The Literature of Immigration and Racial Formation: Becoming White, Becoming Other, Becoming American in the Late Progressive Era (American Popular History and Culture (Routledge (Firm)).)

STUDIES IN AMERICAN POPULAR HlSTORY AND CULTURE

Edited by Jerome Nadelhaft University of Maine

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

STUDIES IN AMERICAN POPULAR HISTORY AND CULTURE JEROME NADELHAFT, General Editor THE FACTORY GIRL AND THE SEAMSTRESS Imagining Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century American Fiction Amal Amireh WRITING JAZZ Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s Nicholas M.Evans AUTOMOBILITY Social Changes in the American South, 1909±1939 Corey T.Lesseig ACTORS AND ACTIVISTS Politics, Performance, and Exchange Among Social Worlds David A.Schlossman STUDIES IN THE LAND The Northeast Corner David C.Smith FIRST Do No HARM Empathy and the Writing of Medical Journal Articles Mary E.Knatterud PIETY AND POWER Gender and Religious Culture in the American Colonies, 1630± 1700 Leslie Lindenauer

RACE-ING MASCULINITY Identity in Contemporary U.S. Men's Writing John Christopher Cunningham CRIME AND THE NATION Prison Reform and Popular Fiction in Philadelphia, 1786± 1800 Peter Okun FOOD IN FILM A Culinary Performance of Communication Jane Ferry DECONSTRUCTING POSTWWII NEW YORK CITY The Literature, Art, Jazz and Architecture of an Emerging Global Capital Robert Bennett RETHINKING THE RED SCARE The Lusk Committee and New York's Crusade against Radicalism, 1919±1923 Todd J.Pfannestiel HOLLYWOOD AND THE RISE OF PHYSICAL CULTURE Heather Addison HOMELESSNESS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE Romaticism, Realism, and Testimony

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John Allen No WAY OF KNOWING Crime, Urban Legends, and the Internet Pamela Donovan THE MAKING OF THE PRIMITIVE BAPTISTS

A Cultural and Intellectual History of the Antimission Movement, 1800±1840 James R.Mathis WOMEN AND COMEDY IN SOLO PERFORMANCE Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, and Roseanne Suzanne Lavin

THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION Becoming White, Becoming Other, Becoming American in the Late Progressive Era

Linda Joyce Brown

ROUTLEDGE New York & London

Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street NewYork, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 2004 by Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by an electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN 0-203-32772-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-94931-9 (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Linda Joyce, 1967The literature of immigration and racial formation : becoming white, becoming other, becoming American in the late Progressive Era / Linda Joyce Brown. p. cm. —(Studies in American popular history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-94931-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Emigration and immigration in literature. 3. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Immigrants’ writings, American—History and criticism. 5. Difference (Psychology) in literature. 6. Passing (Identity) in literature. 7. Women immigrants in literature. 8. Ethnicity in literature. 9. Whites in literature. 10. Race in literature. I. Title. II. Series: American popular history and culture (Routledge (Firm)) PS228.E55B76 2004 810.9′3522′09041–dc22 2004001247

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For Al Cheverine and For my parents, Mary Dostert Brown and Paul Asa Brown

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface Questioning Race, Questioning Whiteness

xi

Chapter One

Introduction: Race, Whiteness, and Women Immigrants

1

Chapter Two

Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin’s Claim to Assimilation

29

Chapter Three

“Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other?” Monolithic Identity and Ethnic Construction in the Fiction and Autobiography of Sui Sin Far

59

Chapter Four

“This hideous little pickaninny” and the Formation of Bohemian Whiteness: Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia

85

Epilogue The Legacy of Progressive Era Racial Formation and the Re-Racialization of Immigrant Bodies

109

Notes

117

Works Cited

127

Index

135

Acknowledgments

While completing this book, I was assisted by a Professional Development Support Grant from the Office for Academic Affairs at Mitchell College. I also was able to present an early version of my epilogue with support from a Graduate Project and Travel Grant from the University of New Mexico’s Office of Graduate Studies. A number of people guided, challenged, assisted, and supported me while I worked on this book. I owe a debt of gratitude to them all. I especially wish to thank Minrose Gwin, the chair of my dissertation committee at the University of New Mexico, for her careful reading and thoughtful advice on my work. I am particularly grateful for her patience and encouragement through the long writing process. I could not ask for a better mentor. I also wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Christine Sierra, Patricia Clark Smith, Shane Phelan, and Jesse Alemán, for their helpful suggestions throughout this project. This book is much stronger because of them. Thanks also to SueAnn Schatz, Ruth Salvaggio, and Carolyn Woodward who offered valuable critique on some early chapter drafts. Ruth Higgins deserves thanks for generously assisting me with editing (and giving up a holiday weekend to do it!). Karen Ward helped with graphics formatting, and my editor at Routledge, Kimberly Guinta, was always quick to respond to my many questions about the publication process. Thanks! My colleagues at Mitchell College Library have graciously helped me find and acquire the sources I needed. Thanks and kudos especially to Tara Borden Samul. Others have helped me on this project both directly and indirectly. I especially wish to thank my parents, Paul Asa Brown and Mary Dostert Brown who offered material support at a crucial point in my work and who also inspired me by believing in the value of education.

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The kindness and welcome offered me by Amy and David Cheverine sustain me. Thank you! Finally, I thank Al Cheverine, a most generous reader and a constant source of inspiration. Your support and encouragement make it all worth-while. REPRINT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express appreciation for permission to reprint several lines from the following: Rina Ferrarelli, “Emigrant/Immigrant I.” First published in Looking for Home. Ed Deborah Keenan and Roseann Lloyd. (Milkweed Editions, 1990), 61. A different version of this book’s epilogue was originally published in journal form. This work originally appeared in The Centennial Review, Vol. 41, No. 3, 1997, published by Michigan State University Press.

Preface Questioning Race, Questioning Whiteness

Two separate personal experiences inspired my original interest in critical race theory and in critical whiteness studies in particular. Both of these incidents occurred in the early 1990s while I was beginning graduate school, and both raised questions for which I had no easy answers. In many ways, this study has been my attempt to work through the questions that these experiences presented. The first incident occurred as a male friend and I were walking along a downtown street in Eugene, Oregon. Two young men passed us, walking in the opposite direction. As the men passed, the closest man leaned toward me and said very quietly, loud enough for me but not my friend to hear, “race traitor.” My friend is Japanese American; my ancestors were primarily European. At the time, certainly, I immediately saw the racism in the man’s remark; only later did I begin to examine the assumptions inherent in the man’s words. I have come to connect them with some of the ideas about racial formation that I discuss in this book.1 Here are some of the assumptions that I have imagined the man in Oregon to hold: he assumed that my friend and I were a couple (we were walking closely together, I remember, perhaps arm-in-arm), and inherent in that assumption is the supposition that we were both heterosexual. The man, I imagine, assumed that I was “white” and that my friend was “Oriental.” Most specifically relevant to this project, I think, are these assumptions: the man saw my companion as a racial threat to his concept of “America,” and he saw me as a traitor because I was reneging on my supposed promise as a white woman to be one of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty has termed the “reproducers of the nation” (27). The very fact that I could make “sense” of the man’s two-word comment suggests that essentialized racial discourse is not just familiar to a handful of extremists. That the man bothered to address his comment to me—rather than simply thinking it or addressing it to his

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companion—implies that he was fully aware that the concept of race he expressed continues to have currency. Furthermore, he was not making reference to some archaic racial system: the threat he perceived—of miscegenation, of the blurring of divisions in his racially stratified world—as well as the warning of danger that I felt viscerally were very much of the moment. Beyond showing that essentialized racial ideology continues to carry weight in our society, however, the experience highlights that both my friend and myself are implicated in that ideology. My friend, because he is part of a racially defined minority in the United States, was already aware of this: when, after the men had passed, I told him what had been said, he expressed anger but hardly seemed surprised. For me, someone who has had the privilege afforded most white people of focusing on race or ignoring it as I choose, the experience emphasized that whether or not I have been aware of it on a daily basis, race affects who I am in the world, how I am perceived, what privileges I am allowed. The second incident that inspired my work on race occurred while I was teaching introductory expository writing. I had asked the students to break up into small groups and to discuss their cultural backgrounds. Specifically, I asked them to identify their cultural heritages and to describe several examples of the values or customs that they received from their families or their culture more broadly; in other words, what do you believe, what do you practice, and from where do you get these traditions? Many of the students in the class were of primarily European descent, and, since the texts that we were reading in the class included writings by people of diverse cultural backgrounds, I was worried by a tendency toward generalization that I had noticed in previous classes; I did not want European-American students to read an essay by an African American, for example, and assume “So this is what black people think.” In “Talkin’ That Talk,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains that “‘racism’ exists when one generalizes about the attributes of an individual (and treats him or her accordingly). Such generalizations are based upon a predetermined set of causes or effects thought to be shared by all members of a physically defined group who are assumed to share certain ‘metaphysical’ characteristics” (403–4). Hoping to highlight the problems inherent in racial generalization, I asked the students to identify their specific backgrounds in order to show the diversity that exists even within a small group. The assignment, I thought immediately afterward, was an utter failure. A few students came up with the kind of answers that my agenda begged. A Vietnamese-American student spoke of her religious

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beliefs; a Nez Perce student shared his ideas about family life. Most European-American students, though, came up with very little. “I’m just white,” was a response, as was “My family is mainstream American.” If anything, the exercise seemed to reaffirm that white people are white and that other people have culture. Since this classroom experience, I have come to question why so many European Americans claim an identity that is at the same time indefinable and a coherent “given.” Why did so many EuropeanAmerican students have trouble getting specific about their cultural histories? Why did a question about culture evoke the vocabulary of race (“I’m just white”) and national identity (“mainstream American”)? Why did many of my students see their own identities—whether expressed in cultural, racial, or nationalist terms—as normative, while the young man who called me a “race traitor” marked both me and the friend with whom I walked with clearly racial identity tags? Not all of the questions raised by these two experiences are answerable within the scope of a single book. Instead, I mention them not only to explain my personal investment in this project but also to emphasize some of what is at stake in contemporary investigations into the history of race. Both of the experiences I mention here emphasize the need to understand how ideas of race have been formulated, to explore how those formulations intersect with formulations of other axes of identity such as sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and class, and to investigate just how these formulations both feed off and form actions, whether those actions are spontaneous racist remarks or the formalization of government policies on immigration. In this study, I have chosen to examine the literature of immigration in the Progressive Era of U.S. history.2 Historians tend to disagree about the precise dates spanned by the Progressive Era. Rogers M. Smith has noted that, “Though scholars dispute what progressivism was, few deny that both major parties and American politics generally changed during the first two decades of the twentieth century in ways that comprise a distinct Progressive Era” (410). Smith, acknowledging that his closing date is somewhat arbitrary, puts the dates at 1898–1912. Others have described Progressivism beginning as early as 1890 and extending as late as the 1920s. The beginning and closing dates of the era might be best determined dependent on one’s historical focus. If focusing on the women’s suffrage movement during the time, for example, one could convincingly argue that 1919 serves to mark the end of the Progressive Era. When discussing immigration, as I do here, 1924 might better serve as a closing date, as this was the year that Congress

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passed the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act), the most restrictive immigration legislation to date. When I refer to the Progressive Era, I am less concerned with a specific set of dates than with contextualizing my discussion within an historical period characterized by social and political reforms as well as, as I shall show, extreme xenophobia and heightened debate about racial classification of immigrants. My interest in the literature of immigration of this period stems from my desire to better understand how racial categories have been formed and transformed. The first two decades of the twentieth century are an especially fruitful period for such an examination, as this period abounded with debate over racial definitions and over who was “fit” to become an American, as I shall show in the following chapter. While the formations of race during the Progressive Era that I examine in this study are not the same as formations of race at the turn into the twenty-first century, I work under the assumption that those earlier formations have influenced the latter and that they still have resonance. This book investigates how the seemingly separate categorical systems of race, ethnicity, gender, and national identity intersect in the formation of “whiteness” in the United States. More specifically, I examine how texts by and/or about women immigrants construct racial, ethnic, and national subjectivities, how these subjectivities infuse the changing definition of whiteness in the early twentieth century, and how these texts reify and resist hegemonic racial ideology. Throughout, my project has been strongly influenced by critical race theory, feminist theories of difference, and recent endeavors to better understand the social construction of whiteness. In my first chapter, “Race, Whiteness, and Women Immigrants,” I survey some of these recent developments in critical race theory, especially regarding the construction of whiteness. I also survey historical iterations of race in the United States, looking particularly at the range of racial discourse in the Progressive Era. I then explain my focus on women writers, arguing that understanding how women have been constructed racially is crucial to understanding processes of racial formation. I close this chapter by discussing how literary texts may be read as “racial projects” and how this kind of reading can increase our knowledge both of the literature and of the historical production of race. My second chapter, “Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin’s Claim to Assimilation,” examines Mary Antin’s autobiography The Promised Land (1912). Overtly, as a number of critics have noted, Antin’s autobiography is a celebration of immigrant assimilability crafted to counter the xenophobic ideology that was prevalent during the

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Progressive Era. What few critics have recognized, however, is how Antin subverts her own celebratory narrative to question both the possibility and desirability of full assimilation. She accomplishes this primarily by creating an autobiographical immigrant subject that reveals more complexity than most critics have acknowledged. Antin shows herself as becoming an unmarked “American” subject—a participant in the socially constructed category of “whiteness”—at the same time that she marks her autobiographical self in terms of gender and cultural affiliations. As I argue, however, Antin undermines the equation between becoming white and becoming American when she questions the possibility of complete assimilation and subverts the white American autobiographical pattern. In “‘Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other?’: Monolithic Identity and Ethnic Construction in the Fiction and Autobiography of Sui Sin Far,” I argue that Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) creates a dialogue between a racialized Chinese identity and the invention of an ethnic identity, Chinese American, as she negotiates between narrative layers in her writing. My reading focuses on several of Sui Sin Far’s short stories from Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) as well as her autobiographical essay “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909) in order to show how Sui Sin Far’s fiction and autobiography fully engage in the processes of constructing ethnicity and questioning the racial essentialism of her time. Because systems of racial categorization at the time she was writing were much less malleable for Asian immigrants than for European immigrants, Sui Sin Far cannot claim, as Mary Antin did for eastern Europeans, that Chinese immigrants could be accepted as white. Instead, she de-essentializes racial categories, in particular the supposedly dichotomous categories of Oriental and white, at the same time that she emphasizes ethnic difference by creating a Chinese-American identity. In my fourth chapter, “This hideous little pickaninny’ and the Formation of Bohemian Whiteness: Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia,” I argue that Cather constructs the character of Ántonia both as an ethnically-marked Bohemian and as a white American. By creating Án-tonia this way, Cather affirms an American identity that, for all of its ethnic markers, becomes racially solidified as white and, hence, normative. When Cather constructs European Americans as ethnically diverse but racially unified she sidesteps eugenicists’ claims of Nordic superiority, claims that were gaining in popularity during the 1910s. In doing so, Cather presents an optimistic but problematic cultural pluralism similar to that advocated by other

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progressive thinkers of the time. Cather, however, can only disrupt one construct of racial difference by reaffirming another. Ántonia’s Bohemian whiteness is made possible, I argue, by an important yet often overlooked scene in the middle of the novel. In this scene, “the Negro pianist” Blind d’Arnault entertains the young men and women of the town of Black Hawk. It is only because black Otherness is reified through the character of Blind d’Arnault that the Bohemian Ántonia can enter into whiteness. Thus, while Cather presents a novel that is optimistic about the contribution of the “new immigrants,” she cannot escape the racial binaries of colonialist discourse.3 I close this study with an epilogue that addresses some of the changes in racial formation during the past two decades. In this chapter I contrast the recent developments in critical understanding of race and whiteness with less promising representations of race in popular media. I look specifically at an issue of Time magazine from the early 1990s in which biological racial categories, similar to those I locate in the Progressive Era, are reified through a computer-generated, “hyperreal” immigrant image on the magazine’s cover. This image reveals both how racial essentialism continues to have popular salience and how the textual strategies of racial formation have changed since the Progressive Era. At the heart of this study lies the assumption that whiteness is not a stable, unified category of human classification. Instead, whiteness, like other racially-defined groupings, is an ever-shifting terrain, one that has changed markedly since the nineteenth century and continues to evolve as we move into the twenty-first. Furthermore, I work under the assumption that the history of immigration is crucial to understanding shifts in the terrain of whiteness, and to understanding processes of racial formation more generally. Upon arrival in the United States, immigrants enter into the racial fabric of the country and change that fabric. While processes of racial formation are always in-progress for U.S.-born citizens as well as for immigrants, focusing on immigrants allows us to look at a crucial moment in the racial formation process, a moment when racial assignment occurs and when individuals negotiate for a specific racial assignment and/or try to construct an identity in relationship to that assignment. As the chapters in this book make clear, texts by and about new immigrants to the United States can reveal how these processes occur. In focusing on immigrants’ relationships to whiteness, I am not attempting to assert an overarching theory of the formation of whiteness. Indeed, the differing approaches to theorizing whiteness offered by theorists in recent years reveal that the formation

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of whiteness is complex, multifold, and often fragmentary. My approach is necessarily selective; I do not attempt to address all, or even most, of the ways that whiteness has formed. Instead, I view my analysis as one part of a larger project of better understanding racial formation and, more specifically, the construction of whiteness. Examining cultural production by and about immigrants during the late Progressive Era allows us to better understand constructions of racial difference and their relationship to subjectivity during a critical period in the formation of whiteness and consequently to better understand some of the processes by which race, more generally, is formed.

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Chapter One Introduction: Race, Whiteness, and Women Immigrants

Farm by farm, township by township, the displacement of the American goes on—a quiet conquest, without spear or trumpet, a conquest made by child-bearing women. Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New The term race, used in reference to human categorization, has existed in the English language since at least the sixteenth century.1 The connotations and cultural meanings of race, however, have hardly remained stable since its first usages. While this study cannot attempt to cover all of the changes in the definitions of the words race and whiteness since their earliest uses in English, it is important to note some significant changes in European and American conceptions of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1735, Swedish botanist Carl von Linnaeus divided humans into four subspecies in his famous Systema Naturae (Tucker 9). Linnaeus’s system of classification relies on the identifying qualities of skin color, kind of civilization, and place of origin. Thus, Linnaeus’s notion of race is not solely a biologically-based one. Influenced by Linnaeus, both biologists and anthropologists in the nineteenth century attempted to develop a more “scientific” system of racial categorization. In doing so, they frequently shunned qualitative criteria such as a person’s system of beliefs in favor of what was supposed to be more easily quantifiable data such as skin color, stature, and cranial shape. These pseudo-scientific methods of classification were used to justify assumptions about moral and intellectual differences between races2 But while the moral connotations of certain racial categories—most notably the assumed binary of “white” and “black”—remain similar in different systems of racial categorization, the systems themselves vary greatly. I innaeus posited four racial categories; Arthur Comte de

2 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

Gobineau focused on three, with a dominant Aryan sub-race (1855); other writers have proposed at least forty-five distinct races (Reports of the Immigration Commission 5: 3); in nineteenth-century America, legal codes often recognized only “white,” “Negro,” and “Indian” (Omi and Winant 82). In some of these systems, the term white applies to anyone of European origin as well as people from certain regions of Asia. In other classificatory systems, white refers only to people of European descent. In still other systems, people from different parts of Europe are separately classified, and only those from north-western Europe are considered fully “white.”3 While scientists and anthropologists continued to debate how to racially classify humans, few doubted that humans could be classified based on observable, biological criteria,4 and by the end of the nineteenth century, the debate about racial classification became central to issues of American immigration. In the middle of the nineteenth century, increased immigration from Ireland caused significant public backlash, prompting restrictionist groups such as the Know Nothings to form and inflaming discussions of Irish racial inferiority. While this discourse of Irish racial inferiority continued through the nineteenth century, during the second half of the century, debates over the racial categorization of people of European descent often seem to be eclipsed following abolition and the increased immigration of laborers from Asia, particularly from China. Although the definition of who was “white”—and therefore considered desirable as an immigrant—was nebulous during this time, the definition of who was racially Other became ever more solidified. While citizenship in the United States has been racially based almost since the nation’s inception (Mohanty 24), the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first law banning immigration of a specific racially-defined group.5 Thus, during the second half of the nineteenth century, we can see the codification of racially-based immigration policy. The increase in emigration from eastern and southern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century prompted a renewal of debate over the racial status of these immigrants and their consequent fitness for assimilation. Many minority groups such as African Americans, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, Asian immigrants and their descendants, and American Indians were routinely classified by their racial “Otherness”; however, the status of the “new” immigrants from eastern and southern Europe remained a question in scientific and legal venues as well as in popular thought.6 This debate over the racial status of Europeans emerged in numerous forms of cultural production.

INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 3

The “increasing fragmentation and hierarchical ordering of distinct white races (now in the plural),” Matthew Frye Jacobson explains, “was theorized in the rarified discourses of science, but it was also reflected in literature, visual arts, caricature, political oratory, penny journalism, and myriad other venues of popular culture” (41). To better understand the shifting terrains of race and whiteness in U.S. history, it should prove useful at this point to turn to recent developments in critical race theory that have focused on this history. I will then return to a discussion of how race, and whiteness specifically, was theorized during the late Progressive Era. CONTEMPORARY THEORIES OF RACE The critical study of whiteness and white privilege is a relatively new phenomenon, stemming largely from the emergence and development of critical race theory. While scientists have known for some time that race is useless as a biological concept, race continues to form and organize lives, even while the practices of our lives form and organize race itself. Put another way, race, while signifying nothing concrete or scientifically meaningful, continues to both signify and have cultural significance. As Gates puts it, “When we speak of ‘the white race’ or ‘the black race,’ ‘the Jewish race’ or ‘the Aryan race,’ we speak in biological misnomers and, more generally, in metaphors. Nevertheless, our conversations are replete with usages of race which have their sources in the dubious pseudoscience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (“Writing ‘Race5” 4). This passage comes from Gates’s introduction to “Race,” Writing, and Difference, a collection of essays originally published in a 1985 volume of Critical Inquiry and edited by Gates into a book that has had significant influence in the field of critical race theory, particularly in its applications to the study of racial representation and language. Gates’s introduction to the collection along with his concluding essay “Talkin’ That Talk” worked to contextualize and foreground the issues that have become central to critical race theory and its application to language and literature—“the complex interplay among race, writing, and difference” (“Writing ‘Race’” 15)— and led to further studies of this interplay. Most significant to this study, Gates’s writing, as well as the essays collected in the volume, shift the examination of race onto the terrain where it belongs, and in doing so raise a number of questions: Given that race is a social construction, how and why is it constructed and maintained? By and for whom? What roles do language and literature play in that construction?

4 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

And what possibilities do they offer us for resisting hegemonic racial constructions? Other writers who place the construction, or in their own words the for mation, of race at the center of concern are Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Similar to Gates’s earlier study, Omi and Winant question notions of race as an “objective term of classification,” concluding that Attempts to discern the scientific meaning of race…seek to remove the concept of race from the historical context in which it arose and developed. They employ an essentialist approach which suggests instead that the truth of race is a matter of innate characteristics, of which skin color and other physical attributes provide only the most obvious, and in some respects most superficial, indicators. (64; emphasis in original) Rather than employ such an essentialist idea of race, these authors suggest, we need to analyze race precisely in relation to “the historical context in which it arose and developed.” Omi and Winant argue against using ethnicity-, class-, and nationbased theories alone to explain the construction of race in the United States. Noting that “race and racial dynamics in the United States have been theoretically understood by relying on one of three central categories: ethnicity, class, or nation” (11–2), Omi and Winant go on to argue that none of these paradigms has been sufficient to allow us to understand race. In particular, they claim that ethnicity theory has overly relied on analogies with patterns of European immigration, consequently not accounting for “any special circumstances which racially defined minorities encounter in the U.S.” (22). Furthermore, Omi and Winant take issue with the ways that ethnicity theory has been applied to blacks; “with rare exceptions,” they note, “ethnicity theory isn’t very interested in ethnicity among blacks. The ethnicity approach views blacks as one ethnic group among others. It does not consider national origin, religion, language, or other cultural differences among blacks, as it does among whites, as sources of ethnicity” (22). While Omi and Winant also note that ethnicity theory has provided useful insights, they ultimately claim that it does not adequately explain or account for race. Because “ethnic group-, class-, and nation-based perspectives all neglect the specificity of race as an autonomous field of social conflict, political organization, and cultural/ideological meaning” (48), Omi and Winant propose a new model for understanding race, that

INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 5

of “racial formation.” Their text is devoted to studying this “sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (55). I find Omi and Winant’s discussion of racial formation useful to an examination of representations of turn-of-the-century immigration for several reasons. First, it allows us to escape the dangerous trap of essentializing x racial difference. But it also allows us to avoid equating race with culture, an equation that works, as Anthony Appiah notes, to biologize “what is culture, or ideology” (36; emphasis in original). Furthermore, the concept of racial formation lets us examine the sociopolitics of formations of racial difference. As Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L.Gilman point out in their essay “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism” (1991), racial categories “had material weight in the lives of individuals and groups; racial identities were embodied in political practices of discrimination and law, and affected people’s access to education, forms of employment, political rights, and subjective experience” (73). Referring specifically to the scientific discourse on race, the authors add that it “was one of the most authoritative languages through which meaning was encoded, and as a language it had political and social, as well as intellectual consequence” (73). Stepan and Gilman make it clear that the effects of racial categories on people’s lives are wide ranging, but they also emphasize that the practices of encoding difference, what Omi and Winant would consider projects of racial formation, impact the way that “society is organized and ruled” (Omi and Winant 56). Thus, examining the processes of racial formation at work in the discourses of immigration can provide a more textured picture of the relationship between those discourses and structures of power. While writers such as Gates, Omi and Winant, Stepan and Gilman, and Appiah have theorized how racial difference in general has been formed and articulated, in recent years other writers have turned their focus to understanding the development of specific racial categories, including whiteness. These writers largely respond to the problem of seeing whiteness as normative or, perhaps more accurately, the problem of not seeing whiteness at all. One of the earlier theorists to call attention to white privilege was Peggy McIntosh. In “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies” (1988), McIntosh draws parallels between the two forms of privilege in her essay’s title as she attempts to unpack the “invisible knapsack” of white privilege. Grounding her discussion in her own experiences, McIntosh develops a

6 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

tentative list of some conditions of her day-to-day existence that are determined by her race. She also begins to examine what “privilege” itself is. Noting that “we usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned, or conferred by birth or luck,” she goes on to distinguish between “unearned advantage” and “conferred dominance,” both of which constitute white privilege in the United States (296–7). Reflecting that the silence surrounding privilege is what keeps inequitable systems of power in place, McIntosh ends her essay with a call to end this silence and to work to “reconstruct power systems on a broader base” (299). One writer and researcher who seems to have heeded McIntosh’s call is Ruth Frankenberg. Like McIntosh, Frankenberg rejects the idea that race is a problem solely for racially-defined minorities; rather, she begins her work with the assumption that both “white people and people of color live racially structured lives” (1; emphasis in original). Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993) offers detailed accounts of what it means to be a white woman in the United States. Frankenberg’s analysis is based on interviews with self-identified white women on how race shapes their lives. Frankenberg makes her project explicit from the outset: she aims to begin “exploring, mapping, and examining the terrain of whiteness” (1). While rejecting the idea that racism is solely a problem for raciallydefined minorities and not an issue for those who identify as “white,” Frankenberg sets out to make whiteness visible and socially specific instead of normative. To do so, she focuses her interviews and her analyses of them on specific aspects of white women’s experiences, paying special attention to the complexities of race as experienced through childhood, in interracial relationships, and through parenting. Frankenberg’s study is informed both by critical race theory— particularly that of Omi and Winant—and socialist feminist theory. The three paradigms of white race consciousness that she outlines stem directly from her observations of twentieth-century feminism and also reflect the views of the women she interviews. Frankenberg names these paradigms (or mo ments or discourses, as she alternately calls them): essentialist racism, color and power evasion, and race cognizance (14–5). The first of these, essential ist racism, refers to what many Americans today would consider racism: a belief in essential, biological, and hierarchical inequality of races. Frankenberg sees the second paradigm as characterized by claims of “color-blindness” and evasion of power inequalities; it is epitomized by the belief that we are all “the same under the skin” (14). Despite “the best intentions of its

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adherents,” color-blindness, which Frankenberg shows intersecting with liberal humanism, “preserves the power structure inherent in essentialist racism” (147). The third paradigm, and the one that holds the most hope for confronting racism, “insists once again on difference” but does not define difference hierarchically or essentially. The terms of “race cognizance” are articulated by people of color, and inequality refers to social structure, not to essentialized racial difference (14–5). Frankenberg is careful to point out that, while one can often trace these three paradigms to specific historic and political moments, they can also exist concurrently, and a single person can articulate multiple discourses (143, 157, 189).7 This last idea is particularly relevant to my project. The historical period that I examine here can be seen as an era predominated by hegemonic, essentialist racism; however, Frankenberg’s definition of these three paradigms can help a reader of early twentieth-century literature see the intricacies of racial discourse during this time. Since multiple discourses on race can exist simultaneously, a reader is reminded to look for disruptive discourses on race, paradigms that resist or subvert dominant ideology, operating within other repressive discourses on race. I will return to this idea when I discuss literary texts as racial projects later in this chapter. Frankenberg’s specificity about what constitutes whiteness is also particularly useful to a study of the formation of racial categories. Frankenberg carefully defines whiteness, providing a definition that is too often missing or left implicit in earlier discussions of race and racism in the United States. Whiteness, Frankenberg argues, is defined by a set of three “linked dimensions”: “First, whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. Second, it is a ‘standpoint,’ a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others and at society. Third, ‘whiteness’ refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” (1). Since publishing White Women, Race Matters, Frankenberg’s definition of whiteness has evolved, especially regarding the extent to which whiteness is “unmarked and unnamed.” As she notes in her later essay “The Mirage of Unmarked Whiteness” (2001), upon scrutiny, “the notion of whiteness as unmarked norm is revealed to be a mirage or indeed, to put it even more strongly, a white delusion” (73). Thus, while whiteness has been formed in such a way to make it invisible to many people who are considered white, it can be fully visible to people who have a different relationship to the centers of power.

