were made to them in order to get them to this moment in their bedroom accepting my meager funds—the promise of a better life, the promise of prosperity, the promise of education for their children, the promise of living in a country that is “safe,” the promise of progress, the promise of acceptance. From my childhood to present day, “the store,” as my parents simply called both the physical structure and the various businesses they ran within its walls, would be a constant source of stress, anxiety, fear, exhaustion, and insufficient but much- needed income. As I came of age behind bullet-proof glass, I learned how to ring up purchases on the cash register, run lottery numbers for loyal players, charge the appropriate kind of tax depending on the product, and distinguish between those who showed my family kindness and those who resented our presence in their community. I learned the costs of what my parents sold and the cost of a country that had invested labor, capital, law, and culture into a national project of oppression. I learned that my parents were not meant to achieve the American Dream, and that by default, neither was I, but believing was a way of coping with the impossibility of such promises. I learned that my parents believing that they must subscribe to existing hierarchies was a mode of survival, one that they learned quickly in order to sustain their livelihood and support their family. I learned that none of this was by chance or coincidence but rather, by design. Over the years, I witnessed the verbal abuse my parents faced from some members of the neighborhood. I also witnessed the regulars who always showed 248 kindness, whether in the form of a Christmas gift or an extended conversation about that day’s headlines. I learned that discrimination is acquired, not just at home or from the media, but through everyday interactions, which for my parents, would always be associated with their exclusion from the American Dream. Of course, there were exceptional interactions that intensified my parents’ anti-black prejudice. My parents were held up at gunpoint on several occasions, with one particularly bad instance when I was a sophomore in college. On this particular day, the masked man who pointed the gun would not leave even after acquiring all cash and valuables. My mother would later tell me that she was absolutely sure she was about to die. My mother was not able to speak to me about it for several days and I received a phone call from my father instead, a rare occurrence as my mother was the one who normally kept me up-to-date on family matters. I remember my father telling me that my mother was unable to return to work for several days. I remember my parents hiring a retired black man who lived in the neighborhood to help out at night to deter shoplifters and more masked gunmen, a salary they could not afford to pay, but the alternative was even more costly. This man would eventually become one of my father’s dearest friends, a simple reality that gives me hope. I remember that my parents’ prejudice is a product of white supremacy and the myth of the American Dream, a myth that traps my parents into looking for someone, anyone, who is worse off to assure themselves that they are still better off than some and that if they can, others should be able to as well. I remember that my parents, too, are victims of white supremacy, and that no matter what, they are my parents, who sacrificed far too much in order to get me where I am today. I 249 remember that my education grants me the privilege to study in a field that I have chosen, a field that gives me the tools to challenge the realities and systems that seek to oppress me and other minority populations. I remember that my parents are human and that their experience has taught them how to survive and that for a time, survival was all that mattered. The Bryn Mawr School (Roland Park, North Baltimore): 1991-2003 I attended an all-girls school for twelve years. Considered one of the most progressive and academically rigorous schools in the Baltimore region, Bryn Mawr felt like a completely different world from my parents’ store, despite being less than four miles away. It was here that my budding feminism, my love of books, and my intellectual curiosity were nurtured and encouraged. At the same time, I saw the stark differentiation between me and the majority of my classmates, whose families’ names were on high-rises downtown, whose parents were on the Board of Trustees, whose extreme privilege often made me feel out of place as someone whose family name was often mispronounced and who could only afford to go to this school with a huge amount of financial aid. That feeling of being out of place was, on occasion, reinforced by those who felt their family’s class, history in the city, and whiteness automatically made the school more theirs than mine. I would experience variations of this feeling throughout my life, sometimes subtly, such as my first day of college in Adams House, and at other times, much more overtly, especially as I have become more accustomed to such incidents and as I have acquired the language with which to describe them. 250 Many immigrant parents cite wanting to provide their children with “a better life” as to why they leave their homelands; for my parents, that