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Frankenberg frequently uses the term cultural practice, rather than culture alone, to emphasize the activity involved in the formation of culture. Culture does not refer to a bounded space, a “thing” that individuals either possess or do not, but rather refers to a wide range of activity that is not “separate from material life” White Women, Race Matters (192). Frankenberg’s definition allows for understanding whiteness as something that is always in the process of change and that is always place-specific and time-specific. Thus, for example, when the Russian-Jewish immigrant Mary Antin describes idolizing American patriots, as I discuss in the following chapter, she is limning a cultural practice that is part of her repertoire of whiteness in the early twentiethcentury United States. Worshiping dead pa triots is as much a cultural practice as was Antin’s earlier chanting of the songs of David in the Pale of Russia. However, composing a patriotic poem on George Washington, as Antin did, might not be as salient as a white cultural practice in present-day New Mexico, say, as it was in Antin’s Boston, and it almost certainly would not be a white cultural practice in a country other than the United States. Frankenberg’s definition of whiteness suggests that such place-specific and time-specific cultural practices work to structure racial identities. While writers such as McIntosh and Frankenberg have sought to discover what whiteness means in the lives of contemporary Americans, other theorists of whiteness have turned their attention to the historical development of whiteness as a racial category. One of the most ambitious and influential of these recent works is Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race. Published in 1994, the first volume of Allen’s Invention, subtitled Ra cial Oppression and Social Control, presents a sustained comparison between race in the North American colonies and in Ireland. Allen concludes volume one by describing the “sea change” experienced by Irish immigrants to the United States, as they were transformed from victims of racial oppression to upholders of slavery. In volume two, subtitled The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (1997), Allen focuses more directly on the formation of whiteness in the American colonies. Allen, a member of the “socio-economic” school of historians, begins volume one of his two-volume treatise with a vehement argument against the “psycho-cultural” school of thought on the origins of slavery and racism. In the “psycho-cultural” tradition (Allen singles out Winthrop Jordan and Carl Degler as representatives), racial slavery is seen to stem from preexisting racially-based prejudices held by Europeans and their American descendants. Allen considers this

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psycho-cultural position not only inaccurate but also dangerous to current conceptions of race: if racism is innate, there is little hope for changing racist attitudes and practices. In addition, he argues against those socio-economic historians who view racism as providing actual benefits for European Americans; instead, Allen argues, racism offers what he characterizes as “illusory” benefits, in the form of racial privileges, but not concrete improvement such as an escape from propertylessness, in the lives of the majority of European Americans. Allen summarizes his criticism of these two views of racism: “whether racism be ‘natural born’ in European-Americans, or whether it be the function of actual (as against illusory) benefits for all ‘whites’ as a result of racial oppression, the implications for ridding our society of the curse of racism are equally unfavorable” (1:19). Instead, Allen argues, the “invention” of whiteness and the consequent racially-based form that oppression took in the colonies that were to become the United States were deliberate political acts of the ruling class. Building on Edmund S. Morgan’s argument (American Slavery—American Free dom, 1975), Allen sees Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–7) as a turning point in American racial history. During Bacon’s Rebellion, bond laborers of both African and European descent joined forces against the aristocracy. In response to this proletarian threat, the ruling class instituted racially-based slavery in place of bond servitude, the indentured servitude of both African and European workers. By allowing certain proletarians, European workers and their descendants, to share in privileges based on skin color, as Allen explores in detail in volume two, the ruling class disrupted the possibility of proletarian solidarity, providing the ruling class with a system of social control that nominally included poor “whites” but that ultimately consolidated power for the ruling class. Perhaps the most important aspect of Allen’s work is his persuasively argued insistence that “whiteness” did not simply emerge as a socially salient category by chance or accident but instead was deliberately “invented” by the ruling class. This thesis alone provokes interesting questions. If racial difference was a conscious invention, how did it come to be seen by so many as a “natural” phenomenon? How were different groups of European immigrants adopted into the system of whiteness when its benefits, as Allen shows, were illusory and did not involve, at least for immigrant workers, material improvement in their lives? And if whiteness were invented to preserve the power of the ruling class and to establish the slave/ocracy, how did abolition affect the systems of racial difference in the United States? Not all of these questions are

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within the scope of this project. The last two of these questions, however, have been addressed by other writers in the 1990s, including historian David R. Roediger. In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), Roediger focuses primarily on the formation of whiteness immediately preceding the American Revolution and through abolition in the nineteenth century. Roediger’s starting point is a premise suggested by W.E.B.Du Bois in Black Reconstruction: that whiteness has functioned as a “psychological wage” for white workers, a privilege to compensate for “alienating and exploitative class relationships” (Roediger 13). This “psychological wage” fits nicely with the “illusory” benefits of whiteness discussed by Theodore Allen. Also like Allen, Roediger sees the proletariat as central to the development of race in the United States. According to Roediger, the formation of the working class is indivisible from “the systematic development of a sense of whiteness” (8). Unlike Allen, however, Roediger, is particularly concerned with the psychoanalytic dynamics of whiteness and with how language functions in its construction. Roediger focuses on the thoughts and anxieties of nineteenth-century white workers in order to show the inextricability of whiteness and working class identity. The American Revolution fostered a desire among workers of European descent to view themselves as free, as personally independent. Industrial growth and entrenched wage dependence, however, highlighted workers’ lack of independence and social mobility. According to Roediger, one of the laborers’ responses was denial. Consequently, “the white working class, disciplined and made anxious by fear of dependency, began during its formation to construct an image of the Black population as ‘Other’” (14). White male workers, then, psychologically distanced themselves from the institution of slavery by distancing themselves from those who were slaves. Working class identity subsequently became intertwined with white racial identity. One of the most interesting and useful aspects of The Wages of White ness is Roediger’s careful attention to the function of cultural practices and language in the formation of racial difference. Roediger devotes considerable space to analyzing the role of minstrelsy in the construction of white identity, and he also examines how the language employed by white workers helped create and perpetuate racial difference. Roediger provides a number of examples of this racialization of the language of labor: for example, many workers adopted the term boss (from the Dutch baas) in place of master with its connotations of

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slavery, and domestic workers frequently rejected servant, a term also associated with slavery, in favor of hired help. This linguistic reconfiguration helped white workers to “define and accept their class positions by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and ‘not Blacks’” (13). Directly influenced by the works of Roediger and Allen, Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995) continues, in some ways, where these other studies left off. Ignatiev explores how one oppressed group of immigrants, the Irish, sought acceptance in the United States by recreating themselves as white workers. Ignatiev shows this transformation by examining relations between Irish and African Americans from the early nineteenth century through Reconstruction, particularly in Philadelphia. He is especially concerned with how Irish workers achieved political viability by allying themselves with pro-slavery Democrats. Like Roediger, Ignatiev sees Irish workers as active participants in their own racial construction. Ignatiev writes an unusual kind of history, aimed, in his own words, “not so much at facsimilitude as plausibility” (178). There are certainly some gaps in Ignatiev’s study. For example, despite the author’s goal of showing how the Irish were “actors in their own history” (3), the book does little to show the agency of Irish women, perhaps because of the work’s overt concern with party politics in an era prior to women’s suffrage. This omission is particularly striking when the relationship between parenthood and race is considered: the race of a child has long been considered to be determined by the race of the mother. Thus how Irish women became white would seem to be crucial to the question of how the Irish, in general, became white in the United States.8 Furthermore, by focusing on the relations between Irish immigrants and African Americans, Ignatiev might be missing some of the subtleties of white racial formation, especially regarding the role of populations that do not always easily fit in a black/white binary. Despite its limitations, however, How the Irish Became White is a useful addition to the study of the history of racial formation for a number of reasons, not the least of which are the author’s methods. Ignatiev’s sources are wide-ranging; he draws on historical accounts, newspaper articles, oratories, personal letters, and fictional works. By incorporating these diverse sources, Ignatiev emphasizes that the discursive repertoire of race is itself wide-ranging. Implicit in Ignatiev’s account of whiteness, as in Roediger’s, is the assumption that the cultural production of an era can reveal how race was formed and inhabited during that time.

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Similar to Ignatiev’s study of the Irish, Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America (1998) explores racial constructions by tracing one group’s movement from not-white to white in the United States. To develop this historical shift, Brodkin draws on critical race theory as well as her own family’s experiences in a methodology that she describes as “a slightly unorthodox combination of participant observation, insider ethnography, and grounded theory” (4). She is especially concerned with how gender and class work to form race and how race informs constructions of gender and class. This interrelated triad of race, class, and gender forms the basis of her discussion of national identity and whiteness. Most relevant to this project is Brodkin’s discussion of how racial categories are necessarily gendered in the United States. While some theorists of whiteness have largely ignored the role of gender in the process of racial formation, often subsuming women under the category of “worker,” Brodkin, like Frankenberg, brings gender to the forefront of her discussion. Brodkin explains that in the United States, the “idea of nation has been built around the myth that its populace consists of two mutually exclusive kinds of people who are defined by mutually exclusive ways of being women and men”: “white ladies and gentlemen” and “nonwhite and savage ‘hands’” (175–6). Thus, entering into whiteness involves adopting the “right” gendered role, and this role is both formed by and formative of one’s class position. Brodkin uses an example from 1920s journalist William Allen White to illustrate this relationship: “And as the Aryans of Greece tried democracy with their bondwomen and failed, and the Aryans of Rome tried a Republic with slaves and failed, so they who came to America from Latin countries failed in this new world because their new world homes were half-caste and not free, and the liberty they sought was license and not sacrifice” (qtd. in Brodkin 176). In this ideology, adopting the “right” gendered role is essential to being considered fit for participation in the nation; “the racial nature of woman-hood,” Brodkin explains,” is precisely what distinguishes those who are fit for democracy from those who are not” (176).9 In this sense, Brodkin’s study provides a useful complement to Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters; while Frankenberg focuses her investigation on how race shapes white women’s lives, Brodkin investigates how gender shapes race. Read together, the two works emphasize the interrelatedness of gender and race, as well as their inseparability from matters of class, sexuality, and national identity.

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Rather than focusing on one culturally distinct immigrant group as do Ignatiev and Brodkin, Matthew Frye Jacobson studies emigrants from across Europe in Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998). Jacobson is particularly concerned with the formation of whiteness as different immigrant groups defined their fitness for American citizenship. Jacobson’s approach is guided by two premises: first, that race “is absolutely central to the history of European immigration and settlement” (8), and, second, that “race resides not in nature but in politics and culture” (9). While Jacobson outlines these premises at the beginning of his book, he also implicitly argues them throughout the work, as he shows how race, and whiteness specifically, has been politically and culturally fabricated, and how “European” has come to be synonymous with “white.” Yet, while Jacobson establishes that not all European immigrants were deemed white in the past, he warns against “facile comparisons” between the racial experiences of European immigrants and those of other non-white groups, pointing out that “it is not just that various white immigrant groups’ economic successes came at the expense of nonwhites, but that they owe their now stabilized and broadly recognized whiteness itself part to these nonwhite groups” (9). Jacobson’s work differs from that of Allen and Roediger, as the author himself recognizes. While Jacobson notes the significance of these other authors’ contributions to the study of whiteness, he also points out the limitations in their arguments. Most specifically, Jacobson finds that Allen’s and Roediger’s focus on class limits their abilities to illuminate the full complexities of whiteness, to set it “against a broad historical backdrop,” and to show the formation of whiteness “outside the economic arenas of class concern and social control” (18–9). Jacobson, while recognizing the importance of class and socioeconomic power dynamics, works to go beyond these issues, particularly to show articulations of race in the areas of “national subjectivity and national belonging” (21). One of the ways Jacobson does this is by examining the history of how race has been used to determine “fitness for self-government” (20). Much of his discussion is framed by the 1790 Act of Congress that restricted “the rights of citizenship” to “free white persons,” and he not only explores how this restriction has affected immigration and naturalization but also its impact on notions of manifest destiny and on national subjectivity more generally. Between the 1840s and the 1920s, Jacobson argues, “continual expansion and conquest pulled for a unified collectivity of European ‘white men,’ monolithic and supreme, even while nativism

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and the immigration question fractured that whiteness into its component—‘superior’ and ‘inferior’—parts” (204). Throughout his study, Jacobson highlights the socio-political dimensions of racial categories and emphasizes the contingencies of race, nation, power, and cultural production. Of the works on whiteness that I discuss here, Jacobson’s is especially relevant to my concerns in this project. Jacobson not only focuses on immigrants from Europe, he also devotes considerable space to an examination of early twentieth-century articulations of racial difference. In doing so, his text-suggests the importance of studying these issues in the late Progressive Era. “In general,” Jacobson remarks, a pattern of racially based, Anglo Saxonist exclusivity dominated the years from 1840 to the 1920s, whereas a pattern of Caucasian unity took its place in the 1920s and after…. Between the 1920s and the 1960s concerns of “the major [racial] divisions” would so overwhelm the national consciousness that the “minor divisions,” which had so pre-occupied Americans during the period of massive European immigration, could lose their salience in American culture and disappear altogether as racially based differences. (91–2) Jacobson also identifies 1924, the year that Congress passed the restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, as a significant year in this shift. While “residual traces of the scheme that had reigned between the 1840s and the 1920s persisted into the mid-twentieth century,” suggesting that “nineteen twenty-four may be the high-water mark of the regime of Anglo-Saxon or Nordic supremacy…and not its proper closing date,” racial lines were nonetheless redrawn in the 1920s (93). To me, the period preceding the Immigration Act of 1924 seems especially crucial to understanding how this shift occurred. By focusing this book on the years immediately preceding the redrawing of racial lines, I aim to highlight some of the processes by which European immigrants were refigured as racially normative and what that refiguration meant for Americans who were not deemed white. EUROPEAN IMMIGRATION AND RACE IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA During the Progressive Era, much of the debate surrounding immigration centered on the racial character of the “new immigrants.”

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Writers of the time noted a shift in the populations who were immigrating to the United States. The restrictionist sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild summarizes in Im migration: A World Movement and Its American Significance (1913): “Roughly speaking, the old immigration came from the north and west of Europe, the new immigration comes from south and east of that continent” (129). According to Fairchild, the old immigrants “were of a racial stock very closely related to the early settlers of the country,” and Fairchild makes it clear that “the early settlers,” in his mind, were English (130). In contrast, “the new immigration is made up from people of a very different racial stock, representing the Slavic and Mediterranean branches of the Caucasian race rather than the Teutonic” (130). While all Europeans, to Fairchild, are “Caucasian,” the racial differences within this overarching racial category are significant: the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe “are by no means so closely related in physique or so similar in mental characteristics to the people of the United States as the immigrants of early periods” (143). Fairchild largely ignores immigration from parts of the world other than Europe, claiming that “immigration to the United States is as yet almost wholly a European movement” (129). To make this claim, Fairchild must disregard significant immigration from other parts of the globe, particularly from Asia. As I discuss in chapter 3, Asian immigration was considered important enough by others, especially on the west coast, that considerable debate surrounded the issue. Fairchild does, however, make a claim about non-European immigration that reveals his perceived racial dividing line: “In so far as there are any immigrants from non-European sources they would naturally be classed with the new immigration” (129). Whether or not the mention of classification refers directly to race, Fairchild suggests that the “new immigrants” from Europe and all non-European immigrants are more akin to each other than either is to the “old immigrants” from western and northern Europe. Fairchild, to a great extent, locates his restrictionist argument in the belief that the racial difference of the “new immigrants” would cause difficulties with assimilation that would consequently lead to social problems. While Fairchild tends to blur the boundaries between race and what we would now term ethnicity—claiming vaguely, for example, that “with the difference in race go differences in mental characteristics, traditions, and habits of life” (130)—other writers of this period made clearer the primacy of biologically-based difference in

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their anti-immigration arguments. Writing in 1907, political economist John R. Commons asserts: Race differences are established in the very blood and physical constitution…. Races may change their religions, their forms of government, their modes of industry, and their languages, but underneath all these changes they may continue the physical, mental, and moral capacities and incapacities which determine the real character of their religion, government, industry, and literature. (7) Similarly, eugenicist Madison Grant—whose The Passing of the Great Race (1916) I address more fully in chapter 4—insisted on the biological basis of racial differences both globally and within Europe, drew direct correlations between biological difference and difference in mental characteristics and “spiritual and moral traits” (199), and further emphasized the superiority of the “Nordic race” to the other races he envisioned. Still other writers were less consistent about the racial classification of the “new immigrants.” In The American Scene (1907), Henry James implies that these newcomers, noting Jewish immigrants in particular, are racially different from the “old immigrants” without taking a direct stance on immigration restriction. In his chapter “New York and the Hudson: A Spring Impression,” James compares Jews living in New York to, variously, fish, worms, ants, squirrels, and monkeys, and in doing so calls on a Euro-American tradition of using animal metaphors to depict the racial Other (100–02). While James avoids overtly invoking “race,” preferring instead terms such as type and tribe, he nonetheless reiterates racial essentialism, as when he notes that Italians, “over the whole land, strike us, I am afraid, as, after the Negro and the Chinaman, the human value most easily produced” (98). James’s curious phrasing challenges interpretation. By “easily produced,” does he refer to a presumed high birthrate? Does he imply a simplicity about these “races” that makes “production” or reproduction “easy?” However one interprets James’s judgement about the “easily pro duced” nature of Italians, African Americans, and Chinese, at the very least James suggests that essential racial differences exist both among European immigrants and between immigrants, and the descendants of immigrants, from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Yet other passages in “New York and the Hudson” present a more sympathetic view of European immigrants, and even draw into question the

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essentialism of racial difference among European immigrants. His favorable comments, for example, about the Italians he has met in Italy— those Italians who possess “that element of the agreeable address”— suggests that Italian “difference” might not be so innate, after all (98). James’s representations of, and attitudes about, racial difference are far too complex to fully analyze here, but I want to emphasize that this complexity, this knotty and often contradictory ideology of race, exists even within a single text by a single author.10 Numerous other texts, from diverse academic disciplines as well as from popular media and the arts, serve to illustrate the range of racial discourse surrounding immigration during the first two decades of the twentieth century. I address several of these texts in the following chapters, further discussing the works by Fairchild, Commons, and Grant, and also examining, in chapter 3, texts that focus more specifically on Asian immigration and race, such as those by Burton L.French and James D.Phelan. In the following section of this chapter, however, I focus on one group of texts, a multi-volume government publication, as this group in itself embodies some of the extremes of this discourse on race, especially as it relates to European immigration. In 1911, the U.S. Congress published The Reports of the Immigration Commission, a series of detailed reports resulting from an intensive, government-sponsored investigation into numerous aspects of immigration and immigrant life. The reports are notable partly for their appearance of exhaustiveness; they were published in forty-one volumes, most volumes contain nearly 1,000 pages, and they present extremely detailed explorations of issues ranging from the Effect of the Employment of Recent Immi grants upon the Establishment of New Industries to The Tendency to Insanity among the Immigrants, by Nationality or Race.11 The extensiveness of the Commission’s investigation—which was completed over a period of three years and cost about one million dollars (Curran 126)—appears indicative of the growing anxiety about immigration in the period immediately before World War I. The “immigration question” became the focus of numerous magazine articles, sociological texts, autobiographies, and fictional narratives as well as the focus of Congress’s Immigration Commission. When I first began to survey the Reports of the Immigration Commis sion several years ago, I was looking especially for information regarding the cultural assimilation of immigrants. My interest in the idea of assimilation stems from other reading about early twentiethcentury immigration; many other authors, whether for or against

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immigration restriction, presume that a successful immigrant is one who can be assimilated into “American” culture, a culture that, although rarely defined, is usually presumed to be fairly homogenous and reflective of the values of an Anglo-European hegemony.12 When I approached the Immigration Commission’s reports, however, I was surprised by one volume in particular: Changes in Bodily Form of Descen dants of Immigrants, a report on an anthropological study led by Franz Boas, an immigrant himself. Here was a report about assimilation, but not about the kind of assimilation—the change of culture, of traditions, of values—that I had presumed to be central to debates about immigration. Instead, the report focused on physical change—change in head shape, stature, hair color—in descendants of immigrants, and concluded that children of European immigrants develop “in such a way that they differ in type essentially from their foreign-born parents” (1:44). The method followed in this study of “changes in bodily form” is in keeping with empirically-based pseudo-scientific studies of race prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Boas attempts to situate the study by asserting that “It was suggested to the Commission that if measurements of the bodies of European immigrants and their descendants at different ages and under different circumstances could be made in a careful way by pseudo-scientific anthropometrists, valuable results might be reached” (1:44). By situating his study in this way, Boas at first allies himself with the field of anthropological anthropometry, a field of study that was largely concerned with using the measurement of human bodies to establish the biological basis and hierarchical quality of racial difference. What Boas concluded from such measurements was that changes in “bodily form” do indeed occur in the descendants of European immigrants. The report’s conclusions were based on a number of different bodily measurements of immigrants. One of the aspects on which the researchers focused particularly was the head shape of immigrants; they found that “the head form, which has always been considered one of the most stable and permanent characteristics of human races, undergoes far-reaching changes due to the transfer of the people from European to American soil” (2:505). Boas provides a specific comparison as an example of such a change: “the east Eu ropean Hebrew, who has a very round head, becomes more long-headed; the south Italian, who in Italy has an exceedingly long head, becomes more short-headed; so that in this country both approach a uniform type, as far as the roundness of the head is concerned” (38:5).13 To arrive at these conclusions, the

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investigators relied on specific empirical data; they measured and compared width and length of the heads of immigrants to produce a “cephalic index” that supposedly represents the head shape of an immigrant.14 In other parts of the study, the investigators measured features such as stature as well. In the end, the conclusions Boas draws from these measurements are wide-sweeping. “We are compelled to conclude,” he writes, “that when these features of the body change, the whole bodily and mental make-up of the immigrants may change” (2:506).15 For Boas, the importance of the investigation into “changes in bodily form” lies in the conclusion that change indeed occurred. Such a conclusion would indeed be unexpected (the word Boas uses) to someone who was convinced that race is a real, immutable, biological category. If biologically-based racial difference was not a generally accepted way of understanding the world, an investigation into racial change would hardly be considered to be worthwhile. However, while starting from this assumption about race, Boas goes on to conclude that physical changes do indeed occur, showing the instability of biologically-based racial categorization, at least as far as those categories apply to European immigrants and their descendants. While Boas’s study does focus specifically on Europeans, his conclusions have implications for race more generally. If bodily features as well as “the whole bodily and mental make-up” of individuals change over time, race cannot be viewed as immutable essence.16 While Boas seems to question racial essentialism in Changes in Bodily Form, the same cannot be said of the authors of other volumes of the Reports of the Immigration Commission (Figure 1). In another volume of the Reports, a Dictionary of Races or Peoples, anthropologist Daniel Folkmar and physician Elnora C.Folkmar make clear their belief in the natural constitution of racial categories. In this Dictionary, different races are defined, in part through physical description, in part through language, and in part through moral and mental characteristics. While racial divisions are sharply drawn throughout the text, the defining criteria of racial difference are nebulous and sometimes contradictory. These contradictions reveal themselves in the different categorical systems the authors employ. For example, after acknowledging that the “number of the chief division or basic races of mankind is more in dispute at the present time than when Linnaeus proposed to classify them into 4,” Folkmar and Folkmar explain that they have chosen to use a system that categorizes people as “Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, Malay, and American, or, as familiarly called,

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Figure 1. “Sketches of Head Forms” from The Reports of the Immigration Com mission, volume 38, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants.

the white, black, yellow, brown, and red races” (1:211). But the authors are hardly consistent with their choice of this system. They immediately follow their description of these five races with a table that provides statistics about twenty-eight different races in Europe alone. Under the heading “Race or people” Folkmar and Folkmar are careful to distinguish between such races as “Slovak,” “Hebrew,” and “English and Scotch” (1:214). Following this, the authors offer yet another system of racial classification that they clearly link to biological difference, claiming that there are at least three races in western Europe: “the Teutonic’ or ‘Nordic’ (tall, blond, and long-headed), the ‘Alpine’

INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 21

(broad-headed), and the ‘Mediterranean’ (brunette and long- headed)” (1:218). Furthermore, the authors are inconsistent regarding their criteria for determining precisely what constitutes a race. For example, they claim that “race is determined by language in such phrases as ‘the races of Europe’ but by physical qualities, such as color, hair, and shape of head, when we speak of ‘the five great races’ or divisions of mankind” (5:13). Matthew Frye Jacobson points out, however, that European groups, supposedly defined by language, “are irretrievably cast as racial groups throughout the Dictionary, so that even within the unifying construction of a grand ‘Caucasian’ race, among European peoples difference itself is consistently defined as both biological in nature and extreme in degree” (79). For example, eastern Bulgarians, according to the report, are “distinctly long-headed…predominantly brunette, with dark hair, although it is said that 40 per cent have light eyes. The race is rather low in stature and stockily built, but no distinctly Mongolian feature remains, unless it be the high cheek bones and rather narrow eyes which are common amongst them” (1:222). Folkmar and Folkmar’s Dictionary provides similar biologically-based detail about the other “races” of Europe: “the ‘Jewish nose,’ and to a less degree other facial characteristics, are found well-nigh everywhere throughout the race” (5:74). The report also links moral and mental qualities to essential racial difference, characterizing southern Italians, for example, as “excitable” and “impulsive” (5:82) and Slavs as careless “as to the business virtues of punctuality and often honesty” (5:129). The detail and confidence of these descriptions of specific races seem to contradict the findings of the study on Changes in Bodily Form. While the report on Changes started with the assumption that raciallybased physical difference both existed and held some significance, its conclusions called into question the stability of racial difference. For the authors of the Dictio nary, in contrast, racial difference continues to rely on stable, biologically-determined essences. Elazar Barkan has described the Reports of the Immigration Commis sion on the whole as “the high point of political propaganda for immigration restriction before the Immigration laws were enacted in the twenties” (83). While the other volumes of the Reports are not as consistently and explicitly racist as the Dictionary, they do largely reflect, or at least do not question, the assumption that racial difference is a factor in immigration and that race is a biologically meaningful entity, rather than a social construction. In this sense, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants is an anomaly in the Reports, a

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single volume questioning the essential nature of race, at least as it regards Europeans. This anomaly was far from being universally popular or influential. Indeed, William Dillingham, the senator who led the Immigration Commission objected to the study and voted against funding it (Lund n54). The report on Changes in Bodily Form is important for presenting a resisting voice, one that at first seems couched in the rhetoric of biologically-based race, but that ultimately challenges hegemonic formulations of racial difference. The Dictionary, in contrast, reflects eugenic attitudes of the time, attitudes that were not universally accepted but were represented by powerful figures in academe and politics and were at the high point of their sociopolitical influence during the period. It is in this sense that these two volumes, within the same series interestingly enough, can be seen to represent two extremes of racial thought during the late Progressive Era. As Jacobson has pointed out, eugenic perspectives “were in ascendence” during this period, but “their hegemony was not without ruptures” (85). Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants represents one of those ruptures. To varying extents, so do the texts I discuss in the following chapters of this book. The rupture that Willa Cather creates in My Ántonia is perhaps the most disturbing of those presented by the three authors on whose work I focus. Cather rejects the idea that racial difference is meaningful among Europeans and their descendants, but in doing so she reifies the racial Otherness of African Americans. In The Promised Land, Mary Antin lays claim to a monolithic white America at the same time that she questions the boundedness of whiteness. And Sui Sin Far creates the most radical rupture of all in her fiction and autobiography, as she deessentializes racial difference while showing the possibilities of constructing a Chinese-American subjectivity. While none of these writers wholly embraces eugenic ideas, each presents a different relationship to whiteness, a different perspective on the prospect of immigrant assimilation, and different strategies for understanding race in relation to, and in resistance to, hegemonic racial ideology. IMMIGRANT WOMEN AND RACE Before continuing, I wish to explain my focus in this study on women writers writing largely about women immigrants—whether their own autobiographical personae or fictional characters. Writing this explanation seems odd to me in one sense: I suspect that in many quarters it remains possible to write a manuscript exclusively focused

INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 23

on male writers without feeling required to justify that choice. My focus on women writers was not based originally on a conscious decision; however, as my work progressed, this focus became more and more crucial to my understanding of how immigrant texts participate in racial formation. As a number of feminist critics have pointed out, race is gendered, just as gender is raced, and both race and gender are tied to notions of nationhood. Whiteness itself, as Karen Brodkin argues, can be read in gendered terms: white women have long been viewed as “mothers of the nation,” while men are the nation’s citizens (Brodkin 176). In Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History, Rogers M. Smith traces some historic developments of this notion of “republican motherhood.” Smith notes that during the revolutionary period, women “had to be both equal and not equal citizens” (112). Drawing from the work of Linda Kerber, Smith explains that women were still subject to feudal legal doctrines concerning their subordinate status, but that male revolutionaries “dramatically reformulated the rationale for those rules by ‘politicizing women’s traditional roles’ in terms of republican ideology. Wifely functions now were not the labors of ‘subjects’ but rather the duties of ‘republican motherhood’” (112). To further explain the role of “republican motherhood,” Smith summarizes the views of the Federalist legal scholar James Wilson, as expressed in his Lectures on Law (1782): Women should develop their unique qualities, bestowed by nature and its Creator, so that they might “embellish” and “exalt” social life by their “beauty,” “virtue,” and “affection.” Their proper political role, again, was to form their daughters for similar service, and to refine their sons’ virtues, adding to male spiritedness the civility and concern for others that republican citizenship required. (Smith 146–7) Wilson’s formulation emphasizes women’s proper roles as mothers of good citizens. Smith traces minor legal changes in this formulation through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Certainly by the early twentieth century there were challenges to “republican motherhood” as women’s proper role. As Smith shows, however, this formulation still had considerable currency, even among women activists during the Progressive Era.17 If women are important for their ability to bring forth male children and prepare them for republican citizenship, it follows that the

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acceptability of women immigrants would lie largely in their perceived fitness for this role. And, since race has long been a prime determinant of fitness for citizenship, the racial assignment of immigrant women becomes crucial to the welcome of any given immigrant group.18 In the logic of this ideology, the racial categorization of immigrant women is central to determining the future racial make-up of the country. As Katrina Irving has pointed out, during the Progressive Era, “the figure of the immigrant mother proved particularly resonant. For nativists, who linked the alien woman’s imputed preternatural fecundity with eugenically based theories concerning the effects of miscegenation, the maternal function of the immigrant woman was especially productive of racial anxiety” (Immigrant Mothers 3). To further illustrate the function of women in the nativist racial ideology of the Progressive Era, I turn now to a restrictionist sociological text of the time, Edward Alsworth Ross’s The Old World in the New: The Signifi cance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. Ross, whom one researcher has called “Perhaps the leading nativist sociologist” of his time (Curran 116), published The Old World in the New in 1913. In this book, primarily concerned with European immigration, Ross devotes a chapter to discussing “American Blood and Immigrant Blood,” in which he addresses subheadings such as “Primitive types among the foreign-born” and “How immigration will affect good looks in this country.” Ross’s treatment of race is certainly one of the more striking examples of racially-based antiimmigration argument from the early twentieth century; yet his assumptions about the biological basis of race and about the superiority of specific races to others recur in many other texts, in academic sociological books like Ross’s as well as in articles published in journals and popular magazines.19 Ross describes a specifically threatening racialized immigrant body: “You are struck by the fact that from ten to twenty per cent are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality” (285). Ross’s ideas of immigrants are not only biologically based but also immediately link physiognomy with mentality. This linkage reiterates a parallel between questions of cultural assimilation and race. Many proimmigration texts of this time proposed that, if immigrants could become culturally assimilated, they posed little threat to “American” society. If, however, mental, hence cultural, assimilation is necessarily connected to race, as Ross implies, an early twentieth-century reader might perceive a new threat grounded in socially prevalent ideas about the immutability of race.

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At the same time that Ross links the physical body with mentality, he posits immigrant women, without initially mentioning them, as the source of the racial threat. Ross follows his description of immigrant bodies by asserting that employers of immigrants “overlook that [the immigrant] man will beget children in his image—two or three times as many as the American—and that these children will in turn beget children” (286–7). The problem for Ross, as for other nativists, is not only the racial difference of immigrants, but also the perceived fecundity of immigrant women. Much anti-immigration sentiment of the time was in response to the increase in immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and, as in the case of Ross, re sponded to the stereotype of prolific childbearing among Catholic and Jewish women. In another chapter, titled “The Slavs,” Ross is more direct about women’s central position in his perception of a racial threat. “The Slav wife in this country,” he claims, “bears from two to two and a half times as fast as the wife of American parentage. Her daughter born under the Stars and Stripes is seven-eighths as prolific as her barefoot immigrant mother” (130). Ross goes on to discuss the fecundity of Polish immigrants and concludes that “Farm by farm, township by township, the displacement of the American goes on—a quiet conquest, without spear or trumpet, a conquest made by child-bearing women” (133–4). Here, Ross locates the threat he perceives in the bodies of these presumably fecund immigrant women. “The superfecund Slavs,” Ross writes, “may push to the wall the Anglo-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the WelshAmericans, the German-Americans, and the rest” (140). During the time that Ross was writing, however, the number of women immigrating to the United States was much lower than the number of immigrant men. Congress’s Immigration Commission itself found that, in the period from 1899 to 1910, nearly 70 percent of immigrants were men, while about 30 percent were women. The disproportionate numbers prompted the Immigration Commission to claim that The absence of family life, which is so conspicuous among many southern and eastern Europeans in the United States, is undoubtedly the influence which most effectively retards assimilation. The great majority of some of these races are represented in the United States by single men or men whose wives and families are in their native country. (1:42)

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The report’s implication that eastern and southern European immigrants were more likely to be men than immigrants from other places is questionable; the Commission itself found that, between 1899 and 1910, the disproportion between men and women immigrants—the majority being men—from France was greater than the disproportion between “Hebrew” immigrants, who were primarily entering the country from eastern Europe. Still, the Commission’s belief that women function as the assimilators of immigrant children is itself significant. When the Immigration Commission’s report suggests women as the locus of assimilation, the authors seem to refer primarily to cultural assimilation; children, the authors presume, are taught language and values (two accepted indicators of assimilation) by their mothers. But women are also the bearers of children and hence are widely thought to be responsible for the biological constitution of their children. I read Edward Ross’s anxiety about “superfecund” Slavic women as directly connected to an assumption that white women, immigrants and descendants of immigrants from north-western Europe, are, and ought to be, the “reproducers of the nation.” If women from what Ross would view as different and inferior races are “multiplying like rabbits” (Ross 47), then these women would appear to pose a distinct threat to his America, an America that, for Ross, not only demands cultural homogeneity but racial homogeneity, in the form of a very narrowly conceived whiteness, as well. As Katrina Irving has pointed out, nativists of the time “constructed an image of the nation as the besieged ‘broodland’ of the Anglo-Saxon race and presented the reproductive front as the critical arena of battle” (Immigrant Mothers 37). Ross’s assumptions, like those of the Immigration Commission, eventually fall back on the idea that the immigrant’s responsibility is to become “like us”; however, for Ross, as for other restrictionist writers of the time, the race of women immigrants severely limits who can become “like us.” The racial classification of immigrant women, then, becomes central to the debate over who is “fit” to become an American. LITERARY TEXTS AS RACIAL PROJECTS Up to this point, I have been examining racial history in the United States, both as it has been interpreted by contemporary critics and as it impinges on the discourses of the Progressive Era, which is one of my concerns in the following chapters. So far, I have said little about the function of literature in this history.

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“Texts are worldly,” Edward Said wrote in 1983; “to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted” (607). At the time, Said was reacting to a dominant tradition in the humanities of divorcing texts from the social world in which they are produced and consumed. Happily, since the time that Said published The World, the Text, and the Critic, literary criticism has changed dramatically as more and more critics have taken as their subjects both the world and the text. While I am reading the texts I discuss in this study as socially and historically situated in this general sense, I am also reading the relationship between literary texts and systems of power in a more specific way: these texts are, or are part of, projects of racial formation. Omi and Winant define a racial project as “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to re organize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (56). Racial projects form the links between social representation of race and social structure; they do the work of racial formation. They not only define what race means at a particular place and time but also establish the sociopolitical consequences of that meaning.20 These projects can be large or small in scope and can do their work anywhere in the political spectrum, but they are always situated: “The social structures they uphold or attack, and the representations of race they articulate, are never invented out of the air, but exist in a definite historical context, having descended from previous conflicts” (58). The texts that I consider in this study are racial projects, but that is not to say that they do the same work that other racial projects do today or that previous racial projects did in preceding centuries. I examine them in conjunction with other texts of the late Progressive Era in order to interpret them as part of an array of racial projects that work to represent, define, and create the racial social systems of the time. Omi and Winant are careful to point out that because racism itself must be seen as always historically situated, there is “no timeless and absolute standard for what constitutes racism” (71). They emphasize that not all racial projects are racist. A racial project can be defined as racist “only if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist catego ries of race” (71; emphasis in original). It is important to be aware, therefore, both of racial projects that work to establish or further oppressive ideologies and social structures, as well as of racial projects that work to question, resist, or counteract the

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dominant racial order. The texts that I discuss in the following chapters run the gamut. When examining literary texts as racial projects, it is much easier to address how these texts interpret, represent, and explain racial dynamics than how they affect sociopolitical structures of power. As Omi and Winant’s definition of racial formation makes clear, representations of race are only part of the process. While in some cases it is possible to address the public reception of a literary text (based, for example, on published reviews), and it is possible to read a text in the context of the sociopolitics of its time of production, it is often difficult to trace the direct linkage between the text and its consequences for racial structures outside the text. One cannot determine how much impact a text such as Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, for example, had on popular attitudes toward Czech immigrants and their racial assignment, just as it is impossible to trace any kind of direct causal link between the texts I discuss here and the Immigration Act of 1924. While it is not always possible to know the specific effects on power structures that a particular text may have had, it is possible to show more generally how a text links racial representation with power structures. As Said has noted, “The realities of power and authority—as well as the resistances offered by men, women, and social movements to institutions, authorities, and orthodoxies—are the realities that make texts possible, that deliver them to their critics, that solicit the attention of critics” (607). However, as Omi and Winant’s discussion of racial formation suggests, texts also affect the “realities of power and authority.” They can reiterate those realities; they can question them; they can work to change them. In the following chapters, I examine how racial projects by three women writers of the late Progressive Era link representations of race with the racial power structures of the time.

Chapter Two Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin’s Claim to Assimilation

Surely it has happened before that one body served more than one spiritual organization. Mary Antin, The Promised Land This is my home this thin edge of barbwire Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera “I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over,” Mary Antin (1881–1949) begins the introduction to her autobiography The Promised Land. Antin, a Russian Jew, was born in the shtetl of Polotzk, Russia (now Belarus) in 1881 and immigrated to Boston in 1894.1 Published in 1912, The Promised Land tells the story of Antin’s childhood in the Pale of the Settlement (the area of Russia, through much of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, where Jews were forced to live) as well as of her first few years in the United States. From the first sentence of her introduction, Antin signals that hers is a story of assimilation. After claiming that she has been “made over,” Antin proceeds by distancing her adult identity from her childhood self: “I can analyze my subject,” she asserts, “I can reveal everything; for she, and not I, is my real heroine. My life I have still to live; her life ended when mine began” (xix; emphasis in original). Antin’s emphasis on the process of her own assimilation coupled with her overt praise of “American” traditions, liberties, and institutions have prompted many readers to view her autobiography as a patriotic paean to immigrant assimilation.2 In a review for The Nation, for example, one of Antin’s contemporaries praised The Promised Land as “a tale told with glowing enthusiasm of the transformation under the influence of

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new surroundings of a benighted Russian-Jewish girl into an enlightened and public-spirited American” (Review of The Promised Land 517). As Steven J.Rubin notes in his essay “Style and Meaning in Mary Antin’s The Promised Land: A Reevaluation,” more recent critics have generally upheld this attitude, viewing the autobiography as “the optimistic story of those who arrived in America eager to shed their outdated customs and who willingly accepted the values and manners of the new world. It is generally considered to be the classic story of assimilation, of transformation, and of hope” (36).3 While Rubin and Magdalena Zaborowska—in How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives, which I will discuss later in this chapter—view Antin’s claim to assimilation as much more complex than a superficial reading of her book would allow, none of the contemporary criticism of The Promised Land fully accounts for how assimilation in Antin’s work is necessarily connected to the formation of racial categories at the beginning of the century. Overtly, Antin’s autobiography is indeed a celebration of immigrant assimilability, a celebration crafted to counter prevalent xenophobic ideology. What few critics have recognized, however, is how Antin subverts her own celebratory narrative to question both the possibility and desirability of full assimilation. She does this primarily by creating an autobiographical immigrant subject that is far more complex than most critics have acknowledged. Antin constructs her autobiographical self as an unmarked “American” subject—a participant in the socially constructed category of “whiteness”—at the same time that she marks her autobiographical self in terms of gender and cultural affiliations. Before addressing how Antin both constructs and subverts a white American subject position, I will first address how she describes her early life in Russia, since the boundary between the Russian Jew Maryashe Antin and the later American Mary Antin is not as distinct as many critics would have us believe. I will then show how Antin constructs the process of assimilation as an act of claiming a position as a white American. As I will argue, however, this equation is undermined by Antin’s questioning of the possibility of complete assimilation and by her subversion of the white American autobiographical pattern.

COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 31

PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES AND BOUNDARIES OF IDENTITY The Promised Land is divided roughly into two halves; the first half of the text describes Antin’s early childhood in the shtetl of Polotzk, while the second half addresses Antin’s education and transformation after immigrating to the United States.4 What I call the “first half” of the autobiography consists of 162 pages. The “second half” contains 184 pages. These “halves” are joined by a single chapter of sixteen pages that describes the journey from Russia to the United States. From the very beginning of the autobiography, Antin reveals her awareness of boundaries, both physical boundaries and less tangible social ones. “When I was a little girl,” the first line of chapter 1 reads, “the world was divided into two parts; namely, Polotzk, the place where I lived, and a strange land called Russia” (1). Very soon, however, this geographical opposition becomes blurred for Antin; she soon realizes that between Polotzk and Russia an intermediate region exists, the rest of the Pale. When Antin is still a young child, she journeys by railroad to visit relatives in the town of Vitebsk, where she sees the River Dvina— the same river that flows through her home town of Polotz: All my life I had seen the Dvina. How, then, could the Dvina be in Vitebsk?…It became clear to me that the Dvina went on and on, like a railroad track, whereas I had always supposed that it stopped where Polotzk stopped. I had never seen the end of Polotzk; I meant to, when I was bigger. But how could there be an end to Polotzk now? Polotzk was everything on both sides of the Dvina, as all my life I had known; and the Dvina, it now turned out, never broke off at all. It was very curious that the Dvina should remain the same, while Polotzk changed into Vitebsk! (2) While Antin’s description of her childhood realization is certainly a romanticized one, its placement at the beginning of the autobiography is significant. Antin begins a work about immigration, about crossing borders and boundaries, by questioning whether boundaries are static. She continues her exposition on boundaries by discussing the effect of her realization. “The mystery of this transmutation [between Polotzk and Vitebsk] led to much fruitful thinking,” she claims, The boundary between Polotzk and the rest of the world was not, as I had supposed, a physical barrier, like the fence which divided

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our garden from the street. The world went like this now: Polotzk—more Polotzk—more Polotzk—Vitebsk! And Vitebsk was not so different, only bigger and brighter and more crowded. And Vitebsk was not the end. The Dvina, and the railroad, went on beyond Vitebsk,—went on to Russia. Then was Russia more Polotzk? Was here also no dividing fence? (3) Antin extrapolates from her realization and begins, like contemporary post-modern theorists, to question the rigidity of other boundaries that she had hitherto believed to be immutable. Writing about literal and psychological borderlands in the 1980s, for example, Gloria Anzaldúa, in Borderlands/ La Frontera, uses similar imagery when she writes that “the skin of the earth is seamless./The sea cannot be fenced,/el mar does not stop at borders” (3). Anzaldúa suggests that political and geographical borders—signified by the concrete manifestations of barbed wire, chain link fences—are politically-motivated human creations that are constructed “to distinguish us from them” (3; emphasis in original). For Antin, as for Anzaldúa, water provides an image for fluidity across such borders.5 Literal borders—between Polotzk and Vitebsk, between the Pale and the rest of Russia—yield when Antin realizes that the threads of the river and of the railroad do not observe such borders. Despite this early recognition, however, Antin soon finds that some boundaries are not as easily crossed as the physical distance between Polotzk and Vitebsk. “Polotzk and Vitebsk were now bound together by the continuity of the earth,” she observes, “but between them and Russia a formidable barrier still interposed” (3). This barrier, she acknowledges, is the Russian hatred of the Jews of the Pale: [T]here came a time when I knew that Polotzk and Vitebsk and Vilna and some other places were grouped together as the “Pale of Settlement,” and within this area the Czar commanded me to stay, with my father and mother and friends, and all other people like us. We must not be found outside the Pale, because we were Jews. So there was a fence around Polotzk, after all. The world was divided into Jews and Gentiles. This knowledge came so gradually that it could not shock me. It trickled into my consciousness drop by drop. By the time I fully understood that I was a prisoner, the shackles had grown familiar to my flesh. (5)

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Although a child, Antin realized that boundaries are not necessarily static and concrete; however, they do exist, created by the Czar’s command and enforced by those in power. Writing as an adult, Antin acknowledges that boundaries are tenuous, that slippage between and across borders can occur easily, perhaps necessarily, but she also shows the rigidity of socially constructed boundaries of oppression. Antin writes at length about the oppressive boundary between Jews and Gentiles in Polotzk, carefully detailing what it meant to grow up a Russian Jew in the latter nineteenth century. Very early in her life, Antin learned to accept “ill-usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather” (5). While never herself the victim of a pogrom, Antin shows the threat of violence against the Jews of Polotzk to be omnipresent. She also carefully notes the fear that her family and neighbors had of forced Christian baptism and of military conscription. To avoid service in the Czar’s army—where Jews are brutally treated and forced to relinquish religious observance—some men “would submit to operations on their eyes, ears, or limbs, which caused horrible sufferings” (14). Antin explains that cowardice did not prompt such measures, emphasizing that “the fear of an unholy life was greater than all other fears” (15). While Antin obviously identifies and sympathizes with the other Jews of her community, a point to which I will return, at an early age she came to question Jewish religious and social practices. In her writing, Antin is especially critical of the inferior position prescribed for women in orthodox society. She describes how even a boy from the poorest of families would be sent to heder, becoming “the hero of the family” (32). After explaining how a boy is schooled, encouraged, and coddled by the family, she adds, “No wonder he said, in his morning prayer, ‘I thank Thee, Lord, for not having created me a female.’ It was not much to be a girl, you see. Girls could not be scholars and rabbonim” (33). Antin’s comment is short, but the gist of it is clear: she resents the role of subjection allotted to Jewish girls and women. For a brief while, before her family lost their mercantile business, Antin herself was sent to school. Her later success in scholarship suggests that she comprehended no acceptable reason for the exclusion of women from the intellectual realm; indeed, she says as much: “There was nothing in what the boys did in heder that I could not have done—if I had not been a girl” (34). Antin furthers this theme by wryly describing the role that women are expected to fill in her community: “every girl hoped to be a wife,” writes Antin, “A girl was born for no other purpose” (34).6 While Antin explicitly criticizes patriarchal Jewish tradition and the subordination of women within her community, she devotes even more

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space to detailing other Jewish customs with care and reverence and, in doing so, constructs her own childhood Jewish identity. After describing the particular difficulties faced by Jews on the Sabbath and on high holy days, Antin shows how days of religious observance transformed her community: “On a Friday afternoon the stores and markets closed early. The clatter of business ceased, the dust of worry was laid, and the Sabbath peace flooded the quiet streets. No hovel so mean but what its casement sent out its consecrated ray, so that a wayfarer passing in the twilight saw the spirit of God brooding over the lowly roof” (30). In this passage, Antin shows her com munity’s traditions in a far more positive light than she does when exposing the unequal access to education of men and women in her orthodox community. Antin not only venerates specific Jewish cultural and religious practices but also addresses her own implication in those structures, an implication that she certainly does not find burdensome; rather, it is at the core of the Jewish identity she constructs. Describing her childhood relationship to her religious heritage, Antin writes, My baby soul was enthralled by sad and noble cadences, as my mother sang of my ancient home in Palestine, or mourned over the desolation of Zion…. God needed me and I needed Him, for we two together had a work to do, according to an ancient covenant between Him and my forefathers. This is the dream to which I was heir, in common with every sad-eyed child of the Pale. This is the living seed which I found among my heirlooms, when I learned how to strip from them the prickly husk in which they were passed down to me. And what is the fruit of such seed as that, and whither lead such dreams? If it is mine to give the answer, let my words be true and brave. (40–1) This passage is an important one, not only because it shows sympathy with her Jewish community that was not evident in her criticism of Jewish patriarchy, but because it suggests Antin’s belief in a continuity between Jewish history, her childhood cultural practices, and her present self. The first part of the passage expresses the beauty of Antin’s religious inheritance; however, it also suggests that she chooses which aspects of that inheritance infuse her own identity: she selectively strips away a “prickly husk.” The passage then continues by suggesting the effect of this inheritance. What is the fruit of such seed? I think Antin is suggesting that her entire book, as well as the seemingly coherent subject that it portrays, is the fruit. If by the end of her

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autobiography Antin describes her subject as fully “American,” as I will argue in the next section of this chapter, then this new subject position is not derived at the expense of her cultural seed; it is a product of it. The Russian Jewish identity that Antin constructs early in the text is not entirely separable from her later “assimilated” identity. Antin reveals this slippage across the boundaries of identity just as she earlier questioned the rigidity of physical boundaries. ASSIMILATION, WHITENESS, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY Chapter 8 signals a marked shift from earlier chapters in The Promised Land. In this chapter—titled “The Exodus” in keeping with the autobiography’s explicit theme of migration as a literal and spiritual movement out of oppression to a “land of milk and honey—Antin tells of how, having been sent tickets from her father in the United States, she and the rest of her family migrated by steamer to Boston. The description of their journey is brief, sketching over the details of Antin’s previously published work From Plotzk [sic] to Boston (1899). The remaining chapters, roughly the last half of the book, describe the Antin family’s successive—and successively failing—attempts at business as well as Mary Antin’s schooling in the United States. Generally, critics have focused on this second half of the autobiography in order to show how Antin reveals her own assimilation. Despite Antin’s overt “American” posturing, however, the latter chapters of The Promised Land actually reveal an immigrant subject who also subverts hegemonic notions of the acceptable, assimilated immigrant. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Mary Antin wrote The Promised Land at a time during which many studies of immigration and immigrant acceptability revolved around biologized notions of race; indeed, many nativist writers argued that groups that were biologically distinct from northern and western Europeans could never become truly American. Considering the prevalence of such discussions, the lack of overt references to race in Antin’s autobiography is striking. If we assume that one of her central purposes in writing was to counter xenophobia, we must question why she consistently refuses to confront the racialized (and racist) arguments that constituted the forefront of nativist publication. I want to argue that, although Antin rarely uses the term race, and never uses the term white to refer to a racial category, the second half of The Promised Land describes in detail a specific

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formation of whiteness as experienced—both embraced and subverted—by Antin’s autobiographical subject. Recent theorists have noted how whiteness has often been constructed as unmarked in North American discourse and cultural practice, as I discussed earlier in this study. In the United States in particular, whiteness as a category of identity has long been considered the norm from which other racialized groups differ. White people have generally been deemed racially neutral in hegemonic ideology, while other people are marked by race, a point to which I will return. As contemporary theorists have argued, however, processes of racial signification have never been neutral; instead, they are always socially and historically grounded. Social and discursive con structedness is as much a feature of whiteness as it is of any other racialized grouping. Thus, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant point out in Racial Formation in the United States, while “the categories employed to differentiate among human groups along racial lines reveal themselves… to be at best imprecise, and at worst completely arbitrary” (55), the formation of those categories is anything but arbitrary. From the beginnings of modern racial consciousness, racial formation has been intricately connected to European domination and hegemony. Describing the European conquest of the Americas, Omi and Winant note that “the seizure of territory and goods, the introduction of slavery through the encomienda and other forms of coerced native labor, and then through the organization of the African slave trade—not to mention the practice of outright extermination—all presupposed a worldview which distinguished Europeans, as children of God, full-fledged human beings, etc., from ‘Others’” (62). More specifically relevant to this study, we can see the increasing popularity of biological concepts of race during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a crucial part of systems of domination; “claims of species distinctiveness among humans,” assert Omi and Winant, “justified the inequitable allocation of political and social rights, while still upholding the doctrine of ‘the rights of man’” (64). Thus, any formation of race—whether articulated in a scientific, overtly political, popular, or artistic arena—is necessarily tied to political and social agendas. Without explicitly using the terminology of race, Mary Antin presents a very specific account of a formation of whiteness in the early twentieth century. She does this, in part, by working within the definition of whiteness as an unmarked, “given” category; the essence of being “American,” in The Promised Land, is to participate in a hegemonically-defined, Anglo-Protes-tant-centered definition of

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whiteness. Basically, being American and being white are coterminous. In “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness,” Ruth Frankenberg revises and expands her earlier definition of whiteness to offer a working definition that is useful in examining Mary Antin’s autobiography. Among the dimensions of whiteness that Frankenberg notes, I find these three especially relevant here: 1. Whiteness is a location of structural advantage in societies structured in racial dominance. 2. Whiteness is a “standpoint,” a location from which to see selves, others, and national and global orders. 3. Whiteness is a site of elaboration of a range of cultural practices and identities, often unmarked and unnamed, or named as national or ‘normative’ rather than specifiably racial. (76; numbered list in original) The second of these dimensions suggests that whiteness is a subject position that necessarily structures an individual’s relationships with other humans. In her third point, Frankenberg acknowledges that whiteness has been constructed in such a way that its cultural practices and identities are unmarked; consequently, their racially-specific existence becomes hidden from some of those who practice them.7 Omi and Winant make a similar claim when they discuss the consequences of centuries of racial dictatorship in the United States. One consequence, they argue, is that these centuries “defined ‘American’ identity as white, as the negation of racialized ‘otherness’—at first largely African and indigenous, later Latin American and Asian as well. This negation took shape in both law and custom, in public institutions and in forms of cultural representation” (66). Like Frankenberg, Omi and Winant acknowledge that race is “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (55). But if the history of racial dictatorship in the United States has caused “American” identity to be defined as white, as Omi and Winant claim (66), Mary Antin’s claims of assimilation are necessarily linked to processes of racial formation. Antin describes her assimilation in terms of changing beliefs and cultural practices; for her, these changes constitute her “Americanness.” Frankenberg’s and Omi and Winant’s theories of whiteness, however, allow a reader to understand Antin’s assimilation—even when defined as a process of cultural transformation or as a process of claiming a position in the nation-state—as an implicitly racialized project. Antin’s movement into Americanness

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cannot be divorced from her movement into, and definition of, whiteness. I wish to turn now to the ways that Antin defines what it means to be American in The Promised Land. Because Americanness and whiteness are necessarily linked for Antin, understanding her notion of American identity is crucial to understanding how she claims a specific white subject position. Antin devotes a great portion of the second half of her book to describing her education in Boston’s public schools. This focus on schooling is explicitly connected to the process of Americanization. Many social reformers, educational theorists, and writers in the popular media of Antin’s time considered assimilation a central goal of schools in areas with immigrant populations. Jane Addams, for example, viewed public schools as venues for Americanizing not only schoolchildren but entire families (through the students’ influences on their parents and siblings) and asserted in Twenty Years at Hull House (1910) that “The public schools in the immigrant colonies deserve all the praise as Americanizing agencies which can be bestowed upon them” (183). Mary Antin makes a similar claim in The Promised Land: “The public school has done its best for us foreigners, and for the country, when it has made us into good Americans” (222). Antin leaves the definition of “good American” ambiguous; however, patriotism seems to play a large role. For example, Antin describes learning about and coming to idolize traditionally revered Anglo-American heroes. Studying about George Washington in school had a profound effect on Antin: “When the class read [about Washington], and it came my turn, my voice shook and the book trembled in my hands. I could not pronounce the name George Washington without a pause. Never had I prayed, never had I called upon the Most Holy, in such utter reverence and worship as I repeated the simple sentences of my child’s story of the patriot” (223). Antin’s use of religious vocabulary and comparison is important here. Antin’s admiration for Washington takes the form of religious worship, and she insures that the reader will not miss this point by drawing an overt comparison with the practices of Judaism. But because Antin portrays her patriotism in religious terms, we cannot view the process she describes as solely an adoption of new cultural values. She mentions Judaic worship as a contrast, emphasizing that her new “religion” of worshiping the Anglo-Protestant patriot has eclipsed her former devotions. At times, she even uses the word conversion to describe the process of assimilation (249). Antin, then, plays on the idea that a person cannot be of two faiths at once. Her new faith/ideology is not pluralistic; instead, she describes leaving behind her

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position as a Jew, marked as Other, to enter the unmarked fold of Americanness.8 Furthermore, Antin is careful to explain her reasons for “converting” to Anglo-Protestant values with such enthusiasm. After describing her studies of the Revolutionary War and her consequent patriotism, Antin contrasts life in the United States with her life in the Pale: Where had been my country until now? What had I loved? What heroes had I worshipped? The very names of these things had been unknown to me. Well I knew that Polotzk was not my country. It was goluth—exile…not a child among us was too young to feel in his own flesh the lash of the oppressor…only a lifelong dreamer here and there hoped to die in Palestine…. So a little Jewish girl in Polotzk was apt to grow up hungry-minded and empty-hearted; and if, still in her outreaching youth, she was set down in a land of outspoken patriotism, she was likely to love her new country with a great love, and to embrace its heroes in a great worship. (226–8) In this passage, Antin clarifies specific reasons that she so easily came to worship participants in the Revolutionary War: her heroes literally represented to her a form of freedom from oppression that she was unable to experience as a child, and by worshiping them she created for herself a sense of belonging in the form of national identity. Antin describes this national identity as a direct result of her schooling. Indeed, her formal education is at the core of the second half of The Promised Land, the half of the text that critics read as evidence of Antin’s assimilation. Political theorist Antonio Gramsci’s explanation of hegemonic rule is useful to understanding how education functions in The Promised Land. According to Gramsci, hegemony relies on a combination of coercion and consent. It is not enough for a ruling group to have military and economic power; in order to maintain power, the group must also have the consent of those they subordinate. Gramsci claims that education effects a “domination by consent”; by legitimizing and perpetuating specific systems of beliefs and practices, formal education works to gain and maintain the consent of the governed (Selections from the Prison Notebooks). If a primary function of schools is to effect assimilation, as writers such as Antin and Jane Addams assert, then the schools must essentially seduce immigrant students into consenting to the rule of the hegemony. The process by which schools brought about this consent during the Progressive Era is complex. In Civic Ideals, Rogers M. Smith

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describes a wide range of political positions regarding the proper role of civic education during the period. Smith notes that it was in the field of education that “Americans tried to shape who and what future American citizens would be”; however, he also shows that how that shaping should take place was in dispute (463).9 According to Smith, centrists largely maintained that “the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe could not be equipped for either citizenship or the franchise until and unless they had mastered an Americanizing civic education in ‘Anglo-Saxon conceptions of righteousness, liberty, law, order, public decency, and government’” (465). While this educational agenda is implicit in The Promised Land, the explicit Americanizing program that Antin describes is even narrower. In Antin’s autobiography, the systems of beliefs and practices perpetuated by the public schools are very specific ones, geared toward encouraging patriotism and a consequent sense of national identity. It is significant, then, that Antin not only presents her patriotism as evidence of her own cultural assimilation, but also uses her experience to generalize about all immigrant children. She begins a chapter titled “Initiation” by claiming: It is not worth while to refer to voluminous school statistics to see just how many “green” pupils entered school last September, not knowing the days of the week in English, who next February will be declaiming patriotic verses in honor of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, with a foreign accent, indeed, but with plenty of enthusiasm. It is enough to know that this hundred-fold miracle is common to the schools in every part of the United States where immigrants are received. (206) In this passage, Antin allies herself with those who believe that assimilation is a necessary precondition of immigrant acceptability. She refutes those nativists who would claim that immigrants such as Antin— in other words, the “inferior” immigrants of eastern and southern Europe—are unable to assimilate. To make this argument in favor of immigration, however, Antin must rely on a narrow definition of what it means to become “American”: one must learn English and express patriotic adulation for the “Founding Fathers.” By using this narrow definition, Antin is able to make a case in favor of immigration without investigating the complexities of “Americanness”: she not only ignores a wide range of cultural articulations that might entwine in the formation of “Americanness,” but even disregards a range of