better life had a very specific path: a good education. I was lucky to attend a school that was sympathetic to my family’s financial situation and chose to invest in me as a student. I attended one of the city’s best college-preparatory schools for twelve years and thrived. Within its walls, I read Toni Morrison’s work for the first time in a “Nobel Laureates” course, which I took as an elective during my senior year. We began with The Bluest Eye (1970) and reading its pages, I was jolted by a sense of racial solidarity that I had not experienced before. Prior to this moment, I had always been a voracious reader, but the experience of reading was always reactionary; I would empathize with the characters, judge them, even envy them, but never see myself in them. I distinctly remember feeling an overwhelming sense of identification with Pecola Breedlove, particularly her desire for blonde hair and blue eyes, a desire I had also held as a young girl. I had never given much consideration as to why I so longed for these physical attributes as a child, though I knew that my lack of these characteristics was intimately linked to being not white, to being other, to believing that I was inferior because of where my family came from. Suddenly, the hierarchies that had upset me but I had never dared question made sense, giving me comfort that they were not inherently about me as an individual. It had never occurred to me that there were books about people who experienced things I did, shared my confusion about how to navigate my world, looked like me. Reading The Bluest Eye was a revelation—up until that point, I had been taught mostly canonical works and had never thought about why those books 251 were considered to be classics. As my mind opened up to the possibility of reading a different kind of canon, one that not only represented a wide range of minority experiences, but also helped me to understand those experiences, I knew that I wanted to continue what had begun with this novel, leading to my decision to pursue graduate education. Reading African American literature was a gateway into my work on race and minority literature, as none of the educational institutions prior to my doctoral work taught minority literature outside of the African American literary canon. Seeking out books written by minority writers about minority experiences, books that are institutionally invisible, has become a crucial part of my scholarship in a challenge to how we choose what we read, teach, and ultimately value in the academy. Sandtown-Winchester (West Baltimore): April 2015 My mother called me on Monday, April 27, 2015 shortly after mainstream media began reporting on a “situation” close to Mondawmin Mall that was quickly escalating, in no small part due to the hundreds of police in riot gear who thought it was necessary to face off with teenagers who had just been dismissed from school. I had been refreshing my Twitter feed all day. My desire to live in the city has always been a point of contention between me and my mother, despite the fact that my neighborhood has gentrified to the point of being considered one of the nation’s most “hipster” neighborhoods. To my mother, though, it was still Baltimore and it was still the city, the very city that had given her years of stress, fear, and anxiety, so she was concerned, especially in light of the protests responding to Freddie Gray’s murder. To 252 those who do not know my mother or her personal history, it would be easy to write off her concern as symptomatic of paranoia and fear of black bodies who are so often criminalized for no other reason than their skin color. I, myself, am guilty of this dismissive gesture, always writing off her concerns as unfounded, unwarranted, unimportant. In fact, I ended this very conversation by insisting that my mother simply did not understand what was really happening in Baltimore, in the country, in the world. At some point later that evening after my mother and I had hung up, my parents’ commercial building was broken into twice, goods and property stolen, windows smashed, and interior destroyed. While my parents no longer run any of their own business out of the property, they rent out the spaces and collect rent as a significant and crucial portion of their income. She didn’t tell me this had occurred for four days, until I called because I had felt remorseful about my brusque tone when she had expressed her concern about me and about the protests during our earlier conversation. As we talked, I could hear the years of pain in her voice, the frustration, and the helplessness. “I just want to get away from Baltimore,” she said to me, sadly. “Why do they have to destroy?” I felt a wave of guilt, not just for having been dismissive of her earlier in the week, but also for my frequent bouts of moral superiority over the years. How can I look my parents in the face and tell them that black men in masks are not the enemy, but the institution of white supremacy, I, who have never had a gun pointed in my face even once, let alone several times? How can I explain to them that their building being destroyed is not as simple as a group of lawless rioters who lack self-control? How do I, who knows so little about their own 253 struggles, educate them about the struggles of another disenfranchised