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Anglo-Protestant cultural beliefs and practices that extend far beyond patriotism and use of the English language. Antin, then, positions herself within a narrow, static “American” identity and consequently is able to present a convincing pro-immigrant argument to her U.S.-born readers. While Antin never overtly acknowledges this American identity as racialized, she does mark it, as Valerie Babb has pointed out, as implicitly a white identity. In Whiteness Visible: the Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture, Babb notes that instances of the racialized character of Americanness are evident in descriptions characterizing exemplary American identity as [Antin] found it personified in the weekly program offered by the local mission, her public education, the literature she read, and her contact with “genuine” Americans. In reflecting on each, she reveals the degree to which white, Protestant, affluent, and American were blurred in her mind. (121) Regarding each of these depictions of “exemplary American identity,” Babb looks at how that identity is racialized. For example, she points to Antin’s literary models of Americanness, by authors ranging from Louisa May Alcott to Horatio Alger, and shows that they “created an America that was a constellation of white images, including a white, female New England childhood…and the adventures of young, often upwardly mobile, white males” (124). Babb also notes that the racialized character of American identity reveals itself in Antin’s description of the white, Protestant entertainers at the weekly mission program. Antin remarks on “the beautiful ladies,” “the miraculously clean gentlemen,” and the “ravishing little girls who stood up in a glory of golden curls” (Antin 267). These “idealized images of white identity,” Babb claims, reveal Antin’s belief that “beyond her Jewish American world lies a better American one” that the entertainers at the mission show represent (120). As Babb’s discussion makes clear, American identity is racially marked as white in The Promised Land. It is important to note, however, that Antin’s generally positive portrayal of white American identity has some cracks. A significant one occurs immediately following Antin’s idealized description of the performers at the mission show. Here Antin describes Brother Hotchkins, the coordinator of the mission shows, whom she does not like: “He was too slim, too pale, too fair” (268). Antin’s emphasis on Brother Hotchkins’s complexion establishes both

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his literal whiteness and also an image of white American identity that contrasts with the preceding idealized ones. Antin denies that her dislike for Brother Hotchkins is racially-based—“I considered myself freed from racial prejudices”—and she emphasizes that she dislikes him because he is a missionary (268). Nevertheless, it is Antin’s antipathy toward Brother Hotchkins’s literal whiteness that frames the passage: she ends her discussion of her dislike for him by mentioning that he remained “happily unconscious of my disapproval of his complexion” (268).10 Antin makes clear that American identity is white, but her attitude toward that identity, both its literal embodiment in the form of Brother Hotchkins, as well as its more subtly presented cultural representation, is sometimes ambiguous. This ambiguity also reveals itself in Antin’s continuing depiction of assimilation. While Antin claims her own assimilation, as I discussed above, she also calls into question the possibility and desirability of complete assimilation, especially for adult immigrants. While Antin’s father quickly eschewed orthodox customs “in his ambition to make Americans” (244) of the family, Antin’s mother, called Hannah Hayye in the text, encountered difficulty adjusting to “American” practices. Antin contrasts her parents’ processes of assimilation: “My mother, as we know, had not the initial impulse to depart from ancient usages that my father had in his habitual skepticism. He had always been a nonconformist in his heart; she bore lovingly the yoke of prescribed conduct” (247). In the end, the process is a painful one for Hannah Hayye: “My mother, therefore, gradually divested herself, at my father’s bidding, of the mantle of orthodox observance; but the process cost her many a pang, because the fabric of that venerable garment was interwoven with the fabric of her soul” (247). The difficulties of assimilation are not only experienced by Hannah Hayye, but also by the rest of the Antin family. In brief passages that interrupt her paean to life in America, Antin describes her family life as chaotic due to the shift away from a familiar organized system of cultural values and practices. “Chaos,” Antin claims, “took the place of system; uncertainty, inconsistency undermined discipline. My parents knew only that they desired us to be like American children” (271). Regarding this change in family life, Antin again generalizes from her experience: The price that all of us paid for this disorganization of our family life has been levied on every immigrant Jewish household where the first generation clings to the traditions of the Old World, while the second generation leads the life of the New. Nothing more

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pitiful could be written in the annals of the Jews; nothing more inevitable, nothing more hopeful. Hopeful, yes; alike for the Jew and for the country that has given him shelter. For Israel is not the only party that has put up a forfeit in this contest. (248) Antin’s attitude toward assimilation in this passage is ambiguous. The process is painful and “pitiful,” but it is also hopeful. Instead of proceeding to explain why assimilation is “hopeful,” however, she asserts that “Israel is not the only party that has put up a forfeit in this contest.” Who else “has put up a forfeit?” Antin may refer to other, nonJewish groups of immigrants. The passage also suggests that U.S.-born citizens, those born in “the country that has given [Jews] shelter,” lose something in the process of immigrant assimilation. After describing her parents’ difficult processes of assimilation, Antin claims that she thinks it “doubtful if the conversion of the Jew to an alien belief or disbelief is ever thoroughly accomplished” (249). She uses the example of her father—whom she had described earlier as one who assimilated relatively easily—to support her assertion. “My father,” Antin imagines, “might speak and tell how, in time, he discovered that in his first violent rejection of everything old and established he cast from him much that he afterwards missed. He might tell to what extent he later retraced his steps, seeking to recover what he had learned to value anew” (248). Significantly, Antin tells of her father’s re-embracement of “old and established” values as an aside rather than as a central part of her, or her family’s, history. In order to maintain the veneer of her paean to assimilation, she refuses to delve too deeply into the possible drawbacks of assimilation, suggesting only that, “perhaps [her grandchildren] may have to testify that the faith of Israel is a heritage that no heir in the direct line has the power to alienate from his successors” (249). Patriotism and religious conversion are not the only terms in which Antin presents the process of assimilation. Since she is writing an autobiography, Antin necessarily creates a work that is situated within a very “American” literary genre, one whose defining characteristics have been largely articulated by white men. At least since the time of Benjamin Franklin, American autobiographies frequently have followed a linear narrative of the self-made individual overcoming adversity, working through a process of (usually self-) education, and ultimately arriving at some sort of social/monetary success. This dominant narrative pattern has worked to reify “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps” as a defining, if clichéd, “American” value. Many readers of The Promised

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Land have identified this narrative pattern in the autobiography. In “Charles Reznikoff’s Family Chronicle: Saying Thank You and I’m Sorry,” for example, Eric Homberger claims that immigrant memoirs of the turn of the century, including The Promised Land, “had the simple force of homilies: how I came, struggled, learned and finally succeeded. The immigrants’ story was a glowing tribute to the promise of America” (327). Similarly, in the essay “Identities Within Identity,” June Sochen, while specifically addressing fiction rather than autobiography, writes of the connotations of adopting such a narrative pattern: When a Jewish American woman writer…writes a rags-to-riches novel…she is operating within a tried and true genre. She is identifying with a literary tradition in America and in so doing allying herself with a whole set of American cultural beliefs. She is accepting the view that progress is a real phenomenon for newly arriving immigrants, that all of them must struggle, and that many will succeed if they observe the Protestant values of hard work, self-reliance, and patience. (9) Both Homberger and Sochen focus primarily on economic achievement, a subject that plays little role in The Promised Land.11 The pattern of struggle and success, however, could easily be used to describe Antin’s educational process in the United States, suggesting that she has allied herself with the American cultural beliefs that Sochen describes. And yet, while The Prom ised Land’s narrative does, in some ways, resemble the dominant American autobiographical pattern, Antin also subverts this pattern. The American autobiographical pattern of self-made success is part of a larger Western tradition of constructing the subject of autobiography. In their introduction to De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explain that “‘autobiography’ has been implicated in a specific notion of ‘selfhood.’ This Enlightenment ‘self,’ ontologically identical to other “I”s, sees its destiny in a teleological narrative enshrining the ‘individual’ and ‘his’ uniqueness” (xvii). This individual, the “selfmade man” of American autobiography, is “rational, agentive, unitary” (Smith and Watson xvii). Recent critics and narrative theorists have noted how the autobiographies of male minorities and women frequently differ from white male autobiographies, especially in terms of the narrative subject’s construction of the self and the relationship between the subject and her or his community and/or society. In 1992,

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for example, Albert E. Stone added a postscript to his earlier (1978) analysis of the two “polar modes of self-representation” (187)—the historically-grounded memoir and the fictionalized private confession— of African-American autobiography. In this postscript to “After Black Boy and Dusk of Dawn: Patterns in Recent Black Autobiography,” Stone notes that for African-American autobiographers, “truth to self seldom means embracing white male models of autonomous identity, a persona typified in mainstream American autobiography by Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, or Lee Iacocca” (188). Making a similar claim about women autobiographers, Germaine Bree, following critic Susan Friedman, asserts that “the important unit is never for [the woman autobiographer] the isolated human being but the presence and recognition of another consciousness” (174).12 Stone, Bree, and Friedman find that texts by autobiographers other than white males rarely focus on isolated, autonomous individuals, and this is precisely the case in The Promised Land. Perhaps the most obvious way that Antin constructs an interdependent, communal subject is through her description of her education in Boston. Whereas Benjamin Franklin details how, on his own initiative, he would stay up long into the night studying, Antin is careful to show how others participated in, and contributed to, the process of her education. Soon after her arrival in the United States, Antin entered the public school with the full support of her family. Her father not only promoted her education, but saw it as a form of salvation: “That subject [education] my father had written about repeatedly, as comprising his chief hope for us children, the essence of American opportunity, the treasure that no thief could touch, not even misfortune or poverty. It was the one thing that he was able to promise us when he sent for us; surer, safer than bread or shelter” (186). At the same time that Antin, her younger brother Joseph, and her younger sister Dora (Deborah), enrolled in school, however, her older sister Frieda (Fetchke) was sent to work as a dressmaker’s apprentice.13 When describing with pride her first day at school, Antin also notes her older sister’s absence: Frieda’s heart did throb that day, but not with my emotions. My heart pulsed with joy and pride and ambition; in her heart longing fought with abnegation. For I was led to the schoolroom, with its sunshine and its singing and the teacher’s cheery smile; while she was led to the workshop, with its foul air, care-lined faces, and the foreman’s stern command. Our going to school was the fulfilment of my father’s best promises to us, and Frieda’s share in it was to

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fashion and fit the calico frocks in which baby sister and I made our first appearance in a public schoolroom. (199) Antin clearly shows that the reason for Frieda’s different fate is financial when she explains that had her father “been able to support his family unaided, it would have been the culmination of his best hopes to see all his children at school” (201). Antin’s education, then, is partly a product of her father’s encouragement and her sister’s sacrifice. Antin quickly succeeded in the public school, especially in learning English, earning praise from her teachers and from her family alike. Again, however, Antin is careful to note that, unlike a more traditional American autobiographer, she cannot take sole credit for her success. With the help of her teacher, Miss Nixon, she learned English quickly and was soon advanced to the second grade. Describing her success, Antin at first seems to give herself much of the credit. After praising Miss Nixon, Antin continues, “I do not mean to give my dear teacher all the credit for my rapid progress, nor even half the credit” (206). This statement suggests that Antin indeed sees her educational success as self-made. However, she quickly qualifies her proud assertion: “I shall divide [the credit] with her on behalf of my race and my family. I was Jew enough to have an aptitude for language in general, and to bend my mind earnestly to my task; I was Antin enough to read each lesson with my heart, which gave me an inkling of what was coming next, and so carried me along by leaps and bounds” (206–7). By crediting her ‘race’ and her family, Antin in one sense seems to be acknowledging innate, hereditary abilities. At the same time, one could read this passage as an acknowledgment of how members of her Jewish community and of her family helped her. In other words, Antin’s diligence and her tendency to read each lesson with her heart are, in part, learned qualities, qualities that her family and her community have taught her. In this sense, Antin is not the self-educated hero of American autobiography; even her personal qualities that help her succeed can be read as the product of her environment. Antin similarly relinquishes any claim to being self-educated when she describes her teachers. She writes of her third-grade teacher, Miss Dillingham, with reverence: “I can hardly name her with the rest, though I mention none of them lightly” (208). Miss Dillingham, the autobiography chronicles, is largely responsible for Antin’s first publication, a poem titled “Snow.” The poem was published in the journal “Primary Education,” prefaced by a letter from Miss Dillingham to the journal’s editor explaining that the poem was “the uncorrected

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paper of a Russian child twelve years old, who had studied English only four months” (211). Antin includes the entire text of Miss Dillingham’s letter and of the poem, and she introduces them by stating that “a tattered copy [of the publication] lies in my lap as I write—treasured for fifteen years, you see, by my vanity” (211). Although Antin notes her own vanity and mentions that she is proud of her poem, she soon criticizes her own pride. After providing the text of the poem, she immediately asserts that “now that it stands there, with her [Miss Dillingham’s] name over it, I am ashamed of my flippant talk about vanity” (212; emphasis in original). She continues by praising Miss Dillingham, concluding that “I ought to go back and strike out all that talk about vanity. What reason have I to be vain, when I reflect how at every step I was petted, nursed, and encouraged?…I never heard of any one who was so watched and coaxed, so passed along from hand to helping hand, as was I” (214). Antin makes it very clear that she has not pulled herself up by her own bootstraps; indeed, her careful construction of the preceding passages suggests that she wishes to emphasize the point. Instead of striking out “all that talk about vanity” as she claims she should, Antin is careful to retain it, perhaps to emphasize how her narrative differs from the traditional autobiographical pattern of self-education. Unlike the success of a self-made white American man, any success that Antin can claim must be seen, in part, as the product of her teachers, family and community. By writing in the form of autobiography, Mary Antin asserts her American self; by refusing the white male autobiographical tradition of pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, she also calls that self into question and consequently calls into question the possibility of assimilation.14 Perhaps even more striking, however, is the way that Antin subverts the traditional linear narrative pattern of autobiography. Autobiographies, like Bildung sromans, often present seamless, linear, chronological narrative structures. Instead, Antin’s autobiography is bifurcated; the first half of the text contains reminiscences of life in Russia, while the second half is a more traditional, chiefly chronological account of her experiences after immigration. As I previously noted, it is this second half of the autobiography that critics examine as evidence of Antin’s successful assimilation. To get a full picture of the autobiographical subject that Antin creates, however, we certainly must examine the text as a whole. The bifurcated structure of The Promised Land might be read as a representation of assimilation. Because Antin focuses on life in Russia in the first half of the book and on “becoming American” in the second

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half, one could argue that she substitutes one culture for another, a reading that is substantiated by Antin’s own claims of “conversion.” Such an argument, however, relies on a linear reading of the text; we must assume a priori that Antin is indeed creating a rags-to-riches narrative of progress and transformation. By instead reading the two halves of the autobiography side by side, the reader can unfold a very different story of assimilation. If, as Sochen argues, the form of Antin’s work implies complicity with American cultural beliefs, then this alliance is complicated by the first half of the autobiography. In this part of the text, Antin not only frequently describes her Jewish community in Russia with reverence and sympathy, but she also marks herself as a Jew and as a female. She does this by carefully describing the differences between Jews and Gentiles in Russia and by describing how differently boys and girls are treated within her community, especially in terms of access to education, as I noted earlier. While Antin attempts to construct herself as American in the second half of the autobiography, her emphasis on her gender and on her religious and cultural ties in the first half prohibit the reader from reading the autobiographical subject Mary Antin as unmarked.15 The Promised Land, then, contains two versions of Mary Antin’s story of assimilation. In the more overt version, Antin becomes an unmarked American; she participates in a hegemonically-defined, Anglo-Protes-tant-centered definition of whiteness. In the other story of assimilation, Antin becomes a Russian-Jewish-American woman. She does not substitute one identity for another but instead crafts a multiple, syncretic subject. Furthermore, Antin makes it clear that even her apparently unified American subject is one that is in-process, one that may have more to do with practice than with essence. Describing the ease with which she adjusted to attending Boston’s Latin School, populated by “aristocratic” students, as a teenager, Antin explains that to “make myself at home in an alien world was also within my talents; I had been practising it day and night for the past four years” (294). Antin’s use of the word practising is significant, suggesting that her American self is not as static or unified as it may appear. However, she does not fully reject the idea that an “authentic” American identity exists. This becomes disturbingly apparent when she describes her reaction to the birth of her niece, her sister Frieda’s first child: “She was born an American, and it was something to me to have one genuine American relative” (314). Antin’s niece is a “genuine American” because she was born in the United States, implying that an immigrant

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may assimilate but can never be a “genuine American,” an identity that, at this moment in the text, is based on essence, not practice. While most critics of The Promised Land, in their focus on Americanization, fail to acknowledge the multiple subject positions that Antin claims, critic Magdalena J.Zaborowska recognizes that there is more than one level to Antin’s narrative. In How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives, Zaborowska does not read Antin’s work in terms of racial formation, as I do in this chapter, but instead chooses to read the work through a gendered lens to uncover how “the politics of female authorship in general and of autobiography in particular are interrogated” in Antin’s autobiography (51). Despite this different focus, however, Zaborowska also finds that the work presents a subtext “which questions and debunks the superficial tale of an immigrant girl’s successful Americanization” (53). Most relevant to this study, by examining Antin’s relationship to the prescribed narratives of her time, Zaborowska offers possible reasons for the multiple narratives in the autobiography. Zaborowska claims that the “sense of fragmentation and alienation from herself” that surfaces in Antin’s narrative should not be read as a happy affirmation of rebirth in America. It indicates instead the inevitable loss of the immigrant woman’s identity amid the Americanization narrative prescribed for her by the dominant culture—the Promised Land, which is not interested in listening to her other story—in which she nevertheless remains Jewish and female, ‘a princess, in memory of my forefathers who had ruled a nation,’ in which she goes ‘in the disguise of an outcast’ although she feels ‘a halo resting on [her] brow.’ (67) I disagree with Zaborowska’s claim that The Promised Land reveals “the inevitable loss of the immigrant woman’s identity”; the idea of loss implies that identity is something static, missing the complexities of the formation of identity. Nevertheless, Zaborowska’s analysis is useful for its acknowledgment of the role Antin’s audience plays in shaping her narrative. Zaborowska clearly suggests that the “official” version of Antin’s story—the one in which Antin claims an already-inscribed white, American subject position—is created to appeal to Antin’s audience. If we assume that Antin’s purpose in writing was, in part, to counter the rampant xenophobia of her time, especially as that xenophobia was directed at the “inferior” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, then her embracement of whiteness can be read as a

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direct response to her social agenda.16 As Zaborowska explains, “Antin did not have any other choice but to participate in some of the ‘paeans’ if she wanted a chance to speak for the immigrant cause, if she wanted to see her text in print at all” (60). She must, at least from her perspective as a Russian-Jewish immigrant woman, a potential “outsider,” adopt a white subject position, and she must largely define white identity as a stable, coherent entity if she is to have a voice and an audience. Having this audience, and having this audience accept her claim to whiteness, is central to the process of racial redefinition for immigrant Jews. Describing the process of how Irish workers became white in the nineteenth century, in How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev implies that claiming whiteness was only part of the process; this claim had to be accepted by those in power. To claim whiteness for Jewish immigrants, Mary Antin is faced with a similar situation: she must position her claim in such a way that it will be recognized by those whose whiteness is already established. In How Jews Became White Folks, Karen Brodkin locates the acceptance of Jews as white in postWorld War II America; however, she also notes that “Jews advanced a variety of cultural claims to Americanness long before these were granted. For the most part, these were efforts to assimilate the values of mainstream America” (155). The Promised Land presents one such early claim. If one of Antin’s purposes was to define herself as white and consequently fit for citizenship, however, we must ask why her autobiography largely ignores an often-used method of defining whiteness by opposing it to blackness. As the studies outlined in chapter one suggest, whiteness has long been defined in opposition to blackness, both relying on and reifying a bifurcated racial system in the United States. While this bifurcated system has not been the only conception of race historically—both whiteness and blackness also have been defined in relation and opposition to redness, for example—the opposition of black and white became crucial to defining immigrant “fitness” during the reign of Jim Crow. As Rogers M. Smith points out, “the fact that most Northern states did not pass Jim Crow laws did not make them just a regional phenomenon” (449). Not only the spirit of the laws but also their legal ramifications held sway throughout the country, and they had specific influence on immigration policy and on the public perception of immigrants. Matthew Frye Jacobson provides an excellent investigation of some of the ways that Jim Crow directly impacted immigration policy.

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Jacobson discusses at length one legal case that exemplifies the degree to which the binarism of Jim Crow influenced the definition of whiteness: the Massachusetts circuit course case In re Halladjian (1909). In this case, the court ruled in favor of four Armenians who had been denied naturalization on the grounds that they were not “free white persons.” In reaching the decision, the court relied not only on colonial racial definitions but also on more recent segregation statutes from states such as Florida, Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. The court cited an Arkansan statute, for example, that specified that “persons not visibly African ‘shall be deemed to belong to the white race’” (In re Halladjian). Such statutes helped the court to affirm that anyone who was not black was, by default, white. While the Massachusetts court’s reification of a bifurcated racial system did not end debate over how to define whiteness, the ruling does show how segregative logic worked to further monolithic whiteness, allowing formerly racially indeterminate immigrants to become white, at least legally. As Jacobson puts it, “for certain groups, at certain moments, under certain conditions, Jim Crow whitened, and whitened decisively” (110). The one point where Antin comes closest to invoking the binary racial logic of Jim Crow is in an incident described by Werner Sollors as perhaps “the most troubling, though little-noticed episode in The Promised Land” (xxx-xxxi). In this scene, Antin tells of a “great hulky colored boy,” “the torment of the neighborhood,” who bullied her on the street. Antin’s father has the boy arrested and tried, and she describes the courtroom scene as pitting “bearded Arlington Street against woolheaded Arlington Street” (260). Rather than seeing racial significance in the scene, however, Antin instead uses this episode to celebrate the U.S. justice system: “We were all free, and all treated equally, just as it said in the Constitution! The evil-doer was actually punished, and not the victim, as might very easily happen in a similar case in Russia. ‘Liberty and justice for all.’ Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue!” (260). Sollors notes that “It is remarkable that Antin did not stop here to imagine any possible analogies between the roles of Jews in the Pale and of blacks in turn-of-the-century America” (xxxi). I would add that it is equally remarkable that Antin does not push the racial binary further here. She suggests such a binary, not only through her description of the “great hulky colored boy,” but also through the literally antagonistic courtroom groupings of “bearded Arlington Street” and “woolheaded Arlington Street.” However, Antin quickly elides this racialized scheme

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by extolling the sup posedly “blind” justice system; as in the rest of the autobiography, race is no longer an overt issue. There are a number of (not necessarily mutually exclusive) possible explanations for Antin’s elision of racial binarism. One potential reason might be that she opposed that construction of racial difference. If the historical Antin did indeed see parallels between the positions of blacks in Jim Crow America and of Jews in the Russian Pale, as Sollors suggests she might have done, opposition to racial binarism and segregation becomes an even more likely cause for not relying on them, and consequently reifying them, to establish her autobiographical whiteness. A less optimistic explanation might be that, given the prevalence of belief in a black/white binary during the Progressive Era, Antin’s brief reference to that binary in the episode noted above was sufficient to establish it as a subtext to the rest of her autobiography. In other words, she would not need to further emphasize that schema of racial difference because her audience would already have been well acquainted with it. This explanation is certainly in keeping with how the racial status of Jews was legally defined during the time: Jewish immigrants were generally accepted legally as “free, white persons” eligible for naturalization. Thus Antin’s brief invocation of the black/ white binary would serve as a reminder of Jews’ “official” status on the white side of the racial line. Jews were generally defined as white in legal arenas; however, their racial status in popular thought was much more ambiguous. Whereas some gentile European Americans contended that Jews, despite their legal racial status, were biologically different from and inferior to other European-American “races,” the more common attitude toward the racial classification of Jews might best be described, to use Brodkin’s words, as “not-quite-white” (60), or in Jacobson’s phrasing, “inconclusively white” (65). Their position in the racial framework of the Progressive Era was more ambiguous than naturalization law would suggest. Antin’s brief bow to the logic of Jim Crow in the incident pitting “bearded Arlington Street against woolheaded Arlington Street,” then, is hardly sufficient to put the issue of Jewish racial ambiguity to rest. This ambiguity, however, can help us to better understand Antin’s elision of the racial binary throughout most of the autobiography. The binary logic of Jim Crow was predicated on the assumption of biological and hierarchical difference between races. While this assumption also pervades much anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic discourse of the time, the social aspects of immigrant racial difference—aspects that were

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viewed as consequent to biological difference but that were frequently addressed sep arately—often took center stage in these arguments. By eliding the racial binary of Jim Crow through much of the text, Antin also avoids directly addressing the issue of Jewish biological difference. I do not wish to imply that the writer Antin consciously invoked then evaded the black/white binary of racial discourse. But whatever her intentions or personal views on the “color line,” her brief opposition of Jews and blacks as well as the text’s general lack of reference to racial binaries directly affect how Jews are constructed racially in the autobiography. Given her anti-xenophobic agenda, Antin’s focus on the cultural dimensions of race allows her to, for the most part, sidestep questions of biological racial difference and instead make the claim that her own experiences better allow her to make: that immigrant Jews are able to culturally assimilate into whiteness. When she does briefly invoke the biologically-based racial binary, that binary only furthers the case for Jewish whiteness. CONCLUSION: BOUNDARIES AND “I”S As I have shown, the story of Antin’s fitness for participation in whiteness is only one of the stories told in the autobiography. I wish to conclude this chapter by returning to the introduction of Antin’s autobiography in order to examine the relationship between the white subject and the marked Other subject of The Promised Land. Many critics have remarked on Antin’s introduction, but none have examined fully the contradictions inherent in it and how those contradictions reflect on the author’s multiple autobiographical subject positions. Most critics who do examine the introduction focus on Antin’s discussion of her reasons for writing the autobiography. In a much-cited passage, Antin asserts that “It is because I understand my history, in its larger outlines, to be typical of many, that I consider it worth recording. My life is a concrete illustration of a multitude of statistical facts. Although I have written a genuine personal memoir, I believe that its chief interest lies in the fact that it is illustrative of scores of unwritten lives” (xxi). This passage foregrounds Antin’s desire to link her own history with that of other immigrants, a linkage that is essential to her proimmigration argument. As Steven J. Rubin claims, autobiography “provided a vehicle for linking personal history with that of the group— with an entire social process” (36). Antin goes so far as to switch from the first person singular pronoun to the first person plural, further emphasizing her identification with a larger group of immigrants: “I am

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only one of many whose fate it has been to live a page of modern history. We are the strands of the cable that binds the Old World to the New” (xxi; my emphasis). I wish to suggest that this “typical” Mary Antin of the introduction, whose story is “illustrative of scores of unwritten lives,” is a correlative of the white Americanized subject that Antin the author has constructed in the autobiography itself. I began this chapter by noting how Antin distances her writing self from the subject of the autobiography. “I am just as much out of the way as if I were dead,” she claims toward the beginning of the introduction, “for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell” (xx). The “I” who is distanced from the autobiographical “person whose story I have to tell” is presumably the Americanized Antin. As in the body of the autobiography, the “I” of the introduction can be compared to the persona of white male autobiography. Similar to many white male autobiographers, Antin describes herself as going through a transformation to emerge as an individual: [D]id [my parents] set me down in a sheltered garden, where the sun should warm me, and no winter should hurt, while they fed me from their hands? No; they early let me run in the fields— perhaps because I would not be held—and eat of the wild fruits and drink of the dew. Did they teach me from books, and tell me what to believe? I soon chose my own books, and built me a world of my own. In these discriminations I emerged, a new being, something that had not been before. (xx; emphasis in original) The “I” of this passage seems to be a full-fledged American autonomous individual, a female Horatio Alger-type character who has risen beyond past adversities to craft her own identity.17 Antin does not resolve the conflict between this strikingly individualistic subject and the subject who claims herself to be representative of scores of other immigrants; however, the presence of both is provocative. Antin at once acknowledges the collectivity, the “unwritten lives” of which her story is “typical,” and also asserts herself as the unique, individual subject. In doing so, she emphasizes not only her personal transformation, but also the potential transformation of other Jewish immigrants. These “others,” too, can assimilate, can become individuals, can lay claim to whiteness. The inclusion of this supposed transformation is essential to Antin’s anti-xenophobic argument.

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Rather than resolving the individualistic “I” and the representative subject that she presents, however, Antin creates yet another facet to her autobiographical identity. In the introduction, as in the text of the autobiography, this “representative” subject and the Americanized individualistic subject are in tension with another “I,” a Mary Antin who remembers herself to be a Russian Jew and who has trouble articulating the boundaries of her identity. After distancing her autobiographical subject from her writing self, Antin immediately proceeds to undermine that distinction: “Now I am the spiritual offspring of the marriage within my conscious experience of the Past and the Present. My second birth was no less a birth because there was no distinct incarnation. Surely it has happened before that one body served more than one spiritual organization” (xix). While still maintaining that she was “reborn,” she also acknowledges in this passage that her autobiographical subject is a multiple one with multiple allegiances. Antin further subverts her own claim of distance between her past and her present—a distance that is central to her claim to assimilation— in the last paragraph of the introduction. Here, she returns to an explanation of her reasons for writing and suggests that an additional motivation for the autobiography is her need to exorcise her past; the autobiography is “a charm that should release me from the folds of my clinging past” (xxii). Discussing the process of migration, Antin claims that All the processes of uprooting, transportation, replanting, acclimatization, and development took place in my own soul. I felt the pang, the fear, the wonder, and the joy of it. I can never forget, for I bear the scars. But I want to forget—sometimes I long to forget. I think I have thoroughly assimilated my past—I have done its bidding—I want now to be of to-day [sic]. It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. (xxii) The subject of this passage obviously desires distance from her past self but suggests that she has not yet achieved that distance and never can; she remains “of two worlds.” In this passage, Antin uses the term assimilated in an interesting way: rather than claim that she has been assimilated into white America as she might, she instead asserts that she has assimilated her own past, presumably her earlier experiences as a Russian-Jewish girl and as an immigrant Other in her adopted country. Antin’s “two worlds” evoke the “double-consciousness” of AfricanAmerican selfhood that W.E. B. Du Bois articulated nearly a decade

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before Antin published her autobiography. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois asserts that After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and the Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. 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 two-ness,—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) Whether or not Antin had read Du Bois’s work (and if she had, the debt was not acknowledged), the similarities between their descriptions of dual consciousness are worth noting. Both experience a conflict between an American consciousness (implicitly white for both of them) and another consciousness: that of a Russian-Jewish woman in Antin’s case and of a Negro man in Du Bois’s. Both express a desire to reach a new, single consciousness—“a better and truer self” in Du Bois’s terms (2), “to be of to-day” in Antin’s. But there are also significant differences in how they perceive dual consciousness. Du Bois describes the new consciousness as merging the double selves without privileging either aspect: “He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world” (3). Antin’s attitude toward her doubleness is more conflicted: she claims that she wants to be rid of her “clinging past,” her Russian Jewish self, suggesting at this moment that she desires for herself assimilated whiteness. And yet she also claims herself “the spiritual offspring of the marriage within my conscious experience of the Past and the Present.” In doing so she suggests that, like Du Bois, she does not privilege one part of her identity over another but also that, unlike Du Bois, she has already achieved a new consciousness, the “offspring of the marriage” of her dual selves. The differences between Du Bois’s and Antin’s attitudes toward their double consciousnesses can be explained in part by the different experiences of African Americans and of Russian-Jewish Americans.

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While both Du Bois and Antin experienced oppression and both heard promise in the “greater ideals of the American Republic” (Du Bois 7), the nature of that oppression obviously differed, as did the degree to which they were allowed access to, and the protection of, those greater ideals that during the Progressive Era were largely reserved for white men. For Du Bois, the merged African-American “better and truer self” remains an aspiration. Antin, “inconclusively white,” presents herself both as a white, individualized, assimilated American and as a RussianJewish-American woman who has merged the different aspects of her identity just as she has merged the different parts of her story into a single autobiography. Early in this chapter I examined how, quite early in The Promised Land, Antin acknowledges the tenuous nature of the borders of geography and politics. Antin’s discussion of these borders provides a useful metaphor for looking at the layers and boundaries of identity that she constructs in the introduction and in the body of her autobiography. In a chapter titled “Initiation,” Antin describes the problems she encountered as a student when trying to understand geography. While she was able to satisfy her teacher’s expectations by memorizing a geography text, she confesses that she was never able to apply her abstract knowledge to the world around her:

If I looked at the map, I was utterly bewildered; I could find no correspondence between the picture and the verbal explanations…. Chelsea, I read, was bounded on all sides—“bounded” appealed to my imagination—by various things that I had never identified, much as I had roamed about the town. I immediately pictured these remote boundaries as a six-foot fence in a good state of preservation, with the Mystic River, the towns of Everett and Revere, and East Boston Creek, rejoicing, on the south, west, north, and east of it, respectively, that they had got inside; while the rest of the world peeped in enviously through a knot hole. (219–20) This vision of her town, bounded and contained, resembles the white American subject position that Antin constructs. Like the imagined Chelsea, the Americanized Mary Antin is presented as static and selfcontained; she is an “I”who has separated herself from Russia and from her Jewish heritage. By also creating a marked subject, one who resists complicity with the American autobiographical tradition and who

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retains a “clinging past,” however, Antin allows the reader to question the veracity of her claim to assimilation, and consequently the stability of these supposed boundaries of identity. She is, at the same time, looking at white America through the knot hole and claiming to be inside the fence.

Chapter Three “Why Couldn’t We Have Been Either One Thing or the Other?” Monolithic Identity and Ethnic Construction in the Fiction and Autobiography of Sui Sin Far

There is occasionally to be seen a half Chinese child with bright complexion and fair hair, and these combined with a straight nose, small mouth and wide eyes might easily deceive a stranger, but a person who has been informed of the child’s parentage, notices at once a peculiar cast about the face. This cast is over the face of every child who has a drop of Chinese blood in its veins. It is indescribable—but it is there. Sui Sin Far, “Half-Chinese Children” Not white, certainly, but not really Asian, I straddle the two worlds and try to blaze your trails for you. Siu Wai Anderson, “A Letter to My Daughter” Literary criticism of Sui Sin Far’s (1865–1914) writing is notably marked by contradiction around the issues of race and ethnicity. Addressing Sui Sin Far’s fictional characters and their relationships to cultural and racial conflict, for example, Lorraine Dong and Marlon K. Hom conclude, One might expect that with her compassion and understanding of both the Chinese and white American cultures, Sui Sin Far would create either complex characters that challenge the conflicts between the two cultures or supreme composite characters that exhibit the grandeur and virtues of both cultures. However, Sui Sin Far has not done so, not because of the anti-Chinese racism of the period but because of her personal belief in the mutual exclusiveness of both cultures. (165)

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In sharp contrast, critic William F.Wu claims that Sui Sin Far “writes with well-defined characters and a clear understanding of bicultural pressures” (131), an assessment that does not confirm that Sui Sin Far believed the two cultures to be mutually exclusive. Contradictory evaluations of Sui Sin Far’s work are even more notable when literary critics address the attitude toward assimilation expressed in her stories. According to Dong and Hom, “she shows that Chinese culture is foreign and should be left to exist on its own…. Sui Sin Far’s stories clearly indicate that the Chinese will forever be Chinese and it is not possible to ‘Americanize’ them” (164). Again in contrast to Dong and Hom’s position, Amy Ling, in her landmark book Be tween Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry, claims that Sui Sin Far “in her writing asserted [that] the Chinese are human and assimilable” (39). These contradictory readings prove even more surprising when we consider that these critics approach the author’s work from similar historical and theoretical perspectives: all of the evaluations quoted above were published within the past twenty-five years, and while Dong and Hom, unlike most critics, have an overall negative assessment of Sui Sin Far’s work, all of these critics approach Sui Sin Far’s writing with concerns about how she represents race, ethnicity, and gender in her short fiction. Why, then, are their conclusions so vastly different? Without directly addressing this question, Annette White-Parks offers a potential explanation in her essay “‘We Wear the Mask’: Sui Sin Far as One Example of Trickster Authorship.” In this essay, White-Parks argues that Sui Sin Far adopts the role of the “trickster” in her writing both to accommodate the racist views held by much of her audience and “write against the dominant racial and cultural ideologies of her time” (1–2). Adopting this “trickster” position, Sui Sin Far “teases us by presenting situations and characters that appear to fit stereotypes, then does a flip that we miss if we are not reading closely” (11–2). WhiteParks’s argument suggests that the contradictions in critical evaluation of Sui Sin Far’s work might be caused by certain critics missing the “flip” and consequently reading only one of the many layers of meaning that the author presents. It is the relationship between these different layers that I will examine in this chapter. I will argue that, when negotiating between narrative layers, Sui Sin Far is also creating a dialogue between a racialized Chinese Otherness, which had considerable popular currency during the time that she was writing, and the invention of an ethnic identity, Chinese American. I will attempt to unravel these two elements as Sui Sin Far presents them in several of her short stories from Mrs. Spring

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Fragrance as well as her autobiographical essay “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” My aim is to show how Sui Sin Far’s fiction and autobiography are largely about the constructions of race and ethnicity. Because systems of racial categorization were much less malleable for Asian immigrants than for European immigrants, Sui Sin Far could not claim, as Mary Antin did for eastern Europeans, that Chinese immigrants could be accepted as white. Instead, her fiction and autobiography de-essentialize racial categories, in particular the supposedly dichotomous categories of Oriental and white, at the same time that she emphasizes ethnic difference by creating a ChineseAmerican identity. Before turning to an analysis of Sui Sin Far’s written work, I shall first survey the discursive attitudes surrounding Chinese immigrants and their descendants during the late nineteenth- and early-twentiethcenturies, since Sui Sin Far writes directly against the grain of this discourse. In 1882, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, an act that prohibited Chinese men and women—except for diplomats, students, teachers, merchants, and tourists—from entering the United States. While ostensibly a temporary, ten-year, measure (President Chester Alan Arthur had earlier vetoed a twenty-year exclusion act on the grounds that it effectively meant prohibition rather than suspension), the law was extended for an additional ten years by the Geary Act in 1892 and extended indefinitely in 1902. The laws were not repealed until 1943. The indefinite extension of Chinese exclusion in 1902, however, did not end debate about Chinese, and more generally Asian, immigration to the United States. Through the first few decades of the twentieth century, especially on the west coast, public discussions continued about the status of Asians and Asian Americans already residing in the United States and about whether Chinese exclusion should be permanent, whether the exclusionary law should be made more restrictive, and whether similar laws should be instituted to prevent people from other Asian countries from entering the United States.1 The arguments against Asian immigration were multifold; many arguments emphasized negative social aspects of Asian immigration (Asian immigrants lower the standard of living and introduce moral standards incompatible with those of European Americans) and economic aspects (immigrants lower wages and displace EuropeanAmerican workers).2 Intrinsic to these social, economic, and political arguments against immigration, however, were explicitly racist antiAsian arguments. The racist roots of these other arguments were acknowledged by some writers early in the century. In a criticism of

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anti-Japanese sentiment in California, one writer, in a 1921 issue of The Nation, claims that most Californians “will tell you that the conflict between the races is primarily economic, and not social…. While it is far from my intention to deny that there is an economic conflict between the races in California, I am convinced that this factor is of less importance than most Californians will admit, and that the antipathy of the white man for the yellow, skillfully engendered by politicians and by part of the press is a principal element” (Bliven 171). James D.Phelan, a noted restrictionist politician, shows the conflation of these anti-Asian arguments in “Japanese Question from a Californian Standpoint” (1913), an article published in The Independent, a weekly New York-based magazine with a national audience.3 In this article, directed at arguing for Japanese exclusion but also containing significant generalizations about “Orientals,” Phelan asserts that the naturalization laws were addrest [sic] to Europeans and did not contemplate Orientals, who, even in the earliest days, were regarded in the American sense, as indigestible. The men who originally opposed the introduction of negro laborers took the same ground, that being essentially foreign and inassimilable, the negro would create a race classification, which would be repugnant to American institutions and would destroy the idea of equality. It is, therefore, a question of preserving California as a white man’s country, upholding American standards and civilization, or abandoning it to an alien people capable, in this fierce competition, of either exterminating the whites or of reducing them to a hopelessly lower economic, social and political plane. (1438) Phelan makes it clear that the racial division that he perceives is welldefined and immutable. Whereas the racial categorization of many Europeans was in flux during this time, the line between “white” American and “Oriental” was not only drawn but impermeable: “Orientals” are “indigestible” and “inassimilable.” Furthermore, Phelan compares Asian immigrants to African Americans, whose degree of Otherness has long been explicitly based on racial criteria; by doing so and by expressing a wish to preserve California as “a white man’s country,” Phelan makes it clear that his concerns about immigration are concerns about race. This emphasis on Asian immigrants as “inassimilable” as well as the conflation of racist arguments with other arguments against immigration

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recur in numerous other nativist texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While many of these arguments group all Asian immigrants together as “Orientals,” as does Phelan in the passage above, some arguments and literary depictions distinguish between the different nationalities of immigrants, deeming some Asian immigrants preferable to others. S.E. Solberg notes that at the time Sui Sin Far began writing the Chinese were largely viewed as “mysterious, evil, nearby, and threatening, while the Japanese were exotic, quaint, delicate (or manly, as the samurai), and distant” (31). This issue of distance seems key to the differing views. While the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 severely limited the number of new immigrants arriving from China, the overall Chinese immigrant population in the United States remained significantly higher than that of any other Asian immigrant group. Thus, the number of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the United States made their presence more visible and immediate, likely contributing to their different reception. Through the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants were generally perceived as the Yellow Peril. Around the turn of the twentieth century, however, the stereotypes used to argue for Chinese exclusion were transferred to other Asian immigrant groups, particularly the Japanese. The Japanese population in the United States increased from 2,039 in 1890 to 24,326 in 1900, and to 77, 157 in 1910 (Osumi 9). Because of European-American anxiety prompted by these increases, much of the anti-Asian literature of the first part of the century focuses on excluding Japanese immigrants. While overtly concerned with Japanese exclusion, this literature makes clear that differences among Asian immigrants mean little to xenophobic writers; instead, these writers reiterate stereotypes that work to establish a monolithic Oriental Other. In a 1907 article in The Independent, one writer begins by asserting “Now any one who is at all familiar with the two races, realizes fully, and will state unhesitantly, that Occidental and Oriental civilizations will never mix” (Kahn 26). Another writer, whose essay arguing for exclusion was included in a 1908 issue of the Congressional Record, makes it even clearer that his position is racially motivated: “every year that goes by without positive legislation looking to the checking of Oriental immigration means the introduction into our midst of a people of a strange blood who throughout the centuries to come will retain their individuality” (French 279). While some writers distinguish between Chinese and Japanese immigrants, usually claiming one nationality “preferable” to the other,

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most restrictionist writers express antipathy toward “the Oriental” in general. It was in the context of these views of race and Asian immigration that Sui Sin Far published fiction about Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans from the 1880s to the 1910s. Sui Sin Far was born Edith Maude Eaton to a Chinese mother, Lotus Blossom, and an English merchant father, Edward Eaton, in Macclesfield, England in 1865.4 The family permanently immigrated to North America in 1872, first living in New York then settling in eastern Canada. The reason for the move from England to North America is unclear. Amy Ling speculates that Sui Sin Far’s English grandparents disapproved of their son’s marriage, thus prompting the family to move (26). Annette White-Parks acknowledges that the decision to emigrate was probably due to multiple factors: “Perhaps North America’s size and heterogeneous populations made it seem easier for a family that had violated social taboos to hide there than in a small English village. Perhaps the depression in the silk trade between England and China in the 1870s caused a slump in family business, adding a financial incentive. Or perhaps Edward’s family asked them to leave” (Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton 17). Whatever the initial motivation for migrating, the family’s financial situation did not improve in North America. While in England, the Eaton’s were of the merchant class, and Edward Eaton had artistic aspirations, suggesting some degree of leisure. In the United States and Canada, however, the family grew larger and apparently struggled financially: Sui Sin Far describes her eleven-year-old autobiographical self selling hand-made lace and her father’s paintings in the streets (“Leaves” 128). By her late teens, she was working as a typesetter and stenographer, and by the late 1880s she had published essays and stories in both Canadian and U.S. periodicals. While her family lived in Montreal while she was a child, as an adult, Sui Sin Far spent many of her years in the United States; after working briefly in Jamaica in 1897, she lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Boston. She returned to Montreal shortly before her death in 1914. Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far’s only published book-length work, appeared in 1912. Consisting largely of stories previously published in magazines, the work is structured into two sections: the first, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, contains seventeen stories and covers 241 pages; the second, Tales of Chinese Children, contains twenty stories and covers 102 pages.5 The original context of publication of many of the stories gives the reader a clue about Sui Sin Far’s intended audience; the stories were published in a range of popular and regional

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magazines, including The Century, The Indepen dent, Good Housekeeping, and Hampton’s. It seems likely that Sui Sin Far’s periodical audience was predominantly European American and that her collected stories were geared toward the same audience. The format of Mrs. Spring Fragrance is overtly Orientalized: bound in an embossed red cover, the pages of the text are decorated with a pastel design that suggests water colors. In addition to a bird and branches of blossoms and bamboo, the design includes Chinese characters that Ling translates as happiness, prosper ity, and longevity (41). For a European-American reader of the early twentieth century, the material reality of the book, in addition to the author’s name, testifies that this is a text about the exoticized Other. Throughout the book, however, Sui Sin Far refuses to present her characters as Oriental Others. Not only does she present sympathetic and carefully developed Chinese and Chinese-American characters, but through these characters she subtly questions the dichotomous racial identities upon which anti-Chinese attitudes relied. AMERICANNESS AND RACIALIZED BODIES IN “MRS. SPRING FRAGRANCE” Set in Seattle, the title story of Mrs. Spring Fragrance tells of an “Americanized” Chinese immigrant woman and her attempts to help a young friend, Mai Gwi Far or Laura, marry Kai Tzu, the man she loves, instead of the man to whom her parents have betrothed her. In addition to this plot line, the story also follows how Mr. Spring Fragrance, who is unaware of his wife’s matchmaking attempts, grows to doubt Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s fidelity to him and how he is eventually reassured of her love and fidelity. One of the most interesting aspects of this story—and one of the most revealing in terms of how Sui Sin Far negotiates between race, nationality and ethnicity in her work—lies in the definitions of American that the story offers. While Sui Sin Far ultimately raises the question of whether a Chinese American is indeed “American,” much of the story seems to suggest that American actually denotes a descendent of European immigrants and the values and traditions associated with European heritage. One such definition occurs early in the story when Mrs. Spring Fragrance attempts to console her friend Laura by quoting poetry to her: “Is there not a beautiful American poem,” Mrs. Spring Fragrance asks, “written by a noble American named Tennyson, which says:

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“Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all?’” (5) As Elizabeth Ammons notes in Conflicting Stories: American Women Writ ers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, because Mrs. Spring Fragrance does not recognize that Tennyson is English rather than American, “the literary joke lands on the Spring Fragrances…. We find ourselves in the presence of a familiar cliché—ignorant, laughable foreigners struggling to understand what is completely obvious to ‘us,’ the enlightened insiders” (110). But, as the story progresses, Ammons points out, the butt of the joke starts to shift. The laugh begins to fall not on them but on the lines of poetry and the very idea of separate national traditions on which the joke is based. As we repeatedly hear Tennyson iden tified as American, we must begin to wonder what the English/American distinction means anyway. What makes Tennyson “English” and not “American,” really? The poetry actually is…all in the same tradition: Distinctions essential to separating British and mainstream white American literary lines are miniscule when looked at globally. (110) As Ammons’s analysis suggests, Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s conflation of American and English reinforces how tightly the two descriptors are connected. This notion of Americanness is one in which Mrs. Spring Fragrance, as a Chinese American, cannot participate. While Ammons restricts her discussion to the definition of literary traditions, Sui Sin Far actually plays with the term American in even broader ways. This is shown dramatically in a scene that occurs later in the story. Mr. Spring Fragrance, sitting on his doorstep, engages his European-Amer-ican neighbor, Will Carman, in conversation. Will characterizes a “smoking party” that Mr. Spring Fragrance intends to host as “high class,” to which Mr. Spring Fragrance responds, “Everything is ‘high-class’ in America.” Will agrees: “Haven’t you ever heard that all Americans are princes and princesses, and just as soon as a foreigner puts his foot upon our shores, he also becomes of the nobility—I mean, the royal family.” “What about my brother in the Detention Pen?” dryly inquired Mr. Spring Fragrance.

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“Now, you’ve got me,” said the young man, rubbing his head. “Well, that is a shame—‘a beastly shame,’ as the Englishman says. But understand, old fellow, we that are real Americans are up against that—even more than you. It is against our principles.” “I offer the real Americans my consolations that they should be compelled to do that which is against their principles.” (12–3) The contrast between the two characters’ views of America, and more specifically citizens’ complicity with American penal bureaucracy, is certainly striking if not surprising to a modern reader. Even more interesting, I think, are the different ways that Will Carman and Mr. Spring Fragrance define what it means to be American. Will distinguishes between different kinds of Americans: those responsible for detaining Mr. Spring Fragrance’s brother—the abstract and official Americans—and “we that are real Americans,” those who oppose injustice “even more than” would a Chinese immigrant like Mr. Spring Fragrance. Mr. Spring Fragrance, however, refuses to ac knowledge such a distinction. By ironically saying, “I offer the real Americans my consolations that they should be compelled to do that which is against their principles,” he creates a single group of Americans by collapsing the two groups; the “real Americans” are the very ones who are doing “that which is against their principles,” detaining Chinese immigrants. For Mr. Spring Fragrance, as for his wife, “American” apparently denotes any U.S. citizen of European descent; not only does he exclude himself from the category, but he also reaffirms that Americanness is a matter of descent rather than of ideology. This division between European Americans and Chinese Americans— European Americans as Americans, Chinese Americans as Chinese—is consistently reiterated in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” From the beginning of the story, Mrs. Spring Fragrance is described as “Americanized,” and later in the story, Mr. Spring Fragrance recalls how a business acquaintance, upon meeting Mrs. Spring Fragrance, remarked, “She is just like an American woman” (14; my emphasis). Similarly, when he begins to question his wife’s fidelity, Mr. Spring Fragrance himself wonders, “If his wife was becoming as an American woman, would it not be possible for her to love as an American woman—a man to whom she was not married?” (14; my emphasis). Significant, here, is Sui Sin Far’s use of the words like and as: Mrs. Spring Fragrance is not becoming an American woman; she is becoming as an American woman. While suggesting that Mrs. Spring Fragrance can adopt some of the qualities of an American (in this case,

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specific mannerisms, social values, the English language, and, most importantly for Mr. Spring Fragrance, the capacity for infidelity that he apparently views as antithetical to Chinese traditions), racial difference and country of origin bar her from claiming an American identity. In this sense, the story would seem to be in keeping with the notions of Chinese racial inassimilability held by many of Sui Sin Far’s EuropeanAmerican contemporaries. The character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance seems to reify the national, racial, and cultural boundaries between “American” and “Chinese”; however, the story also works to question these boundaries by insisting on the possibility of assimilation and by undermining the idea of static racial categories. On the first page of the story, the reader encounters a curious passage. Kai Tzu, the man whom Laura loves, never enters the story as a developed character; however, he is briefly described: “Kai Tzu, who was American-born, and as ruddy and stalwart as any young Westerner, was noted amongst baseball players as one of the finest pitchers on the Coast. He could also sing, ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes,’ to Laura’s piano accompaniment” (2). The last sentence of this passage suggests that Kai Tzu is culturally as similated: in a move similar to Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s conflation of “American” and “English” when she quotes Tennyson, Sui Sin Far offers Kai Tzu’s familiarity with the traditional English song as sign of his Americanization. Furthermore, that Kai Tzu successfully plays baseball suggests that he is structurally assimilated as well, for he participates in the organized, institutionalized “American pastime.” Perhaps most significant, however, is the narrator’s description of Kai Tzu’s appearance. In order to examine how Sui Sin Far uses physical appearance in the story, I wish to return to the Reports of the Immigration Com mission (1911), the series of detailed reports resulting from an extensive, government-sponsored investigation into numerous aspects of immigration and immigrant life that I discussed in chapter one. In volume 38 of these reports, an investigation devoted to Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, the authors attempt to situate their study by asserting that “It was suggested to the Commission that if measurements of the bodies of European immigrants and their descendants at different ages and under different circumstances could be made in a careful way by scientific anthropometrists, valuable results might be reached” (1:44). After measuring and comparing “stature, weight, length of head, width of head, width of face, and color of hair” (2:525), the report concluded that changes in “bodily form” do indeed occur in the descendants of

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European immigrants. Regarding head shape, for example, the researchers found that “the east European Hebrew, who has a very round head, becomes more long-headed; the south Italian, who in Italy has an exceedingly long head, becomes more short-headed; so that in this country both approach a uniform type, as far as the roundness of the head is concerned” (38:5). One of the ironies of this study is that, while in their generalizations about the head shapes of different European “races” the researchers necessarily rely on biologically-based racial categories, they do so in order to undermine the very notion of distinct races in Europe: if descendants of immigrants approach each other in appearance, racial categories that rely on physical difference tend to disappear. Since the Reports of the Immigration Commission was published in 1911, one year after “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” was originally published in Hampton’s magazine, Sui Sin Far would certainly have been unaware of the study of “Changes in Bodily Form,” but she would have been quite familiar with the discourse that generated it. Interestingly, her brief description of Kai Tzu presents a philosophy of race and assimilability that is similar to, but more radical than, that of the Commission. Instead of conforming to racial stereotypes of Chinese men as yellow-skinned and effeminate, Kai Tzu is “as ruddy and stalwart as any young Westerner.” While this description reifies and privileges European-American notions of beauty and strength, it also suggests that, like the descendants of European immigrants studied by the Immigration Commission, the American-born descendants of Chinese immigrants would challenge the racial constructions of the period. At a time when restrictionists argued that inassimilability due to racial difference was grounds for the exclusion of immigrants, Sui Sin Far subtly questioned the very idea of static racial categories upon which the nativist argument relied. “THE WISDOM OF THE NEW” AND ASSIMILATION Whereas the character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance suggests the possibility of assimilation for Chinese Americans, some of Sui Sin Far’s stories actually question what it means to assimilate, whether assimilation is desirable, and whether there might be identities in between the possibilities of maintaining one’s original cultural practices and ties and relinquishing those ties in order to adopt new ones. The third story in

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Mrs. Spring Fragrance does precisely this: in “The Wisdom of the New,” Sui Sin Far shows the dangers of static, monolithic identity. While “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” offers humor and romance and produces a happy ending, “The Wisdom of the New” is very different in theme and tone. In this story, Wou Pau Lin journeys from China to the United States with her six-year-old son in order to join her husband Wou Sankwei, whom she has not seen since he left China seven years previous. With the help of his European-American patron, Mrs. Dean, and her niece, Adah Charlton, Wou Sankwei has become assimilated; he is, Mrs. Dean remarks to her niece, “as up to date as any young American” (53). Pau Lin, in contrast, retains her linguistic and cultural ties to China. The central conflict in the story arises when Wou Sankwei attempts to Americanize their son, Yen. On the eve of Yen’s first day in “American” school, Pau Lin poisons Yen rather than see him ruined by “the Wisdom of the New” (84). Pau Lin’s resistance to assimilation seems to be caused, in part, by her interpretation of her husband’s relationship to Adah Charlton. Sankwei obviously admires Adah immensely, and this provokes Pau Lin’s jealousy and suspicion. However, it is not simply Sankwei’s attachment to another woman that causes Pau Lin to be jealous: That a man should take to himself two wives, or even three… seemed natural and right in the eyes of Wou Pau Lin. She herself had come from a home where there were two [wives], In that home there had not always been peace; but each woman, at least, had the satisfaction of knowing that her man did not regard or treat the other woman as her superior…. But oh! the humiliation and shame of bearing children to a man who looked up to another woman—and a woman of another race—as a being above the common uses of women. (65) This passage shows that Pau Lin’s jealousy is prompted by husband’s treatment of Adah as superior to herself. But Pau Lin’s jealousy also is inspired, or at least intensified, by the racial difference between the two women. Thus, it is unclear whether Pau Lin’s resistance to assimilation is prompted by her jealousy or whether her jealousy stems from antipathy toward “whites,” personified by Adah. Perhaps it is safest to say that Pau Lin’s feelings toward Americanization are intensified by the association between her husband’s painful treatment of her and “American” Adah. Ultimately, Pau Lin’s attitude toward assimilation, an attitude that is necessarily connected to racial difference, brings about

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the tragedy at the end of the story; she would rather see her son dead than attending “American” school. Wou Sankwei’s own assimilation, however, is equally a part of Yen’s death. At last recognizing Pau Lin’s jealousy—and blaming Sankwei for it without fully acknowledging her own role—Adah Charlton tells Sankwei that he is “becoming too Americanized” (78). Because of his attachment to Mrs. Dean and Adah and because of his drive to assimilate, Sankwei is unable to recognize for himself that his behavior would necessarily cause his wife pain. Within this context, his insistence on Yen’s assimilation drives Pau Lin to kill her child. Discussing Sui Sin Far’s journalistic sketches, White-Parks claims that “however much Sui Sin Far aligned herself with a ‘new’ and more westernized order for Chinese and Chinese American cultures, she never suggests that the old ways should be rejected or condemned out of hand. Those she admires most manage to occupy a ‘both/and’ position between the old and the new, not an ‘either/or’ stance” (Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton 163). This seems to be equally true of Sui Sin Far’s fictional work; it is the “either/ or”stance of the characters that prompts the tragedy of “The Wisdom of the New.” Martha J.Cutter’s examination of racial passing in the fiction of Nella Larsen can further illuminate the problem of dichotomous identities in Sui Sin Far’s fiction. Cutter argues that it is not the act of adopting a false identity itself that causes Larsen’s protagonists to experience psychological suicide. Instead, Cutter asserts, “the assumption of only one guise or one form of passing causes Larsen’s characters to become stable, static, fixed in their meaning, entrapped within social definitions. To assume a single identity in a world in which identity itself is often a performance—a mask, a public persona—is to ensure psychological suicide” (“Sliding Significations” 76). While assimilation is not completely equatable to passing, Cutter’s remarks about the adoption of a single identity are equally relevant to Sui Sin Far’s story. Wou Sankwei is fixed within— and fixated on—an “American” identity. Pau Lin, in resistance to her husband’s behavior, is statically “Chinese.” Caught between these inflexible identities, Yen must die. While Larsen’s characters commit “psychological suicide,” Sui Sin Far envisions murder as the result of creating monolithic identities. In “The Wisdom of the New,” then, Sui Sin Far is neither promoting nor condemning assimilation for Chinese Americans. Instead, the story criticizes those who would see identity only in racialized terms—in other words, as static and bounded. The story leaves us with an unanswerable but tantalizing question. Could Yen, had he not been

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caught between such rigid notions of identity, have created for himself a Chinese-American identity that allowed for multiple cultural values and practices? While Sui Sin Far does not allow such a possibility for the character of Yen, she does raise that possibility in some of her other writing. ESSENTIALISM IN “ITS WAVERING IMAGE” In “Its Wavering Image,” Sui Sin Far continues to investigate the problem of monolithic identity and offers perhaps her strongest indictment of essentialized notions of race and ethnicity. In this story, we are introduced to Pan, who is described in the story’s first sentence as “a half white, half Chinese girl” (85). Pan’s white mother is dead, and she lives with her merchant father in San Francisco’s Chinatown.6 In her father’s “Oriental Bazaar,” Pan meets Mark Carson, a white reporter. The two soon begin to spend time together—Pan “led him about Chinatown, initiating him into the simple mystery and history of many things”—and they become romantically involved (87). However, Mark Carson publishes an article that reveals many of Chinatown’s “mysteries,” that are “sacred and secret” to Pan’s family and friends (92). Feeling betrayed, Pan rejects Mark Carson at the end of the story. Woven throughout this story of betrayal is another story about ethnic and racial identities. The importance of identity and classification is revealed quite early in the story. Upon first meeting Pan, Carson immediately feels the need to classify her racially. He returns to his newspaper office and asks his colleagues, “What was she? Chinese or white?” (86). Although he is told of her mixed parentage, he continues to express a need to use essentialized, either/or labels. In an important scene between Pan and Carson, worth quoting at length, Sui Sin Far describes them on a balcony, admiring the moon and looking over Pan’s neighborhood in Chinatown: “How beautiful above! How unbeautiful below!” exclaimed Mark Carson involuntarily. He and Pan had been gazing down from their open retreat into the lantern-lighted, motley thronged street beneath them. “Perhaps it isn’t very beautiful,” replied Pan, “but it is here I live. It is my home.” Her voice quivered a little.