population of which I am not even a member? How do I, as someone who claims to believe in anti- racist projects of solidarity, community building, and activism, win over my own parents, two people I love and to whom I owe so much, yet agree with so little? And when I try to change their beliefs, what does it mean when I fail? To have those who have the most faith in me disagree with me so wholeheartedly? These are the questions that often overtake my mind as I meditate on the complexities of race and their personal bearings on my life and those I love. These questions trouble me in moments of self-doubt and frustration, but they also drive my work and drive me to be better—a better daughter, a better teacher, a better scholar, a better citizen. Reflections that are at once in progress and ongoing It often feels as if my life has been a series of experiences for which I have lacked the vocabulary to articulate in the moment. At the same time, those very experiences are haunted by my family history, which also lacks a vocabulary simply because so much of it remains unspoken. This is particularly poignant given that my parents have never said the word han in front of me, a word that I did not recognize the first time I heard it, but that I immediately understood as a deeply imbedded part of my own identity. Elaine H. Kim defines han as “a Korean word that means, loosely translated, the sorrow and anger that grow from the accumulated experiences of oppression” (1). While han has a long history for Koreans specifically living on the peninsula, Seo-Young Chu offers a theorization for the ways it imbues the lives of Korean Americans: “But if han is problematic, then postmemory han—the han that 254 flows in the blood of Korean Americans—is infinitely more so. A second-generation Korean American might be haunted by her parents’ anguish, but she would be equally haunted by the knowledge that she herself was not directly victimized by the circumstances that led to such pain” (98). This dialectic of generational trauma has been ever-present, informing not just how I interact with my parents, but also how I understand the intersections of my own identities and experiences. While I have borne witness to some of my parents’ struggles in the States and have heard snippets of their past lives in Korea, I certainly cannot affectively reproduce their fear, their frustration, their disappointment, and their grief. However, these realties, my parents’ own han, deeply and materially shape my own experiences as a Korean American. Chu addresses this question of how memory can at once not be remembered by a particular individual but also form within one’s understanding of one’s familial and ethnic heritage: To some extent, the answer lies in the power of the imagination to respond to historical narratives. Driven to understand her parents' world, the second-generation Korean American might ask them to tell stories about their childhoods. Perhaps she reads autobiographical accounts of the occupation and war. [….] Perhaps she reads fictional accounts of the Japanese occupation in novels. […] Together, these texts evoke images and emotions that amalgamate in her mind to form imaginary “memories” of han. (98) This power of the imagination, particularly when given the space of a literary text, to form memory, is particularly resonant with me, as it was books that first showed me 255 that I was not alone. My own postmemory han, drawn out from a familial memory that I have largely had to reconstruct, is at once a claim to that history and my place in it, as well as a challenge to my omission from it, both because it has been withheld from me through the silence of my parents, and because my age and gender place me at the margins of a larger cultural history. The books I have devoted my graduate career to reading, learning, and studying, are stark counternarratives to my own family’s prized books—the jokbo— which contain the written record of my family’s genealogy, specifically of my father’s side. These bound volumes, spines dusty blue like the color of a Baltimore summer sky made hazy by the Wheelabrator Incinerator and inscribed with Chinese characters that I cannot decipher, tell the story of my father’s lineage with a single name holding the place for each generation dating back centuries: that of the oldest son. While the jokbo was originally maintained for legal purposes related to property and thus, a marker of a particular class, it remains as an official family register, which speaks to its persisting symbolic and material importance. I have only glimpsed these books on the shelf, protected from the environment and prying fingers like mine by sturdy sleeves that are the same faded blue as the spines. I have never seen their covers, which I imagine to be less faded thanks to their protective sleeves, and have certainly never touched their pages. Even if I had, the words inside would be unintelligible, for they would be written in Chinese and perhaps, more recently, in hangul, my mother tongue that I can neither read nor write, and only speak clumsily. Even equipped with the ability to read what lies inside, I know that it would not matter because these books were not meant for me—I was not meant to be included 256 as a reader or as a name that signifies a claim to the family. I am