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He leaned towards her suddenly and grasped her hands. “Pan,” he cried, “you do not belong here. You are white—white.” “No! no!” protested Pan. “You are,” he asserted. “You have no right to be here.” “I was born here,” she answered, “and the Chinese people look upon me as their own.” “But they do not understand you,” he went on. “Your real self is alien to them. What interest have they in the books you read—the thoughts you think?” “They have an interest in me,” answered faithful Pan. “Oh, do not speak in that way any more.” “But I must,” the young man persisted. “Pan, don’t you see that you have got to decide what you will be—Chinese or white? You cannot be both.” (89–90) Mark Carson’s insistence that Pan choose is complex and manylayered. Most apparent is his rejection of the possibility of multiple identities; Pan “cannot be both” Chinese and white. At this point, Mark Carson seems to be talking about racial categories. If racial categories are bounded and mutually exclusive, Pan must indeed be one or the other, and, to his mind, that one must be white. Interestingly, however, he inverts the way that biracial people are usually classified. In the United States, as in other racist societies, the children of parents from different races are usually classified by the more socially stigmatized race, a concept that finds its strongest expression in the notion that “one drop of African blood” makes a person black. Presumably, Mark Carson’s racism and his romantic interest in Pan, which are at odds with each other, prompt him to invert popular notions of racial classification so that he can assure himself that Pan is white. His insistence on her whiteness is further illuminated by an early passage in the story. The narrator tells us that “with delicate tact and subtlety [Mark Carson] taught [Pan] that, all unconscious until his coming, she had lived her life alone. So well did she learn this lesson that it seemed at

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times as if her white self must entirely dominate and trample under foot her Chinese” (87). In this passage, Sui Sin Far offers a subtle and ambiguous explanation for Mark Carson’s view of Pan as white. He teaches Pan that she had been alone before they met; is the reader to assume that her whiteness is evidenced by her willingness to give a white man center stage in her life? Is she white because she accepts that white men are so all-important that women are “alone” or incomplete without them? Is she white simply because Mark Carson says she is? If this is the case, then Carson’s idea of what constitutes whiteness includes cultural and ideological factors as well as biologically-based racial factors. Ultimately, Carson’s attempt to identify Pan as white conforms to the long tradition of identity conception that contemporary theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha describes in “Not You/Like You: PostColonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference.” “Identity as understood in the context of a certain ideology of dominance,” Trinh writes, “has long been a notion that relies on the concept of an essential, authentic core that remains hidden to one’s consciousness and that requires the elimination of all that is considered foreign or not true to the self, that is to say, not-I, other”(371). In “Its Wavering Image,” Mark Carson believes that it is he who can see that essential core in Pan, and that essential core is white. In his view, Pan must eliminate all that is Other, Chinese, so that her authentic white core might emerge. Unlike Mark Carson, Pan does not at first divorce her white and Chinese identities, nor does she attempt to privilege one over the other. When Mark Carson, at the end of the long passage quoted above, claims that Pan cannot be both Chinese and white, she tells him to “Hush!” and says, “‘I do not love you when you talk to me like that’” (90). Not only does Pan resist Carson’s insistence that she choose between the aspects of her identity, but she appears uncomfortable with the idea that these different aspects must be at odds. Pan almost seems to be on the verge of developing a new kind of consciousness, one that would anticipate the mestiza consciousness that Gloria Anzaldúa describes in Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza: from “racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer…. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures” (77, 80). But this new consciousness never emerges in Sui Sin Far’s story. The turning point of Pan’s self-identity, and of the story itself, occurs in the passage where Pan reads the newspaper article in which Mark Carson

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has revealed the “secrets” of Chinatown that Pan has shown him. The reader does not see the text of the article, but Sui Sin Far makes it clear that the article ridicules the religious and social customs of Pan’s community. Pan reacts to the article with anguish: “‘Betrayed! Betrayed! Betrayed to be a betrayer!’ It burnt red hot; agony unrelieved by words, unassuaged by tears” (91). Pan’s words make it clear that she sees her own culpability—she has betrayed her community by introducing Mark Carson into it—but she knows that the ultimate blame is his. Pan tries to make sense of the betrayal: Was it unconsciously dealt—that cruel blow? Ah, well did he know that the sword which pierced her through others, would carry with it to her own heart, the pain of all those others. None knew better than he that she, whom he had called “a white girl, a white woman,” would rather that her own naked body and soul had been exposed, than that things, sacred and secret to those who loved her, should be cruelly unveiled and ruthlessly spread before the ridiculing and uncomprehending foreigner. And knowing all this so well, so well, he had carelessly sung her heart away, and with her kiss upon his lips, had smilingly turned and stabbed her. She, who was of the race that remembers. (92) There is much more going on in this passage than simply an evaluation of Mark Carson’s act of betrayal. The voice of the third-person narrator gives over to Pan’s thoughts, and the reader is reminded that Mark Carson considers Pan “‘a white girl, a white woman’.” But immediately after this reminder we are shown the distance that Pan sees between herself and the white reading public of Carson’s newspaper: a white reader is a “foreigner” to Pan. The final line of the passage further emphasizes that she no longer has a multiple identity; instead, the “race that remembers” through which she identifies herself is obviously Chinese. In the concluding section of the story, Sui Sin Far shows even more dramatically that Mark Carson’s betrayal has caused Pan to reject a multiple identity in favor of one that is Chinese alone. Carson, who has been away from the city for two months, returns to Pan’s home assuming that she “would have forgotten that article by now” and that they will be reconciled (93). Instead, Pan, who is dressed in “Chinese costume,” responds coldly to his advances. Finally, he asks her why she is dressed as she is:

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“Because I am a Chinese woman,” she answered. “You are not,” cried Mark Carson, fiercely. “You cannot say that now, Pan. You are a white woman—white. Did your kiss not promise me that?” “A white woman!” echoed Pan her voice rising high and clear to the stars above them. “I would not be a white woman for all the world. You are a white man. And what is a promise to a white man!” (94–5; emphasis in original) Because, for Pan, being white means being a betrayer, she has chosen to identify herself as Chinese. As White-Parks has pointed out, in “Its Wavering Image” as well as in many other stories, Sui Sin Far reverses the concept of “Other-ness” so that white characters take on the characteristics, such as duplicity, usually associated with the Other, while Chinese-American characters move to the normative center of the narrative (“A Reversal”). This reversal is a particularly daring move; it seems likely that this new definition of what it means to be white would cause discomfort, even anger, in some members of Sui Sin Far’s largely European-American audience. And, significantly, Sui Sin Far has constructed her narrative and her characters too carefully to allow her readers to rationalize Mark Carson’s behavior or to criticize Pan’s: Pan is undeniably the sympathetic character of the story, as Carson is the betraying cad. But Sui Sin Far challenges her audience in even more daring ways. She goes beyond simply reversing the qualities associated with racialized groups, for she also calls into question what it means to be long to such a group. In “Its Wavering Image,” racial identity is not an essence, determined by biology; instead, it is something malleable, wavering. Pan claims her own racial identity and acts out that identity by adopting the ethnic associations of it, represented by her “Chinese costume.” As in “The Wisdom of the New,” Sui Sin Far ultimately creates a single identity for her character, as opposed to the plural identity that Pan articulated earlier in the story; however, in doing so, she shows that this identity is a choice and not an essence. It is in Sui Sin Far’s autobiographical work, which I will discuss next, that she fully examines what it means to choose an identity and whether it is possible to simultaneously occupy more than one subject position.

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ETHNICITY, RACE, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN “LEAVES FROM THE MENTAL PORTFOLIO OF AN EURASIAN” In 1909, The Independent published Sui Sin Far’s autobiographical work “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” While many recent crit ics pay attention to the text, most of these critics use it to establish the details of the author’s life. Some of these critics, however, do consider some of the literary strategies that Sui Sin Far adopts in the work. White-Parks, for example, examines it in terms of the authors’ “shifting roles, her irony, and her playfulness” (Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton 154). Because “Leaves” is a complex literary creation of an autobiographical subject, its textual constructions of ethnicity and race merit close attention. The title of “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” echoes nineteenth-century author Fanny Fern’s Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, but while the “leaves” of Fanny Fern’s work are longer essays, those of Sui Sin Far’s are short, chronologically-ordered episodes.7 Significantly, although the text opens with the words, “When I look back over the years” (125), locating the subject of the text in the past, the entire work is written in the present tense. Xiao-Huang Yin, the only critic to write of Sui Sin Far’s use of the present tense in “Leaves,” notes that “her use of the present tense in describing past occurrences strengthens the impression of her recollections of childhood experiences and fortifies the flashback effect” (59). The use of present tense, however, is more complicated, also representing a very deliberate literary strategy. Sui Sin Far is not simply revealing her experiences; instead, she constructs an autobiographical subject through whom she can explore the intricacies of negotiating identity in the terrain of race, ethnicity, and nationality. One significant way that she negotiates identity is through her autobiographical subject’s ways of naming herself. The centrality of naming and difference is made clear from the opening episode of the work. In this, Sui Sin Far describes her four-year-old subject hearing her nurse tell another nurse that “Sui”’s mother is Chinese: “Tho the word ‘Chinese’ conveys very little meaning to my mind, I feel that they are talking about my father and mother and my heart swells with indignation…. Many a long year has past over my head since that day— the day on which I first learned that I was something different and apart

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from other children” (125).8 In this passage, Sui tells us that the word Chinese carried little meaning for her; however, shortly afterward she informs us that her mother certainly did not hide her Chinese ancestry from her: “She tells us tales of China. Tho a child when she left her native land she remembers it well, and I am never tired of listening to the story of how she was stolen from her home” (128). Surely Sui would have heard these tales by the time she was four; why then does she state that Chi nese had little meaning for her? An explanation might lie in Sui’s recognition that her nurse uses Chinese derogatorily to refer to that which is “Other.” It is this label of Otherness that is unfamiliar to four-year-old Sui. Still, as a child, Sui is not completely aware of what it means to be Chinese. She describes another occasion after her family has immigrated to Hudson City, New York. With her brother Charlie, she passes a Chinese store: “The two men within the store are uncouth specimens of their race, drest [sic] in working blouses and pantaloons with queues hanging down their backs. I recoil with a sense of shock. ‘Oh, Charlie,’ I cry, ‘Are we like that?’” (126). Sui’s shock suggests that she has internalized the equation of Chinese with subaltern Other, but she has not yet learned to apply that name to herself. However, this same incident soon prompts her to do so. Sui and Charlie are chased down the street by neighborhood children yelling, “‘Chinky, Chinky, Chinaman, yellow-face, pig-tail, rat-eater’,” and Sui defiantly responds, “‘I’d rather be Chinese than anything else in the world’” (126). Finding herself the object of oppression, Sui subverts the definition of Chinese at which she had arrived only moments before. But while Sui can briefly embrace a Chinese identity when faced with the taunts of other children, the question of who she is continues to haunt her. Following continued abuse by other children after the family moves to Canada, Sui wonders,

Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters. Why did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English, mamma is Chinese. Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other? Why is my mother’s race despised? I look into the faces of my father and mother. Is she not every bit as dear and good as he? Why? Why?…I do not confide in my father and mother. They would not understand. How could they? He is English, she is Chinese. I am different to both of them—a

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stranger, tho their own child. ‘What are we?’ I ask my brother. ‘It doesn’t matter, sissy,’ he responds. But it does. (127–8) This passage makes it clear that it is not only the stigma of being Chinese that plagues Sui. Equally important is her status in-between races: she is nei ther Chinese nor English, and yet she is both Chinese and English. This apparent contradiction makes it difficult for her to name herself, but, as her final remark shows, she feels the need to do so. Sui’s expression of her need to name herself destabilizes the notion of racial identity as essence. As a child, she cannot name her own identity; she cannot answer the question “What are we?” for there is no racial essence for her to claim. “Leaves” most powerfully interrogates essentialized notions of identity in an often-cited section in which Sui, as an adult, refuses to pass as white. In this section of the text, Sui Sin Far describes her autobiographical self living “in a little town away off on the north shore of a big lake” (129). She is dining with her employer and several acquaintances when her dinner com panions begin to discuss “the cars full of Chinamen” that passed that day on the transcontinental railway that runs through the town (129). Sui’s companions offer explicitly racist comments about the Chinese workers: her employer muses that “I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that the Chinese are humans like ourselves,” and a young woman at the table comments, “They always give me such a creepy feeling” (129). The discussion pains Sui, whom her companions assume to be white: “A miserable, cowardly feeling keeps me silent. I am in a Middle West town. If I declare what I am, every person in the place will hear about it the next day. The population is in the main made up of working folks with strong prejudices against my mother’s countrymen. The prospect before me is not an enviable one—if I speak” (129). Thus far, Sui has been passing as white, and she makes it clear that “outing” herself could have painful, even dangerous, consequences. Nevertheless, she does so, telling her employer, “the Chinese people may have no souls, no expression on their faces, be altogether beyond the pale of civilization, but whatever they are, I want you to understand that I am—I am Chinese” (129). Unlike Sui’s earlier inability to name herself, the adult Sui in this passage is able to claim straightforwardly “I am Chinese.” It should not be surprising that by this point in the narrative Sui is better able to identify herself as Chinese. Earlier in “Leaves,” she describes herself making an effort to become familiar with China, Chinese immigrants, and Chinese Americans, first through library books and later through

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associating with Chinese Americans both professionally and socially. Nor should it be surprising that, up until this moment of “outing” herself, Sui has passed as white. The social and economic rewards for passing as a member of the dominant group in a racist society are great, and presumably Sui did not have to suffer one of the most important penalties of passing: severing ties with family and community.9 But the entire conception of the “Chinese” Sui passing as “white” in this section of “Leaves” is problematic. In her introduction to Passing and the Fictions of Identity, Elaine K. Ginsberg writes that “both the process and the discourse of passing interrogate the ontology of identity categories and their construction…. [They] challenge the essentialism that is often the foundation of identity politics, a challenge that may be seen as either threatening or liberating but in either instance discloses the truth that identities are not singularly true or false but multiple and contingent” (4). When Sui claims to be Chinese instead of white, she is claiming power for herself to defend a group with whom she identifies, but she also seems to be working within a true/false, either/or notion of identity. However, the very act of passing, as Ginsberg suggests, refutes this notion. The child of both Chinese and English parents, Sui is able to move between two identities and in doing so breaks down the boundaries between them. As Martha J. Cutter suggests in “Smuggling Across the Borders of Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” “Sui Sin Far’s construction of her identity encourages a movement back and forth between categories that are supposed to remain separate, an inhabiting of several categories simultaneously that is meant to undo these categories” (143). The essentialized racial identities constructed by Sui’s dinner companions reveal themselves as illusions. Implicit within the act of passing lies a certain powerlessness: on one level, passing involves capitulating to dominant power structures and, in doing so, avoiding conflict or danger. However, passing can also call into question essentialized categories of identity. In doing so, Ginsberg claims, “passing has the potential to create a space for creative selfdetermination and agency: the opportunity to construct new identities, to experiment with multiple subject positions, and to cross social and economic boundaries that exclude or oppress” (16). In another section of “Leaves,” Sui Sin Far shows the possibilities of this kind of boundary transgression. In this section, Sui is in the West Indies, presumably a reference to Sui Sin Far’s experience working in Jamaica. She begins the section by describing herself surrounded by “persons who are almost as high up in the world as birth, education and money can set them,” and then continues:

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I am also surrounded by a race of people, the reputed descendants of Ham, the son of Noah, whose offspring, it was prophesied, should be the servants of the sons of Shem and Japheth. As I am a descendant, according to the Bible, of both Shem and Japheth, I have a perfect right to set my heel upon the Ham people; but tho I see others around me following out the Bible suggestion, it is not in my nature to be arrogant to any but those who seek to impress me with their superiority, which the poor black maid who has been assigned to me by the hotel certainly does not. (130) The biblical justification for white supremacy that Sui Sin Far notes here was wide-spread at the turn of the twentieth century; it conveniently added moral and religious backing to eugenic theories as well as to the concept of manifest destiny. But Sui refuses to participate in the oppression allowed by this interpretation of the Bible. While she claims that acting arrogantly is not in her nature, a reader might wonder if this “nature” is the product of Sui’s multiple subject positions. She makes it clear that in the West Indies, as in the Midwest, she is passing, noting that “Occasionally an Englishman will warn me against the ‘brown boys’ of the island, little dreaming that I too am of the ‘brown people’ of the earth” (130). Sui Sin Far suggests that the act of passing, the process of occupying multiple subject positions, and the transgression of boundaries that accompanies these processes help her auto-biographical subject to reject the racism that the English wield against the black residents of the island. Sui may believe herself to be of different biblical lineage than the black maid, but she instead emphasizes their commonalities, paralleling the island’s “brown boys” with her own “brown people.” In “Leaves,” then, the act of passing not only calls into question essentialized categories of racial identity, but Sui Sin Far also suggests that recognizing multiple subject positions might lead to the dismantlement of racially-based oppression. Toward the end of “Leaves,” Sui mocks acquaintances who encourage her to Orientalize herself in order to succeed in her literary career. These acquaintances, Sui explains, encourage her to “dress in Chinese costume, carry a fan in my hand, wear a pair of scarlet beaded slippers, live in New York, and come of high birth” (132). She should baffle editors with quotations “both illuminating and obscuring”: “‘Confucius, Confucius, how great is Confucius, Before Confucius, there never was Confucius, After Confucius, there never came Confucius,’ etc., etc., etc.,” (132). Sui immediately criticizes those who encourage her to market herself as Oriental, stating that such people

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“forget, or perhaps they are not aware that the old Chinese sage taught The way of sincerity is the way of heaven’” (132). In this section of “Leaves,” Sui moves adeptly from racial stereotypes to a more complex concept of ethnic identity. Presumably, her acquaintances do not see her as Chinese enough; as a Chinese American trying to create her own identity, she fails to meet their expectations of an Oriental writer.10 But immediately after Sui mocks their advice to babble about Confucius in order to seem versed in Chinese philosophy, she quotes Confucius in order to illuminate her own views on identity. In doing so, she not only expresses her belief in being sincere, in being true to her own conception of herself, but she also establishes a sympathetic link between herself and Confucian philosophy. Thus Sui connects herself to China, but suggests that her Chinese-American ethnic identity is much more complex than her acquaintances’ concept of racialized Oriental identity.11 Sui once again quotes Confucius in the final paragraph of “Leaves”: “I have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any. Individuality is more than nationality. ‘You are you and I am I,’ says Confucius. I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant ‘connecting link.’” (132). “Nationality,” for Sui, does not only imply citizenship or identification with a specific nation-state, but also cultural identification. Thus, by emphasizing individuality in this passage, she seems to be distancing herself from any kind of communal or ethnic identity. But she immediately counters this by connecting herself to both China and Europe-America. If forced to choose between the two, if forced to view the world through mutually exclusive racialized categories, Sui cannot claim a “nationality,” for she is neither white nor Oriental. Ultimately, though, unlike the fictional character Pan, Sui claims ties to both countries; by allowing herself to be a “connecting link,” she rejects the dichotomies of racial rhetoric and instead creates her own individual Chinese-American ethnic identity. At the beginning of this chapter, I noted how Elizabeth Ammons has described the different levels of meaning in Sui Sin Far’s work. Because Sui Sin Far rarely uses explicitly racialized language when presenting characters that adhere to essentialized notions of identity, uncovering these layers involves decoding, and distinguishing between, race and ethnicity in her writing, while acknowledging how the two play off each other. The contradictory critical assessments of her work may be caused in large part by the complexity of her presentation of race and ethnicity. Rather than being racial or ethnic monoliths, Sui Sin Far’s characters

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are frequently “hybridized,” not in the racialized sense of being mixed bloods, but rather in the sense that they have multiethnic identities or are caught between identities: Mrs. Spring Fragrance can become “just like an American” at the same time that she is consistently labeled Chinese; the boy Yen is pulled between his father’s attraction to the American “new” and his mother’s ties to the Chinese “old”; Pan is content not choosing between her white self and her Chinese self until a white man betrays her; and Sui Sin Far’s own autobiographical subject cautiously but hopefully gives her “right hand to the Occidentals and [her] left to the Orientals.” In the end, Sui Sin Far uses her fictional characters and her autobiographical subject to interrogate the essentialized racial categories of white and Oriental and to suggest that a more fluidly constructed ethnic identification offers a freedom and a hope for social change that a rigid racial identification does not. At a time when popular literature about Chinese immigrants and their descendants was dominated by images of the monolithic Oriental Other, Sui Sin Far was able to see, and dared to publicly express, an alternative to being only “one thing or the other.”

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Chapter Four “This Hideous Little Pickaninny” and the Formation of Bohemian Whiteness: Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia

Physically they were almost a race apart…. Jim Burden, of the “hired girls” Willa Cather, My Ántonia Neither color, nor shape or size, nor the face you were born with can you take for granted anymore. Rina Ferrarelli, “Emigrant/Immigrant I” Recent critics have begun to investigate the complex, and often disturbing, racial terrain of Willa Cather’s (1873–1947) writing. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison examines Cather’s novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) and claims that the “problem” with the novel, and the reason it so often has been dismissed by literary critics, lies in “trying to come to terms critically and artistically with the novel’s concerns: the power and license of a white slave mistress over her female slaves” (18). While Morrison laments the lack of critical examination of race in Cather’s work—claiming that “the urgency and anxiety in Willa Cather’s rendering of black characters are liable to be missed entirely; no mention is made of the problem that race causes in the technique and the credibility of her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl” (14)— Minrose Gwin has indeed noted a “problem” in Sapphira, brought on by inconsisten cies in characterization and narrative technique. According to Gwin, “The troublesome aspect of Sapphira is that as it suggests the mixed nature of human motivation and conduct, it also implies that… slavery usually had no grave and irrevocable psychological effects upon the enslaved” (138).

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Morrison and Gwin place racial representation in the center of their analyses of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and other critics have begun to explore the racial terrain of Cather’s other novels and short stories. Paying particular attention to The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, Walter Benn Michaels, for example, uses the term nativist mod ernism to describe the racialized constructions of American identity that surface in Cather’s fiction. Other critics have begun to examine racialized portrayals of Pueblo Indians and Chicana/os that occur in Cather’s southwestern novels, and still others have called attention to the anti-Semitism that surfaces is several of Cather’s works. Katrina Irving looks specifically at My Ántonia (1918) in Immigrant Mothers: Narratives of Race and Maternity, 1890–1925, arguing that the novel’s cultural pluralism works to establish the racialized immigrant woman’s place within the stratified and exploitative labor market. Irving’s work, however, is a rarity among critical analyses of Cather’s Midwestern novels and stories about European immigrants; in most such analyses, discussions of ethnicity, considered separately from race, tend to come to the forefront.1 The attention given to ethnicity in Cather’s immigrant-focused works is understandable, especially because of the time-worn equation of “immigrant” and “ethnic” in the United States. Because whiteness has long been constructed as an unmarked racial category, frameworks of ethnicity do not seem to be applied to Cather’s works that focus on American-born white characters. Given the prevalence of discussions of ethnicity in Cather’s immigrantfocused works, however, the dearth of full discussions of race is striking. One likely explanation for this lack is that the emigrants in Cather’s work are from Europe and are therefore characters whom, from a perspective at the beginning of the twenty-first century, most readers would deem “white.” Therefore, regarding a text such as My Ántonia, in which most of the characters are apparently “white” and consequently unmarked for many readers, there has been little extended discussion of race. Such a discussion, however, is actually crucial to gaining a fuller view of the novel and of constructions of race in the early twentieth century. Notions of race during the 1910s, when Cather wrote My Ántonia, were not only in flux but were also intertwined with notions of what we now call ethnicity. At least as early as the first decade of the century, the instability of the term race reveals itself in texts from the social sciences as well as in more traditionally literary texts. In Races and Immigrants (1907), political econ omist John Commons acknowledges that “We [the author] use the term ‘race’ in a rather loose and elastic sense; and

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indeed we are not culpable in so doing, for the ethnographers are not agreed upon it” (12). Commons notes that race has been defined in terms of color, language, place of origin, and skull shape, and then attempts to clarify his own use of the term: Mankind in general has been divided into three and again into five great racial stocks, and one of these stocks, the Aryan or IndoGermanic is represented among us by ten or more subdivisions which we also term races. It need not cause confusion if we use the term “race” not only to designate these grand divisions which are so far removed by nature one from another as to render successful amalgamation an open question, but also to designate those peoples or nationalities which we recognize as distinct yet related within one of the large divisions. (13) This pliability of race reveals itself in numerous other texts. In Immigration: A World Movement and Its American Significance (1913), for example, sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild warns that “the new immigration is made up from people of a very different racial stock [from earlier settlers], representing the Slavic and Mediterranean branches of the Caucasian race rather than the Teutonic. With the difference in race go differences in mental characteristics, traditions, and habits of life” (130). Like Commons, Fairchild uses race to refer to “grand divisions” but also to difference within each division. Furthermore, Fairchild does not specify the relationship between race and “traditions, and habits of life,” only that they are associated, suggesting the interrelationship between race and what we would now term eth nicity. It is therefore not only important to examine the relationship between race and ethnicity in My Ántonia, but also to consider that many of Cather’s contemporaries, unlike readers of today, would not have necessarily considered Ántonia, an emigrant from central Europe, to be racially comparable to immigrants from northwestern Europe or their descendants. While the whiteness of the Virginia-born, alreadyAmerican narrator Jim Burden, with his “fresh color and sandy hair and quick-changing blue eyes,” is never in question, the same cannot be said for the “foreign” Ántonia (xii, 7). In this chapter I will argue that, by the end of the novel, Cather constructs the character of Ántonia both as an ethnically-marked Bohemian and as a white American. In constructing Ántonia this way, Cather affirms an American identity that, for all of its ethnic markers, becomes racially unmarked as white and, hence,

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normative. As I will show, constructing European Americans as ethnically diverse but racially unified allows Cather to sidestep the eugenicists’ claims of Nordic superiority, claims that were gaining in popularity during the 1910s. In doing so, Cather presents an optimistic (but, as I shall show, problematic) cultural pluralism similar to that advocated by progressive thinkers such as Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne as early as the 1910s. Cather, however, can only disrupt one construct of racial difference by reaffirming another. Ántonia’s Bohemian whiteness is made possible, I argue, by a crucial yet often overlooked scene in the middle of the novel. In this scene, “the Negro pianist” Blind d’Arnault entertains the young men and women of Black Hawk (206). It is only because black Otherness is reified through the character of Blind d’Arnault that the Bohemian Ántonia can enter into whiteness. Earlier critics of My Ántonia have seen the episode with Blind d’Arnault as significant to the fabric of, and the musicality of, Cather’s text. Richard Giannone, in Music in Willa Cather’s Fiction (1968), claims the episode is “the pulsating center” of the novel (120). Giannone, however, is discussing how the scene sets a musical and, consequently, an emotional key for the rest of the novel. More recently, Ann Moseley, focusing specifically on cultural pluralism in Cather’s text, notes Giannone’s claim, then asserts that “perhaps the true significance of the Blind d’Arnault episode is that for Jim, and for Cather,…this scene also reflects the feelings of a ‘new soul in a new world’” (10). Quoting Toni Morrison, Moseley concludes that Cather “undertook ‘the journey’ to face the ‘void of racism’” (10). However, a full analysis of the episode is not within the scope of Moseley’s article, and Moseley’s implication that Cather is actively confronting racism remains unconvincing. In contrast to Moseley’s position, Elizabeth Ammons asserts that the episode with Blind d’Arnault reveals Cather’s own internalized racism, rather than her attempt to confront racism (“My Ántonia and African American Art”). Furthermore, Ammons persuasively argues that the scene reveals Cather’s artistic indebtedness to African-American music, a debt that Cather will not own overtly but that erupts nonetheless in her text. Ammons is concerned with how an African-American cultural presence reveals itself and also remains concealed in My Ántonia. In this chapter, I am concerned with the implications of that presence and what its inclusion suggests about racial formation in the second decade of the twentieth century. As I will show, the scene with Blind d’Arnault reveals some of the intricacies of racial formation and its connection to a specific version of cultural pluralism

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that I outline in this chapter. More specifically, Ántonia can only represent an ideal of white Americanness at the end of the novel because Blind d’Arnault is assigned the role of Other. EUGENICS, EUROPEAN RACES, AND CATHER’S IMMIGRANT BODIES In order to examine the constructions of race in My Ántonia, I will look at the novel in conjunction with the ideology of the eugenics movement, specifically the racially-based tenets of eugenics, of the early part of the century. In particular, I will read the novel against The Passing of the Great Race (1916), an important eugenic text by Madison Grant. Madison Grant received a degree in law from Columbia University, but, rather than practicing, he became an amateur naturalist. He was a member of a number of different eugenics societies and actively campaigned for immigration restriction. Grant affiliated himself with many eminent scientists of his time and was respected and viewed as a peer by many of these scientists, despite his lack of formal scientific training (Tucker 88). By invoking The Passing of the Great Race, I do not mean to imply that Cather was consciously responding to Grant’s ideas, nor even that she had read his work. Instead, I view Grant’s work as representative of, perhaps even the apex of, a specific discourse of whiteness and racial hierarchy that I outline here. Whether or not Cather was familiar with Grant’s writing, she certainly would have been familiar with the racial ideology that produced it. Eugenic theories steadily gained popularity among physical and social scientists from the late nineteenth century past the time that The Passing of the Great Race was published in 1916, and during the first decades of this century, they also gained popularity among a more general, largely educated, audience. Between 1906 and 1911, while Cather was a staff writer and managing editor for McClure’s, a widely popular magazine, the magazine published several articles addressing eugenic theories, further emphasizing not only a general interest in these theories but also Cather’s certain familiarity with them.3 The Passing of the Great Race further helped to popularize eugenics among a more general audience. Grant’s text was a best seller (Tucker 90) and went through several printings. Reviews of the book were mixed: reviewers such as Franz Boas (writing for The New Republic) and Horace Kallen (writing for The Dial) strongly criticized Grant’s work; however most critics were less severe, sometimes finding fault

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with Grant’s research methods while generally agreeing with his findings. Several reviewers highly praised the text; one reviewer claimed it “a book to be read and considered by thinking men among us,” suggesting something of its audience (Boston Transcript 7). I choose Grant’s text to represent eugenic racial ideology because of its widespread influence and because it is to some extent the culmination of eugenic thought about the race(s) of Europeans in the first decades of the twentieth century. In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant’s stated purpose is not to examine the superiority of whites to other peoples of the world (although he does so occasionally, anyway) but rather to examine the racial differences among the people of Europe and their colonial descendants. According to Grant, all the people of Europe are white, but there exist three “subspecies,” to which Grant refers as “races”: the Nordic subspecies, the Mediterranean, and the Alpine (17–8). Grant is careful to emphasize that the differences between these European peoples are not linguistic or national but are specifically due to racial heredity. Following the traditional criteria of anthropometry, Grant asserts that the central hereditary characteristics that distinguish these racial subspecies are skull shape (specifically the “cephalic index” or ratio between the length and width of the skull), face shape, eye color, hair color, skin color, and stature (16–26). According to Grant, Mediterraneans are short, have long skulls, narrow faces, black or dark brown eyes, black or dark brown hair, and dark skin color. Alpines are stocky, have round skulls, broad faces, black or dark brown eyes (“sometimes hazel or gray in western Europe”), black or dark brown hair, and dark skin color. Nordics are tall (“distinguished by great stature”), have long skulls, narrow faces, blue, gray, or green eyes, light skin, and light hair (Grant’s list reads, “Flaxen. Fair. Red. Light brown to chestnut. Never black.”) (26). Grant also shows that there is some correspondence between European geography and racial subspecies. Not surprisingly, Mediterraneans surround the sea of the same name but also comprise some of the population of France, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Most of eastern and central Europe, Grant claims, is inhabited by Alpines, as is south-central France and northern Italy (Figure 2). All the inhabitants of Scandinavia are Nordic, as are the majority in England, Scotland, North and East Ireland, Germany, Northern France, and the Baltics—essentially all of northern, particularly northwestern, Europe. The settlers of the thirteen colonies that were to become the United States, what Grant calls “native Americans,” were Nordic.