not a part of this story. This physical remnant of Korean primogeniture is a reminder that my family comes from a very different world, one where gender roles are not just suggestive but rigidly maintained, where tightly-held beliefs of racial, ethnic, and cultural purity— Korean minjok—provided a people with a sense of unity and kinship when they lacked political sovereignty until the mid-twentieth century. It is also a reminder that my parents, who are at once Korean nationals and U.S. citizens, are also caught between two nations and two desires—to assimilate and be successful by achieving the American Dream, but also to remain true to their Korean heritage, even if they had to relinquish their official ties of citizenship in order to make this new strange country their home. And finally, it is a reminder that, despite growing up in a rigidly patriarchal culture, my parents have always wanted me to succeed and be happy in ways that would not have been possible or even desired for a daughter in their time. Growing up with my immigrant parents, I was never “properly” prepared for the realities of being racially other within the United States. My parents, born and raised in South Korea, faced their own hardships, but coming from a country whose population is highly homogenous both racially and ethnically, neither of my parents had the moment of racial self-realization that I had as a young girl. At the time, I naïvely thought I had just been dense for not realizing the differences between me and the white girls at school. I tried my best to erase those differences, desperately trying to fit in at my elite, all-girls private school, where the other students were predominantly white and extremely privileged. Furthermore, I never thought to discuss my discomfort with my difference with anyone as my parents had made it 257 quite clear that I should be exceedingly proud of my Koreanness, and I was under the impression that my experience of feeling shame and unease with my difference was mine alone. Reading, however, made me realize that my own experience was part of a larger phenomenon and that I was certainly not alone in tripping over the color line. I was not the only one who had the distinct memory of realizing that I was not white and the overwhelming disappointment, shame, confusion, and sense of helplessness that ensued. I was not the only one who struggled with existing between the world of my parents and the world in which I was born. I was not the only one who, through the institutionalization of racial difference and white supremacy, was led to believe that not being white meant being of less value and therefore, I should strive to be more like my white peers in every aspect of how I lived my daily life. And, I was not the only one to realize the extreme fallacy of such strivings and stand up to them with pride and defiance. These discoveries were at once comforting and alarming. While I was thankful that I was, in fact, not alone in my experiences, I was also angry not only that I had been born into a country that systematizes such hierarchies, but also that I had fallen for the idea of white superiority so willingly. In books, I increasingly found replicated variations of what I had felt and experienced, especially as I became more mindful of the texts I chose to read. Through reading, I found comfort and validation, a place to explore what I did not know how to say, what I was afraid to reveal to others. In many ways, this dissertation is a breaking of my own silence, a first attempt to give a language to those experiences for which I lacked the words to utter in my earlier days. In reading and thinking through these texts, in trying to make sense of 258 these imaginative worlds, I was also able to make sense of my own. It is also my attempt “to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair” as tasked by Baldwin in my first epigraph and to try to “know what survives, what’s handed down” as Kim describes in my second epigraph. Though there are gaps and silences around my family history and the larger history of immigrant experiences in the United States, my hope is that, through reading and imagining, we can begin reconstructing a different kind of story that bears witness quite literally to what is observable and knowable. My parents could not have prepared me for this educational journey that has been entwined with my own personal history, but they certainly paved the way with their courage, their hard work, and their sacrifices. Though they may not fully agree with the spirit of this project, nor fully absorb the import of its words, that was precisely what they invested in: my intellectual and personal journey, which they could not control, the fruit of which unfolds in this dissertation. In looking to their past—our past—I hope to contribute to the growing archive that represents and insists upon the value of wide-ranging minority experiences as a part of our national and global imaginary. My parents’ physical and emotional labor has made possible my intellectual labor. These pages I dedicate to them. 259 Bibliography Ahlin, Lena. The “New Negro” in the Old World: Culture and Performance in James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. Lund University Press, 2006. 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