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Throughout the book, Grant works to establish the superiority of the Nordic “subspecies.” “The Nordics are, all over the world,” according to Grant, “a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant character of the Alpines” (198). The Nordic, he claims, is “the white man par excellence” (150). Grant’s aim is to argue against unrestricted immigration, which he feels is “sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss” at the expense of Nordic Americans: “If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control, and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed, or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo” (228). If one were to examine My Ántonia through the lens of Grantian eugenics, the central characters of the novel should represent two races: the Nordic American-born and Norwegian immigrant characters (Jim Burden, his grandparents, the Harlings, Lena Lingard), and the Alpine Czech immigrant characters (the Shimerdas, Krajiek, Cuzak).4 Yet, the characters that Cather creates do not easily conform to eugenic racial categories (Figure 2). Like many of Cather’s narrators, Jim Burden pays careful attention to the physical appearance of the novel’s characters. When a new character is introduced, Jim almost invariably provides a physical description, and he often focuses on coloring: hair color, skin color, eye color. This attention to detail is not unique to My Ántonia among Cather’s fiction; indeed, her work is replete with visual detail, especially regarding the physical appearance of characters. In “The Bohemian Girl,” for example, the reader learns of Nils Ericson’s “heavy reddish eyebrows,” of the cut of his trousers, and of his razor-stubble before even learning his name (97). This kind of detail is equally common in My Ántonia: nearly every character in the novel is introduced with a detailed physical description. This level of detail is certainly not unique to Cather as a writer; when read in the context of the eugenics movement, however, Cather’s descriptions of her characters take on a new resonance. As I have shown in my summary of Madison Grant’s ideas, eugenicists believed specific physical attributes to be determined by race: cranial index (or skull shape), eye color, hair color, skin color, and stature are the most “telling” features for Grant. These are also the physical features most often noted in My Ántonia. Cather’s physical descriptions of characters, however, contrast sharply with the racial

Figure 2. “Present Distribution of European Races” from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race

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categories of eugenic thought. Cather’s apparent rejection of these racial categories becomes most noticeable in descriptions of the different members of immigrant families.5 The Norwegian immigrant Harling family, for example, hardly conforms to Grant’s Nordic ideal. While young Sally Harling has “yellow hair” (169), the oldest daughter Frances Harling is “dark, like her father” (170). Mrs. Harling’s body, “short and square and sturdy-looking” (168), contrasts with the Nordic “great stature” (Grant 26). For a family who would be, according to Grant, from all-Nordic Norway, the Harlings certainly show a range of contrasting physical features. Cather’s rejection of eugenic constructs of European racial differences is equally noticeable when the members of Ántonia’s family, the Shimerdas, are described. Grant portrays Bohemia as an almost exclusively Alpine- populated region; consequently, if Cather were to rely on a eugenic scheme, one should expect the Shimerdas to conform to Alpine characteristics: stocky or heavy statures, brown or black hair, brown or black eyes, round heads, and wide faces. Instead, the Shimerdas show a range of dissimilar physical features. The Shimerda’s son, Ambroz, is short and has a wide face, but he also has hazel eyes (25). Mr. Shimerda is “tall and slender,” and has a pale face and hands that Jim describes as “white and well-shaped” (27). Ántonia herself has brown eyes and hair, whereas her younger sister Yulka is simply described as “fair” (26). Jim’s own “native American” family shows similar physical diversity. Jim himself has blue eyes and “sandy” hair (xii), and his blue-eyed grandfather’s white beard had once been red (13). In contrast, Jim’s grandmother has “brown skin and black hair” (9), characteristics that Grant would deem impossible in a Nordic. Thus, Cather draws characters who refute eugenic notions of physically separate races among Europeans and their descendants. But this is not to say that race is absent from the novel. While Cather rejects one model of racial difference, that of the eugenicists, she represents another one, a model of monolithic whiteness and black Otherness that is undoubtedly more familiar to readers today. In Whiteness of a Different Color, Matthew Frye Jacobson examines the “fracturing of whiteness into a hierarchy of plural and scientifically determined white races” between the 1840s and 1924 (7). Beginning in the 1920s, Jacobson claims, these previously racially differentiated European immigrant groups became “reconsolidated” as a unitary white race (8). In My Ántonia, we can see a movement toward this consolidation prior to the 1920s. Cather’s novel serves as a bridge between these different constructions of racial difference. Before explicitly addressing

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representations of racial difference in My Ántonia, however, I first need to outline the vision of cultural pluralism that Cather presents in the novel, as this vision of cultural pluralism is intricately connected to racial formation. CULTURAL PLURALISM, RACE, AND BLIND D’ARNAULT In his important study Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (1996), Guy Reynolds examines attitudes toward Americanization present in My Ántonia. Noting that Cather’s “fictions of race and multiculturalism can often seem strikingly receptive to difference,” Reynolds argues that My Ántonia is “a major instance of this attentive sympathy” (81). Yet, despite such observations, Reynolds pays little attention to race in his chapter on My Ántonia. Reynolds admits that “Cather’s heterogeneous, pluralistic immigrant culture is, nonetheless, essentially white” (80), but because he chooses to focus on “Cather’s commitment to biculturalism” (98), he does not examine how race is constructed in the “multicultural” world of My Án- tonia.6 In the following pages, I will show that the cultural pluralism articulated by Cather and advocated by a number of her contemporaries is part of a process of racial construction despite the fact that it often seems to ignore questions of race.7 To establish his argument, Reynolds compares Cather’s vision of multi culturalism (Reynolds’s term) to that of Randolph Bourne, a progressive intellectual who wrote for periodicals such as The Dial and The Atlantic Monthly. The comparison between Cather’s and Bourne’s ideas about ethnicity and nationality is apt, in part because Bourne publicly approved of Cather’s vision, giving My Ántonia a glowing review in The Dial (“Morals” 557), but also because of the similarities between their ideas. Like Reynolds, I use Bourne to explicate notions of cultural pluralism during the Great War era.8 While I agree with Reynolds about the similarities between Bourne’s and Cather’s visions of cultural pluralism, I should point out that Reynolds views their visions much more positively than I do here. Bourne’s essay “TransNational America” (1916) provides a succinct, articulate example of pluralist thought of the time. It is important to note that there were differences between the cultural pluralists. However, the main tenets of Bourne’s “Trans-National America,” particularly the rejection of the melting pot metaphor, were shared by a number of them.

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Rejection of the melting pot metaphor of assimilation is central to cultural pluralism. Rather than idealize a single culture into which immigrants “melted,” cultural pluralists called for a recognition and appreciation of multiple cultures in the United States. In “TransNational America,” Bourne argues directly against melting pot assimilation: “What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities [of different cultures] should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity” (253–254). Instead of the melting pot, Bourne invokes a metaphor of weaving to present a vision of a pluralistic culture: “America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision” (262). Thus Bourne indicts as parochial anyone who would advocate “melting.” In contrast to other views of immigration of the time, specifically exclusionism and hegemonic assimilationism, Bourne’s ideas at first might seem liberatory. Indeed, Bourne’s works were republished in the 1960s and his ideas advocated by a number of civil rights activists, and more recently his discussions of cultural pluralism have been recuperated by political theorists looking for a new interpretation of nationalism. As Andrew Walzer points out, however, Bourne’s vision of cultural pluralism is problematic. In “The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne: A Usable Past for Multicultural America?” Walzer shows that “although Bourne’s concept of the ‘Transna-tion’ seems to acknowledge and even celebrate cultural difference, his ideal was in fact of a unified people in which cultural and historical difference was elided” (15). Specifically, Walzer shows, Bourne elides racial and gender differences in his focus on male European-American citizens. Walzer addresses “Trans-National America” only briefly; however, a closer look at the text of Bourne’s essay shows how exclusion is part of his cultural pluralism. Arguing against those who would criticize recent immigrants for their “newness,” Bourne asserts that “We are all foreignborn or the descendants of foreign-born, and if distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly be on some other ground than indigenousness” (249; my emphasis). Bourne’s claim in this sentence already suggests a narrowness to his “we”: he certainly does not have American Indians in mind as part of this group. Bourne continues by claiming that both early and late arrivals to America have come for the same reasons: “They came to get freedom to live as they wanted to.

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They came to escape from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make their fortune in a new land” (250). By focusing on European colonists and later immigrants, Bourne ignores Africans brought to America as slaves and their descendants. Throughout the essay, Bourne maintains this focus on European immigrants and their descendants as the threads of his transnational fabric. He mentions “Germans,” “French,” “Scandinavians,” “Poles,” and “Bohemians” as parts of the transnation, but not “Chinese,” “Mexicans,” or “Armenians.” Bourne’s cosmopolitan vision turns out to be distinctly Europolitan. “Trans-National America” also suggests that Bourne, while opposing the “melting pot” model of assimilation, saw some degree of assimilation as desirable. Bourne notes, “I do not mean that the illiterate Slav is now the equal of the New Englander of pure descent. He is the raw material to be educated, not into a New Englander, but into a socialized American…. Let us speak, not of inferior races, but of inferior civilizations” (250). Bourne continues in this vein, claiming that immigrants “evolve” with time: “America has burned most of the baser metal…from them” (259). Thus, through education and through contact with people of “superior” cultures, European immigrants transform into the ideal Americans of the future. In My Ántonia, Cather presents a vision of cultural pluralism that resembles Bourne’s in a number of ways. Most obvious is Cather’s choice of ethnic characters. The narrator Jim is “native” American, the Shimerdas are Czech, a number of characters are Scandinavian, and minor characters are Russian and Italian. Like Bourne’s transnational threads, significant characters have European ancestors. But the similarities between Bourne’s vision and the America of My Ántonia go beyond Cather’s focus on European-American characters; like Bourne, Cather rejects the melting pot as a promising metaphor for the nation and instead envisions a cosmopolitan Midwest. As did Bourne, Cather later would later use the word cosmopoli tan to describe the ideal federation of cultures: “it is in that great cosmopolitan country known as the Middle West that we may hope to see the hard molds of American provincialism broken up” (qtd. in Reynolds 80). In My Ántonia, Cather presents this culturally pluralistic Nebraska, where people not only retain their cultural distinctiveness while living side-byside but also contribute significantly to the future of the United States. Before examining the similarities between Bourne’s and Cather’s ideals of cultural pluralism, I first need to clarify the relationship between Cather and her narrator Jim, a relationship that is fraught with

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complications and contradictions. At least since the time that Blanche Gelfant published her landmark essay “The Forgotten Reaping Hook: Sex in My Ántonia” (1971), critics have questioned Jim’s reliability as a narrator. Breaking with a critical tradition that tended to equate Jim’s voice with Cather’s, Gelfant asserts that Jim is “disingenuous” and “self-deluded” (60), thus opening the door for subsequent critics who have addressed Cather’s authorial intention and the extent to which Cather’s views correspond with those expressed by her narrator. Some of the most interesting interpretations of this relationship occur in feminist scholars’ analyses of gender and sexuality in My Ántonia and in Cather’s life. Deborah Lambert (1982) and Judith Fetterley (1986), for example, both see Jim as a mask for Cather’s own lesbian consciousness. Other critics, such as Susan Rosowski (1986) and Jean Schwind, (1985) focus on how Cather seems to distance herself from, and undercut, Jim’s narrative. Cather biographer Sharon O’Brien effectively summarizes the questions addressed, at least implicitly, by these critics (and raised by numerous others): “Does Jim Burden speak for Willa Cather? Does Cather carefully maintain ironic distance from his vision? Or does she waver, at times detaching herself from Jim, at times seemingly identified with his perspective?” (23). The plethora of differing and often contradictory interpretations of the relationship between Cather and her narrator suggests an affirmative response to O’Brien’s third hypothesis. The full extent to which Cather identifies with Jim and distances herself from him has been the subject of many critics’ analyses over the past three decades and is not within the scope of this chapter. Because, however, I wish to discuss the visions of cultural pluralism and racial formation that Cather presents (as opposed to those presented by an unreliable narrator), it is important that I clarify my stance on the relationship between Cather and her narrator regarding these visions. It is impossible to deny what numerous critics have pointed out: Cather gives the reader reason to doubt Jim’s reliability. On the issues of cultural pluralism and race, however, the reader has at least two reasons to believe that Jim’s vision corresponds with Cather’s. First, in the sections of the book that I discuss here, Cather does not undercut Jim’s general impressions. While the descriptions in these sections might come from a narrator with a “generally romantic and ardent disposition,” as Cather describes him in the introduction to the novel (xi), Cather gives the reader no reason to question the events of the story: Jim’s visit to Ántonia at the end of the novel and the performance of Blind d’Arnault, that I will analyze in the remainder of this chapter. Second, Jim’s apparent attitudes toward

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cultural pluralism and racial difference resemble what we know of Cather’s own attitudes. As Reynolds shows, Cather allied herself with cultural pluralists of her time in her opposition to assimilationist tendencies (79–81). Furthermore, as Elizabeth Ammons demonstrates in “My Ántonia and African American Art,” Cather “readily participated in mainstream racist attitudes prevalent early in the twentieth century” (61), attitudes that coincide with those expressed by her narrator Jim9. I return now to the similarities between the cultural pluralism of Randolph Bourne and the vision of cultural pluralism that Cather presents, particularly in the last section of the novel. Toward the end of My Ántonia, Jim returns to Nebraska to visit Ántonia after twenty years. After marrying a Czech immigrant, Anton Cuzak, Ántonia has settled on a farm and had many children. Numerous critics have examined this section of the novel, many paying specific attention to the connection between Ántonia and the Nebraskan land and to Jim’s image of her as a symbol of fertility. She has been described as an “earth goddess, mother earth, the madonna of the cornfields” (Woodress 51) and a “central fertility figure” (Gelfant 63). Whether this image is viewed positively or more ambivalently (see Deborah G.Lambert’s “The Defeat of a Hero: Autonomy and Sexuality in My Ántonia”), the connection between Ántonia and the land dominates critical discussions of the novel’s last section.10 Jim describes Ántonia’s skin as “brown and hardened” (379) like the earth, and he explicitly connects her to agricultural fertility: “She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last” (398). Jim’s descriptions of Ántonia in this final section of the novel, however, also add to the novel’s configurations of race and assimilation, and this last section of the novel presents Cather’s ideal of cultural pluralism. For Jim, the older Ántonia is a positive figure. Jim describes the moment when they first meet again: “As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished” (374). As they talk, Jim observes to himself that “Ántonia had not lost the fire of life. Her skin, so brown and hardened, had not that look of flabbiness, as if the sap beneath it had been secretly drawn away” (379). Jim emphasizes retention of identity in these descriptions; it seems important to him that, despite the changes of time, Án-tonia remains much the same person he knew in childhood. The idea of retention of identity also involves Ántonia’s ethnic self. She claims, “I’ve forgot my English so” and notes that the children learn to speak Bohemian first, learning

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English only in school (378). The retention of language, too, is viewed positively by Jim, who describes the children speaking to each other in “their rich old language” (394). Jim notes ethnic markers other than language: Ántonia’s son Leo plays “Bohemian airs” on his grandfather’s violin, and Ántonia continues to make the same pastries, kolaches, that she made as a child (392, 381). The Czech characters are not explicitly racially marked, as I have shown; rather, in this final section they retain positively-framed ethnic markers. Jim’s description directly parallels Bourne’s description of ideal immigrants who “retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and their national spiritual slants” (259). According to Bourne, difference becomes a creative force when Americans work as a “cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed” (258). This cosmopolitanism, so central to Bourne’s transnational America, also reverberates in the ending of My Ántonia. Ántonia’s children learn Bohemian at home but become bilingual at school, which they presumably attend with people from a variety of cultures. The family maintains cultural traditions from Europe, but, as Reynolds has pointed out, “Ántonia fulfils the American dream of pioneer settlement even as she revivifies a European way of life” (83). And “native” American Jim befriends Ántonia’s Czech husband Cuzak, plans to take the oldest boys on hunting trips, and hopes to “tramp along a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak” himself (418). The ending of the novel shows interchange between cultures as well as what Bourne terms a “peaceful living side by side” (258). Bourne looks to the future for a definition of American culture: “As long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the ‘melting-pot,’ our American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was something to which the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future” (“Trans-National America” 256). For Bourne, American culture will be forged as people of different cultures interact and learn from each other. He implies that it will be the descendants of immigrants, not necessarily immigrants themselves, who will see the cosmopolitan society he envisions. In My Ántonia, Jim Burden too looks to the future as the site of a new American culture. When describing his visit to Ántonia and her family toward the end of the narrative, he offers a descriptive paean of Ántonia as the earth mother figure. He then concludes his chapter with a striking two sentence paragraph: “It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and

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straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races” (398). This passage is remarkable for a number of reasons. Certainly, Ántonia’s “tall and straight” sons contrast with eugenic descriptions of Alpine stature, and rather than being the “unfit” immigrant mother so popular in eugenicist discourse, Ántonia is “a rich mine of life.” In addition, however, and with an eye to the future like Bourne, Jim sees a new “race” in Ántonia’s descendants. Ántonia is not the new American; rather, she is the conduit through which her sons become American. Significantly, Jim does not mention Ántonia’s daughters here, implying that this new “race,” this new American culture, will be the domain of men. To complicate this issue further, this passage is included in book 5 of the novel, titled “Cuzak’s Boys.” Jim views Án-tonia as the founder of a new race of which her sons are evidence; yet, according to the book’s title, the sons are her husband’s, not hers. Bourne’s ideas can again help to explain this apparent contradiction. Despite Bourne’s apparent radicalism, his writing, as Andrew Walzer shows, expresses a nostalgia for an earlier vision of the nation as an “imagined community” of European-American men.11 According to Walzer, Bourne’s “apparently pluralistic vision has to be seen along side [his writing that expresses] an ideal of the nation as a deep fraternity of male citizens and site of male power” (18).12 Despite Jim Burden’s explicit admiration of Ántonia, he apparently shares Bourne’s ideal of the nation as a fraternal site of male power. At the end of “Cuzak’s Boys,” which begins with Jim traveling to vis it Ántonia, we find him making plans to take the oldest sons hunting the following summer, we find him spending the last evening of his visit talking with Cuzak, and we find him musing, “There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet. Even after the boys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself! I meant to tramp along a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak” (417–8). Frances W. Kaye notes that “given the conventions of male bonding, Jim’s friendship would have to be with Cuzak, not his wife” (108), but it is the very inclusion of male bonding, not just Jim’s friendship, that is important here. In a work that ends looking to the future and imagining the founding of a new race, this focus on men and male bonding takes on new resonance. Ántonia may be important for her character, her experiences, or her fecundity, but ultimately it is the men of the novel who are important to the new cosmopolitan nation.13 “Cuzak’s Boys” are the future of culturally pluralistic America. Ann Moseley has lauded Cather’s stance on cultural pluralism, claiming that Cather’s “attitude toward these immigrants and cultures

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other than her own was not just that of acceptance and sympathy; rather, it was one of understanding and great admiration” (11). But Cather’s presentation of cultural pluralism is more complex than Moseley allows. The male-focused future implied by the end of the novel already suggests a problem with idealizing Cather’s version of cultural pluralism as critics such as Moseley have done.14 Moreover, the cultural pluralism expressed in the novel presents another problem: the cultural cost of descendants of Europeans coming together to form a new “cosmopolitan” nation. This cost is the exclusion of non-European Others who are not a part of this cosmopolitan future even though they are crucial to bringing it about. As I will show in the rest of this chapter, Cather’s cosmopolitan cultural pluralism is made possible by a black Other, “Blind d’Arnault, the negro pianist” (206). As I discussed earlier in this chapter, Cather rejects eugenic ideas of racial difference among Europeans; however, images of biological racial difference are not absent from the novel. In a chapter at the very middle of My Ántonia, Jim tells of an impromptu dance at Black Hawk’s hotel. Blind d’Ar-nault, a traveling African-American piano player, has come to town, and he performs for the hotel guests and townspeople. Jim’s description of d’Ar-nault conforms in many ways to long-lived stereotypes of the “Negro minstrel”: He was a heavy, bulky mulatto, on short legs, and he came tapping the floor in front of him with his gold-headed cane. His yellow face was lifted in the light, with a show of white teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids lay motionless over his blind eyes…. [His voice] was the soft, amiable Negro voice, like those I remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience in it. He had the Negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have been repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was the happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia. (209) Jim’s description condenses a number of nineteenth-century minstrel stereotypes. His description of d’Arnault’s “gold-headed cane” invokes the fiction of the “urban black ‘dandy’” that Eric Lott has located in black-face minstrelsy.15 The characterization of d’Arnault’s “soft, amiable Negro voice,” “with the note of docile subservience,” can be read as both feminizing and infantilizing, two other stereotyping strategies occurring in white visions of black minstrelsy, as Lott has

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shown. And the description of d’Ar-nault’s “Negro head” recalls the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practice of anthropological anthropometry, popular with eugenicists in particular as a way of “proving” biological racial inequality. Blanche Gelfant, and several critics subsequent to her, have noted this racist language with which Jim describes Blind d’Arnault. Gelfant reads the scene as evidence of Jim’s moral blindness; he is unaware of his “stereotyped, condescending, and ultimately invidious vision” (80). Like Gelfant, other critics who make note of the scene generally see it as developing some theme or motif in the novel. In Redefining the American Dream: the Novels of Willa Cather, for example, Sally Peltier Harvey sees d’Arnault as representing the American Dream; he has pulled himself up as a successful traveling musician. In an introduction to the novel, Stephanie Vaughn notes the racist language of the scene, then suggests that d’Arnault is representative of Cather’s “real artist”: “Real artists, in both Cather’s fiction and her journalism, are always barbarians and sensualists” (xx). In Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, Ammons regards the scene as evidence of Cather’s blindness, rather than, as Gelfant would have it, Jim’s blindness: Cather’s racism and ethnocentricity undercut her attempt to create art somehow outside of or at least in dialog with inherited, conventional, white western narrative tradition…. Cather can put herself inside the experiences of Eastern European immigrants, French Americans, or Canadians, people in many ways quite unlike herself. But when it comes to Americans of other races, such as Indians, Asians, Chicanos, or blacks, her racism blinds her. (134) Ammons’s analysis is certainly an important addition to Cather criticism; numerous readers have long admired Cather as a “writer of broad and inclusive sympathies and imagination” (Ammons Conflicting Stories 134), and carefully examining the accuracy of this favorable impression, as Ammons does, can only help illuminate Cather’s writing and suggest new directions for study. Ammons herself explores one such direction in her essay “My Ántonia and African American Art” (1999). As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, Ammons shows Cather’s artistic indebtedness to African-American music, how an African-American cultural presence reveals itself through Blind d’Arnault, and also how that presence

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remains concealed in My Ántonia. Apart from Ammons, however, critics tend to view the scene with d’Arnault as either a progression of themes articulated in other parts of the novel or as a sort of anomaly in the novel, an eruption of Cather’s racism that has no necessary narrative or ideological connection to the rest of the text. I wish to take a different tack here. Like Ammons, I view the scene as an integral, not marginal or anomalous, part of the novel’s fabric. Instead of analyzing d’Arnault as evidence of an African-American culture presence, I wish to turn to an examination of how and why d’Arnault functions as a racial presence in My Ántonia. Ultimately, the character of d’Arnault does not so much further continuing themes as several critics have suggested; rather, d’Arnault shows the exclusionist impulse at work in the formation of Bohemian whiteness, a cost that is otherwise hidden in the novel.16 Ántonia, or more precisely the promise that Ántonia produces in the form of her sons, can be an ideal of Americanness at the end of the novel only because d’Arnault is assigned the role of Other. The manner in which d’Arnault takes on this role, however, is complex. Ammons points out in a parenthetical aside that d’Arnault appears suddenly in the novel and for no necessary reason in terms of narrative development: “One of the important facts about the black pianist is that he does not have to be in the book. He seems to materialize out of nowhere, to pop into the text as if by his own will” (Conflicting Stories 132). This “unexpected” quality, the strangeness of the episode, is emphasized by the manner in which Jim relates early details of d’Arnault’s life and how he came to learn to play the piano. Jim interrupts his description of the piano performance to tell of how d’Arnault “was born in the Far South, on the d’Arnault plantation, where the spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted” (210). After he was blinded while a baby, his mother concluded that he was “‘not right’ in his head” and kept him away from the “Big House” where she worked as a laundress: “She loved him devotedly, but he was so ugly, with his sunken eyes and his ‘fidgets,’ that she hid him away from people” (211). Nonetheless, Jim describes, the child would sneak up to the Big House to listen through the window as “Miss Nellie d’Arnault practised the piano every morning…. If Miss d’Arnault stopped practising for a moment and went toward the window, she saw this hideous little pickaninny, dressed in an old piece of sacking, standing in the open space between the hollyhock rows, his body rocking automatically, his blind face lifted to the sun and wearing an expression of idiotic rapture” (212). Eventually, Jim tells us, Miss d’Arnault allows him to play the piano and he shows an innate aptitude.

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The “unexpected” aspect of this narrative is highlighted by its lack of an apparent source. Jim does not state how he became aware of the details of d’Arnault’s early life but instead launches into the narrative with no preface, stating the details as simple facts. Although Jim, like d’Arnault, is from the South, he never suggests that he has become personally acquainted with d’Arnault, hearing the story from him firsthand, nor does the often derogatory language of the narrative suggest that it is told from d’Arnault’s point of view. Like d’Arnault himself, the detailed description of his early life seems to “materialize out of nowhere.” The unprefaced, ex nihilo quality of the narrative about d’Arnault adds power to his construction as savage. I noted earlier that Cather does not undercut Jim’s narrative authority when he describes d’Arnault. Jim, as a narrator and as a character in the novel, recedes as he tells d’Arnault’s story; there is nothing to suggest that the reader should question Jim’s descriptions, impressions, or the “facts” that he relates. It is almost as if Cather herself steps into the novel to briefly take over the narrator’s function. The reader is asked to accept the racialized description of d’Arnault as “the truth,” not as the skewed impressions of an unreliable narrator. But if the reader is asked to accept d’Arnault’s racialized presence as “the truth,” what is she to make of this “truth?” What function does this presence play in the novel? One answer to this is that Blind d’Arnault’s scene is crucial for bringing men and women of different backgrounds together. Jim describes how, when d’Arnault begins his impromptu piano playing at Black Hawk’s hotel, the audience consists only of men— young men from town like Jim, as well as traveling salesmen such as “Willy O’Reilly, who travelled for a jewellery [sic] house” and “a dapper little Irishman” who travels for a department store (208). As d’Arnault plays, however, he realizes that people are dancing in the adjoining dining room and announces, “I hear little feet, girls, I’spect” (215). The immigrant “hired girls,” Ántonia, Lena Lingard, Tiny Soderball, and Mary Dusak, are persuaded to dance with the “lonesome men on the other side of the partition” (216). Jim describes how d’Arnault instigates the dancing, not only through his music, but through his urging as well: D’Arnault spread himself out over the piano, and began to draw the dance music out of it, while the perspiration shone on his short wool and on his uplifted face. He looked like some glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood.

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Whenever the dancers paused to change partners or to catch breath, he would boom out softly, ‘Who’s that goin’ back on me? One of these city gentlemen, I bet! Now, you girls, you ain’t goin’ to let that floor get cold?’ (217–8) Jim’s description of the pianist as “some glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood” at first evokes the stereotype of the “black-beast-rapist.”17 But Jim also counters any threat posed by d’Ar-nault’s racialized presence: the musician is grinning, happy, and subservient. D’Arnault is therefore also the “happy darky” of antebellum and reconstruction myth; he is ultimately nonthreatening, a source of fascination. Thus, rather than portraying d’Arnault as the “black-beastrapist,” Jim stereotypes him as a highly sexualized black savage, grotesque yet welcome, whose powers work to bring ethnically different men and women together. This representation of Blind d’Arnault works within a number of seeming contradictions. By including the narrative about d’Arnault’s youth, Cather can invoke two very different stereotypes of AfricanAmerican men: d’Arnault is presented as both the sexualized black savage and the pickaninny. He is repulsive, yet fascinating. D’Arnault is a catalyst for the dance, but he is ultimately a nonparticipant. In Powers of Horror (1982), Julia Kristeva develops a theory of abjection that is useful to understanding the dynamics of oppression and how these dynamics create the complex, and seemingly contradictory, figure of d’Arnault. According to Kristeva, abjection arises in the moment of separation between self and other, specifically as the infant seeks to separate itself from the mother’s body prior to entering the symbolic order. The abject is “opposed to I”; yet, it is not fully an object (1). The abject consists of that which is alien and threatening to the bounded self, and the self thus responds with revulsion to that which disrupts the illusion of a unified self and reveals the instability of its boundaries (Kristeva “Powers”). Following Kristeva, Iris Marion Young, in Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), describes abjection in terms of the reaction of the self to bodily excretions: The process of life itself consists in the expulsion outward of what is in me, in order to sustain and protect my life. I react to the expelled with disgust because the border of myself must be kept in place. The abject must not touch me, for I fear that it will ooze through, obliterating the border between inside and outside

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necessary for my life, which arises in the process of expulsion. (144) The abject is not removed far enough from the subject to be an object (Kristeva 7); rather, it is “only just the other side of the border” (Young 144). While Kristeva primarily focuses on how abjection affects women in patriarchal culture, Young explains that abjection also plays a part in other forms of oppression. According to Young, the “involuntary, unconscious judgment of ugliness and loathing” that signifies abjection partly constitutes racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ableism. When these forms of oppression “exist at the level of discursive consciousness, the despised groups are objectified. Scientific, medical, moral, and legal discourse construct these groups as objects, having their own specific nature and attributes, different from and over against the naming subject, who controls, manipulates and dominates them” (145). Young continues by explaining what occurs when claims of superiority and inferiority are no longer discursively conscious. At that point, oppressed groups “no longer face a dominant subject as clearly identifiable objects different from and opposed to itself. Women, Blacks, homosexuals, the mad, and the feebleminded become more difficult to name as the Others, identifiable creatures with degenerate and inferior natures. In xenophobic subjectivity they recede to a murky affect without representation” (145). According to Young, there is a kind of ambiguity to this “murky affect.” While abjection is “the feeling of loathing and disgust the subject has in encountering certain matter, images, and fantasies, the horrible, to which it can only respond with aversion, with nausea and distraction,” Young also acknowledges that the “abject is at the same time fascinating; it draws the subject in order to repel it” (143). Cather seems to fluctuate between representing the abject and object in her characterization of Blind d’Arnault. Jim’s detailed description of d’Ar-nault shows a certain fascination, and the language he uses to describe the piano player as a child (“ugly,” “hideous”) is the language of abjection. Yet, d’Arnault is not fully understandable in terms of the abject: Jim claims that d’Arnault “would have been répulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was the happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia” (209; my emphasis). It seems that Jim’s objectification of d’Arnault fends off the possible eruption of the abject. Similarly, despite the fact that d’Arnault is called a mulatto, a term that destabilizes the racial binary of black and white, it is his black

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Otherness that is continually emphasized. The threat to the white subject’s boundaries, in the form of the abject, must be checked. Leonard Cassuto’s analysis of the racial grotesque is specifically relevant here. In The Inhuman Race: the Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture, Cassuto argues that attempts at human objectification are never completely successful. Because humans also have a tendency to acknowl edge the humanity of others, attempts at objectification, at denying others’ humanity, tend to result in tension between the two impulses, a tension that configures the victim of objectification as grotesque (xv). Grotesqueness, an abject state, is liminal and conflicted; it is an “ontological netherworld” of being “part human and part thing” (16). Read in this framework, Jim’s configuration of d’Arnault as grotesque reveals the incompleteness of his attempts at objectification, but by also representing d’Arnault as the “happy darky,” Jim effaces that grotesqueness. Jim is still compelled, however, to frame d’Arnault as object. As the abject he would threaten the boundaries of whiteness; as object, however, he would work to define whiteness. Hence, Jim’s descriptions of d’Arnault as grotesque are interspersed with an insistence on his inhumanity: d’Arnault has “almost no head at all; nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool”; his body while playing the piano is “like an empty mill grinding on” (210); his approach to music is “mere instinct” (214). While d’Arnault’s grotesqueness reveals that he is not completely Other, Jim continues to insist that he is. For Jim, d’Arnault functions to normatize whiteness, to establish its borders, but to leave difference within the category of whiteness unmarked. The dancers in the hotel have differing ethnicities: the group includes Norwegian, Irish, Anglo, and Czech Americans. However, these identities are not salient during the dance; apart from gender, Jim barely notes differences among the dancers. D’Arnault’s racial difference from the dancers, in contrast, is emphasized throughout the passage, both in Jim’s physical description of him and in his configuration as a “savage.” Toni Morrison has addressed the importance of examining representations of “blackness” in literature: “What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary ‘blackness,’ the nature, even the cause, of literary ‘whiteness”” (9). Because Jim continually emphasizes d’Ar-nault’s “blackness,” the unmarked sameness of the dancers is also emphasized; we have binary, mutually exclusive, racial categories. Young explains how “the logic of difference as hierarchical dichotomy,

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masculine/feminine, civilized/savage” functions: “The second term is defined negatively as a lack of the truly human qualities; at the same time it is defined as the complement to the valued term, the object correlating with its subject, that which brings it to completion, wholeness, and identity…the valued term achieves its value by its determinately negative relation to the Other” (170). The “blackness” of Blind d’Arnault, the Otherness that Jim sees in his physical body and “savage” presence, works to establish the unmarked, collective white identity of the European-American dancers. It is in this sense that My Ántonia participates in a specific project of racial formation. Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain that “racial projects are always concretely framed, and thus are always contested and unstable. The social structures they uphold or attack, and the representations of race they articulate, are never invented out of thin air but exist in a definite historical context, having descended from previous conflicts” (58). Cather relies on previous articulations of blackness to develop her own representation. But she also has a number of different articulations of whiteness from which she can develop her own: as I have shown, during the time that Cather wrote My Ántonia, the conflict over who was white was an important cultural question. In contest was the racial assignment of the “new waves” of immigrants from Europe. Were these immigrants racially distinct from one another and classifiable in a hierarchical structure of Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine? Or were they all to be subsumed under a monolithic whiteness? My Ántonia affirms the latter, moving away from earlier constructions of European racial identity and toward a construction of whiteness that remains familiar even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What Cather constructs is a form of whiteness with fluid boundaries; all European Americans are able to slip in. In order to show that all European Americans are white, however, whiteness must still have meaning; it must remain bounded. This boundary is precisely what the character of Blind d’Arnault both constitutes and reveals. While there may be some fluidity to whiteness, Jim insists on an object, an absolute Other. For European Americans to be white, for a discourse of whiteness to even exist, the dualism of colonial discourse must remain intact; Bohemian whiteness demands a “hideous little pickaninny” and an “African god of pleasure full of strong, savage blood.”

Epilogue The Legacy of Progressive Era Racial Formation and the Re-Racialization of Immigrant Bodies

When I review the eugenicists’ anti-immigration arguments from the Pro gressive Era, I am tempted to remark on the significant changes that have occurred in both scientific and popular discourse since then. Elazar Barkan has characterized one shift that occurred between the world wars as The Retreat of Scientific Racism in his book by that title (1992). Barkan’s choice of words, unfortunately, is apt. He cannot write of the end or the death of scientific racism, only its retreat. As I pointed out in the preface to this project, Gates asserted in 1985 that “Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction…Nevertheless, our conversations are replete with usages of race that have their sources in the dubious pseudoscience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (“Writing ‘Race’” 4). His observation rings equally true almost twenty years later. While scientific racism may have retreated, the racial constructions of earlier eras continue to inform the lives of all Americans, even when race is couched in social and political terms rather than the terms of science. During the years that I have worked on this study, critical race theory has made significant advancement toward understanding how, when, and why specific formations of race have come to be. Taking a global perspective and tracing changes in contemporary racial formations back a bit farther, Howard Winant, in “White Racial Projects,” claims that We are living through a profound upheaval in the meaning of race, the emergence of perhaps the most contradictory and unsettling racial formation that has ever existed. In a sentence: the past half century or so has been the first time since the dawn of modernity, since the rise of capitalism and the knitting together of the globe in one unified “system,” that white supremacy has been called seriously into question on a world-historical scale. (98)

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During this same time, however, the “usages of race” in print, visual, and audio media, as well as in the everyday lives of many Americans, have continued to draw on older, essentialized concepts of racial difference. One of the significant changes that I have noted during this time is an increase in, or perhaps more accurately an increase in the visibility of, the tension between two ways of looking at race: as either essence or as a sociopolitical construct. One obvious example of this tension at the end of the twentieth century occurred in the critical response to Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The Bell Curve, which harkens back to the eugenicism of the early twentieth century by arguing that class status is directly linked to intelligence and that both are determined by race, has been both a widely popular book and one that has garnered severe criticism of its methodology and assumptions. The book has prompted numerous responses in journal articles and entire book-length anthologies, such as Steven Fraser’s (ed.) The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America, and in more general responses to scientific racism such as Ashley Montagu’s (ed.) Race and IQ. 1 The publication of, and response to, The Bell Curve seems indicative of the contemporary racial climate. We live in a time when a book such as The Bell Curve cannot be published without receiving harsh criticism; however, the fact remains that The Bell Curve was published and became a best-seller. While blatantly racist texts can still find an audience, not all contemporary texts that draw on essential racial categories do so as obviously as The Bell Curve. In the rest of this epilogue, I examine one text that harkens back to essentialist racial ideology but that does so in a much subtler, yet still disturbing, way. In a special issue of Time magazine published in the 1990s, the editors chose, on the magazine’s cover, to show a cyborgian simulation of a female descendant of immigrants to the United States.2 “Take a good look at this woman,” the cover copy reads, “She was created by a computer from a mix of several races. What you see is a remarkable preview of…The New Face of America: How Immigrants Are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society.” The latter part of the text is in large type and centered beneath an image of what appears to be a woman’s head and shoulders. Inside the magazine, in a brief note “From the Managing Editor,” the reader learns that the simulation on the cover is a product of computer-generated morphing; Time created the image as a way to “dramatize the impact of interethnic marriage, which has increased dramatically in the United States during the latest wave of

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immigration” (2). For me, the image, as well as the contents of Time’s special issue on immigration, suggests many of the contradictions inherent in current media representations of “the immigrant question.” Like so many recent discussions of immigration, Time’s special issue attempts to acknowledge the actual diversity present in the United States while, at the same time, it falls back on old racist assumptions— assumptions that find a chief reiteration in images of immigrant bodies, whether these images be photographs, descriptions, or morphs. By using the computer software program Morph 2.0, Time magazine combined and altered actual photographs to create the face of a nonexistent woman who is light-skinned and, according to what current visual media representations prescribe, very pretty. Although she was supposedly created from a mix of different “races” (the copy tells us that she is “15% Anglo-Saxon, 17.5% Middle Eastern, 17.5% African, 7.5% Asian, 35% Southern European and 7.5% Hispanic” [2]), based on the ways that race is currently constructed in the United States, she would, I suspect, be labeled white by most people in this country. What, then, does the magazine’s cover representation say about the “new face of America?” First, the image suggests that immigrants might be acceptable if they appear as pretty white women. This “immigrant” poses no threat to those who believe that white women should be the “reproducers of the nation” (Mohanty 7). Through computer morphing, immigrant “races” have become amalgamated into a body that conforms to hegemonic ideals of physical desirability. While many debates about immigration revolve around questions of cultural assimilation, Time’s special issue also suggests an insistence on a sort of racial amalgamation, a concept that rests on the premise of racial essentialism. The production of this racially amalgamated bodily image, however, is not an arbitrary process. The issue of Time includes an article titled “Rebirth of a Nation, Computer-Style” that shows the reader fourteen photographs of people from different “races” from which the cover illustration was generated. Along the top of the chart, photographs of women are labeled “Middle Eastern, Italian, African, Vietnamese, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese, Hispanic,” and photographs of men descending along the left margin of the two-page layout are labeled in the same way. Computer-generated images of the “progeny” of these “races” cover the remainder of the page (66–7). The faces are notably light in color; as Michael Rogin notes in Blackface, White Noise:Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, they “are rendered in polite, pastel shades of light yellow-brown” (7). The reader, according to the magazine, is to “move across from the left and down from the top to see

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resulting progeny” (66). The forty-nine images of “progeny” generated from the fourteen photographs appear to be as “real” as those from which they were generated; when I first looked at the layout, I could not tell which was a photograph and which was a computer-generated morph. A particularly troubling aspect of the morphing project is that the criteria for selecting photographs are not mentioned in the article. The project relies on the assumption that the photographs somehow represent essentialized features of people from different parts of the world. But what criteria allowed the project’s creators to determine that a photograph of a Vietnamese man, for example, displays singularly “Vietnamese” facial features? From where did they obtain these supposedly representative photographs? And why are the project’s creators careful to distinguish between the Italian and Anglo-Saxon representations while lumping an entire continent together with “African” male and female representations? While the authors of the essay do not describe how they selected the supposed racial representatives, they do suggest the non-arbitrary construction of the images of progeny: “Most of the images, or ‘morphies,’ on the chart are a straight 50–50 combination of the physical characteristics of their progenitors, though an entirely different image can be created by using, say, 75% of the man’s eyes, or 75% of the woman’s lips” (66). Even this seemingly objective 50–50 ratio is itself governed by someone’s preconceptions. Presumably, the programmers of the software package Morph 2.0, with which the images were generated, decided that “Sometimes pure volume counts. The more information extracted from a given feature, the more likely that feature is to dominate the cybernetic offspring. Even when the program is weighted 50–50, if an African man has more hair than a Vietnamese woman, his hair will dominate; the same thing applies to larger lips or a jutting jaw” (66). While human genes certainly do not privilege “pure volume” in the way that Morph 2.0’s creators and users do, I find that, even if the images could be somehow “genetically based,” Time’s presentation would have frightening connotations. The very idea of cross-breeding upon which the morphing project is based relies on the notion of biologically distinct racial categories. While most contemporary scientists agree with Gates that racial categorization is a socially constructed system—a “fiction”—race continues to be used as if it referred to classifiable genetic difference. I view Time’s cover and its accompanying article as precisely such a usage of race. Even though the magazine’s editors claim, in a short,

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easy to overlook, note inside the magazine, that they present the cover image with “no claim to scientific accuracy” (2), their assertion that the image is the result of “a mix of several races” works to reify the fiction of an essential, biological, basis of race. Time’s writers present categories such as Middle Eastern and Chinese with no consideration of how these categories are culturally constituted. Instead, without stating so, they use these terms as biological essences, recalling early twentiethcentury depictions of racial difference, such as those in the Immigration Commission’s Dictionary of Races. There is no other way that such a project in cross-breeding could be performed. When I first came across Time’s special issue on immigration, I recognized its cover and accompanying article to be a reiteration of the trope of race-as-essence that Gates discusses, but the morphing project troubled me in a new way. When the media invoke “race,” they do so with the assumption that racial categories bear some relationship to living persons. Time’s cover image, however, seems to be at least once removed from the usual referential processes of racial categorization. The image, after all, does not pretend, in the ways that the photographs inside the magazine do, to have a specific referent; despite the “real” appearance of a woman (pores and all), there is no living person who looks like the cover image. Even the supposed pseudo-referents of the image—the “African,” the “Anglo-Saxon,” the “Middle-Eastern” persons who have purportedly produced this descendant—are themselves presented as signs; the reader is shown photographs that have been selected based on a constructed system of racial assumptions. Jean Baudrillard’s understanding of simulacra can provide a clearer interpretation of how Time’s cover image functions. In “The Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard claims that “[a]bstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation…is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (342–3). He also asserts that an image “bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (346–7). The image on Time’s cover, like Baudrillard’s description of contemporary simulation, is not a mirror of any actual woman. It is a computer- and human-generated image that has no referent in this world. The image, however, is not presented as the pure simulation of Baudrillard’s definition; it is, contradictorily, presented as a simulation making “no claim to scientific accuracy,” and also as a familiar representation of a person. Even though photographs are themselves representations with questionable relationships to “reality,” they tend to function, for many people, without questioning that relationship. Since Time’s cover image is

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indistinguishable from a photograph, it makes the same claims that a photograph does: it claims some relationship—if fleeting, if momentary—with an actual person. The wording on the magazine’s cover abets presumptions of such a relationship; the image, according to the magazine cover, “is a remarkable preview of the new face of America.” The prominence of the image on the magazine’s cover and the wording of the cover text work to ground the image in some sort of reality. Still, the editor of the magazine, James R. Gaines, asserts in his column “From the Managing Editor,” that the image is presented “in the spirit of fun and excitement” (2). While such a disclaimer seems, on one level, to work to temper the “real” appearance of the magazine’s cover, it also coincides with Baudrillard’s ideas about how simulation functions. In his analysis of Disneyland, Baudrillard claims that the “imaginary world is supposed to be what makes [Disneyland] successful. But what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious reveling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks” (351; emphasis in original). The cover of Time also purports to be a microcosm; it is “a preview of the new face of America.” The challenges, demands, and opportunities of cultural diversity are ignored, and the perceived threat of racial difference has been miniaturized. What the magazine’s editor calls “various ethnic and racial backgrounds” have been condensed into a non-threatening, “beguiling” female icon (2). Baudrillard asserts that “Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland…Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation” (352). I want to suggest, here, that the image on Time’s cover works as a racial Disneyland to conceal the social construction of racial categories. The writers of Time acknowledge that the image is a simulation, but that simulation is only possible through the invocation of “real” progenitors who are racially determined. The cover image, presented “in the spirit of fun and experiment,” promises that “the rest is real;” that, while the image is a racial Disneyland, races, defined biologically rather than socially, really exist. Significantly, the “beguiling” racial Disneyland appears in the form of a woman. Just as the project’s creators omit their criteria for selecting racially representative images, they also neglect to fully discuss how they determined the apparent gender of the cover image: the neck, they

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claim, “often determines the gender of the morph offspring” (64). The selection of a woman to represent “the new face of America,” however, hardly seems an arbitrary choice. In “Cartographies of Struggle,” Chandra Talpade, Mohanty argues that “the construction of immigration and nationality laws, and thus of appropriate racialized, gendered citizenship, illustrates the con tinuity between relationships of colonization and white, masculinist, capitalist state rule” (23). Women’s bodies, Mohanty goes on to suggest, are especially important to debates about immigration, as immigration and nationality laws “explicitly reflect the ideology of (white) women as the reproducers of the nation” (26–7). The image on Time’s cover, then, works to reassure anyone who believes that white women’s duty is to be a “reproducer of the nation.” In this limited sense, the simulation works against racially motivated anti-immigration sentiment. But my concerns, here, are not with the intentions or agendas—whether for or against immigration—of those who used Morph 2.0 to create the cover image; instead, I am worried by the ideologies upon which such an image relies. By presenting an image of an apparently white woman as the future of immigration, by suggesting that the hope of America lies in the reproduction of homogenization, the magazine can ignore that the people currently living within and entering the United States are not represented by this image. Biologized racial categories are reified, racism as a social force is masked, and white women’s bodies have become the site where this formation of race is articulated and perpetuated. One of the weapons used by current structures of power, Baudrillard tells us, is the discourse of desire. “‘Take your desires for reality!’ can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power,” Baudrillard states, “for in a nonreferential world even the confusion of the reality principle with the desire principle is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality” (360). Time’s cover image represents precisely such a confusion of the desire principle and the reality principle, as the magazine’s editor makes clear in his commentary on the image: “As onlookers watched the image of our new Eve begin to appear on the computer screen, several staff members promptly fell in love. Said one: ‘It really breaks my heart that she doesn’t exist’” (2). The reader is not told why this desirable “new Eve” was produced from the mixture that it was (7.5 percent Asian, 35 percent Southern European, etc.) or why certain photographs were selected as representative of races. The simulators’ choices are left unexplained, begging the question of which and whose desires helped to form this image, and whose desires and political agendas are satisfied by the construction of whiteness itself.

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Time’s special issue on immigration suggests not only how the terrain of whiteness has shifted since the Progressive Era, but also how differently the literature of immigration functions in racial formation today. During the Progressive Era, race was generally considered a “truth”; writers such as Mary Antin and Willa Cather questioned the borders within the racial system without questioning that race itself was real, while Sui Sin Far interrogated the “truth” itself, the śupposed essentialism of racial categories. All three of these writers created representations of race that were linked to the racial power structures outside of their texts. Time’s racialized “New Face of America” does not represent a racial reality outside the text nor does it question existing racial power structures; rather, by invoking race through a hyperreal simulation “in the spirit of fun and excitement,” it reifies racial difference while concealing that race is a fiction, complexly formed. Racial projects today, just as in the Progressive Era, often conceal their own participation in the formation of race. Because of this, and because of the evolving nature of racial projects, the continuing complicity of literature in forming and transforming racial categories demands the closest attention. Dismantling racially-based oppression requires that we understand how racial categories have been, and continue to be, formed. By studying literary works by and about immigrants as racial projects, we can come to understand a small but crucial part of historical and contemporary racial formation processes.

Notes

NOTES TO PREFACE 1. I am indebted to Michael Omi and Howard Winant for the term racial formation which I borrow from their book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. I use formation and construction interchangeably in this book; however, I use both to refer to the “sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (Omi and Winant 55). 2. I have chosen to use the phrase literature of immigration, rather than the more common literature of the immigrant experience because it allows me to examine works such as Sui Sin Far’s “Its Wavering Image,” a work written by an immigrant about American-born characters. While this story is not directly about the immigrant experience, its themes are relevant to my larger discussion. In using the phrase literature of immigration, I do not mean to imply that I focus solely on the act of immigration; instead, I mean to connect literature-immigrationimmigrant in a looser way than the phrase literature of the immigrant experience suggests. 3. I do not mean to imply here that Cather’s text is itself an example of colonialist discourse but rather that the racial binaries she invokes resound with the Manichean racial constructions of colonialist discourse.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. In his closing essay of “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains the editorial decision to place the word race in quotation marks in the collection’s title. The editors chose to do so “to underscore the fact that ‘race’ is a metaphor for something else and not an essence or a thing in itself, apart from its creation by an act of language” (“Talkin’ That Talk” 402–3). I was faced with a similar decision while writing this study. When using terms such as race and

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2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

whiteness, I have largely chosen to omit quotation marks on the assumption that these terms will be read in context as referring to the social constructions that are my subject. On occasion, I do put such terms in quotation marks to reemphasize their constructedness. I was faced with an equally difficult decision regarding how to refer to the people of the nation in which I live. The term Americans is inaccurate when used to refer to a specific nationality, as Rogers M. Smith has pointed out, in that all the inhabitants of the Americas are equally “Americans” (507 n1). Similarly the term United States and its abbreviation U.S. can refer to other nations with those words in their names. Smith finds no adequate substitute for conventional usages; I regret that I have not either and use these conventional terms in this book. Complicating the matter further, American also describes a fictional set of values and practices assumed to be shared by the nationals of this country. When I emphasize this fictional identity, I often put the term American in quotation marks. Finally, when using compound identity adjectives, such as in the phrase “ChineseAmerican writer,” I follow the conventions of my publisher in using a hyphen; however, I remain aware of the complex politics of hyphenation. See Tucker, pages 55, 68, and 86, as well as Stepan and Gilman’s “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism.” See also my discussion in this chapter of the Dictionary of Races or Peoples in the Reports of the Immigration Commission. Stepan and Gilman’s essay addresses some of the few who did question this assumption. In 1790 Congress enacted that immigrants who were “free white persons” could be naturalized. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese residents from naturalization and prohibited most Chinese immigration. See also Smith, pages 359–63. See also Tucker, pages 35–6 and 59–61, and Smith, pages 446–8. In “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness” (2001), Frankenberg adds the term “power-evasive race cognizance” to describe a mode of seeing that she observes at the beginning of the twenty-first century (91). I return to this issue later in this chapter. I return to this idea in the section “Immigrant Women and Race” later in this chapter. A special issue of The Henry James Review from 1995 presents a forum on race in the author’s work, and a number of articles in that issue specifically address The American Scene. Of special interest is a series of interrelated articles that begins with Sara Blair’s “Documenting America: Racial Theater in The American Scene,” and continues with Ross Posnock’s response to Blair’s article, Blair’s rebuttal of Posnock’s criticism, and Kenneth Warren’s commentary on the exchange between Blair and Posnock. This series of essays provides an excellent overview

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11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

not only of James’s complex treatment of race in The American Scene but also of the different ways that modern critics interpret that complexity. Forty-two volumes were announced; however, the forty-second volume (intended to be an index) was not printed. Fairchild reflects this view in chapter 18 of Immigration: he uses the terms “assimilation” and “Americanization” synonymously and writes of “assimilation to the American type,” while implying that this “type” is essentially English. A.Piatt Andrew makes a similar assumption while arguing against immigration restriction in “The Crux of the Immigration Question” (1914). Other examples occur in Max J.Kohler’s “Some Aspects of the Immigration Problem” (1914), Arthur Dunn’s “Keeping the Coast Clear” (1913), and James D. Phelan’s “Japanese Question from a Californian Standpoint” (1913). Phelan actually uses the term “homogenous” to describe a “sturdy white population” (1437). One rare early dissenting voice is heard in Ernest Crosby’s “Immigration Bugbear” (1904), in which the author, criticizing the assimilationist impulse, asks “why this craze to make all men and all things alike?” (598). Later cultural pluralists like Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne, whose ideas I analyze in chapter 4, also represented this alternative ideological trend. Figure 1 presents “an impression of the change in proportions” in Hebrews and Sicilians from Boas’s study (38:9). The “cephalic index,” a measurement to determine racial classification that originated in the nineteenth century, represented the ratio between the width and length of a human skull. See the Reports of the Immigration Commis sion, vol. 38, chapter 1. I will return to this immediate connection between body and mentality inherent in the report’s conclusions when I discuss the work of Edward Alsworth Ross later in this chapter. For an excellent discussion of Boas’s views on race, his influence on other anthropologists, as well as a survey of differing anthropological views on race, see Barkan, chapter 2. For more on the history of “republican motherhood” from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, see Smith, pages 185–6, 230–5, 453–9. While the notion of “republican motherhood” is no longer explicit in legal definitions of citizenship, it continues to have social resonance even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Chandra Talpade Mohanty recognizes a parallel in contemporary Britain. In “Cartographies of Struggle,” her introduction to Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (1991), Mohanty draws on the arguments of the Women, Immigration and Nationality Group (WING) noting that “immigration and nationality laws in Britain are a feminist issue, as they explicitly

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reflect the ideology of (white) women as the reproducers of the nation” (26–7). 19. See, for example, articles by Devine, Hayes, Ripley, and Phelan. 20. Omi and Winant criticize attempts to see race as either a social structure or a cultural representation; instead, they argue that we must look at race as both at the same time.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. The autobiographical Antin does not mention her age at immigration. Antin’s father, Israel Antin (called Pinchus in the autobiography), arrived in the United States in 1891, and the rest of the family arrived three years later (Handlin, Foreword to The Promised Land vii), making Mary Antin twelve (almost thirteen) at the time of immigration. A letter by one of Antin’s teachers, included in the text of the autobiography, claims that Antin is twelve during her first year in school, implying that the autobiographical Antin could have been as young as eleven at the time of immigration. This inaccuracy is likely due to a lie on the part of Israel Antin when he filled out the forms for his children to attend school. By putting Mary Antin’s age at two years younger than it actually was, her father ensured that she would have three more years of compulsory schooling. See Keren R. McGin-ity’s “The Real Mary Antin: Woman on a Mission in the Promised Land” 291–5, as well as Sollors xxvii-xxviii. 2. When I use the word assimilate in this chapter, I refer directly to cultural assimilation. There is, however, certainly some overlap between cultural and structural assimilation in Antin’s work, especially regarding how participation in American institutions, particularly the schools, affect cultural assimilation. Furthermore, I use the words assimilate and Americanize interchangeably in this chapter. While any meeting of people from different cultural backgrounds involves change on both sides, notions of assimilation early in this century assumed change primarily on the part of the immigrant. Assimilation connoted that the immigrant would “become like” U.S.-born Americans, and the cultural character of these Americans was generally assumed to be coherent and static. 3. James Craig Holte, in The Ethnic I: A Sourcebook for Ethnic-American Autobiography, claims that “Mary Antin provides an example of Americanization at its best” (31). See also Betty Bergland, “Ideology, Ethnicity, and the Gendered Subject: Reading Immigrant Women’s Autobiographies,” and Cecyle S. Neidle, America’s Immigrant Women. 4. I use the name “Antin” to refer to both the author/historical figure as well as to the author’s autobiographical persona. When I discuss the events of the autobiography, the latter persona should be assumed as the referent.

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5. While water symbolizes this fluidity across borders for Anzaldúa, a fence symbolizes the consciousness of the borderlands. As the second epigraph to this chapter suggests—“the thin edge of/barbwire”—that position is not always a comfortable one. While Antin’s identity construction as a Russian Jew cannot be equated with Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness, the parallels in their imagery suggest what it means to negotiate the complexities of a “both/and” identity. The parallels between Antin and W.E.B.Du Bois that I discuss later in this chapter are similarly suggestive. 6. Interestingly, Antin’s criticism of women’s subaltern position in Jewish life does not extend to the second half of the autobiography, her description of her life in the United States. By restricting her criticism of patriarchy to her Russian Jewish community, she avoids confronting her American readers with the implications of patriarchy within the United States. For a useful, brief discussion of women’s relationships to patriarchy within the Pale, especially regarding women’s positions within secular Yiddish culture, see Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks, chapter 4. 7. It is important to note that Frankenberg uses the term “practice” to refer to an ongoing process: “the term ‘practice’ in the singular designates not a thing but a process or activity…‘white cultural practice’ does not suggest uniformity of belief system or worldview, but rather the idea that activity is taking place” (White Women, Race Matters 194). 8. The ease with which Antin makes this “conversion” is certainly due, in part, to her father. Antin describes her father as one whose desire to see his family assimilate outweighs his ties to Judaism: “being convinced that to hold to the outward forms of orthodox Judaism was to be hampered in the race for Americanization, he did not hesitate to order our family life on unorthodox lines…. On the Holy days he bought my mother a ticket for the synagogue, but the children he sent to school” (246–7). 9. For more on these different positions regarding the role of education, see Smith 463–9. 10. Antin’s aversion to Hotchkins’s appearance is rooted in his literal whiteness, presumably biologically-based. This is one of the rare instances in The Promised Land when Antin veers from her implicit contention that cultural forms and practices constitute whiteness and instead suggests a biological basis of racial difference. I address these two aspects of racial difference later in this chapter in my discussion of the racial binary of Jim Crow. 11. While America seemed to provide tremendous opportunities for the Antins in terms of education, self-expression, and freedom from persecution, it did not immediately provide the economic opportunity that so many immigrants of Antin’s generation expected. Mary Antin’s

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12.

13.

14.

15.

father repeatedly failed in his attempts at retail business. Despite Israel Antin’s hard work, the family was forced to move into ever more dilapidated “evil corners of the slums of Boston” (357). Toward the end of the autobiography, Antin notes that her family was eventually able to leave the tenements for “a darling cottage of our own” but she does not describe how they were able to do so, claiming only that “we found a shortcut” (357). By eliding a “bootstraps” part of her family’s economic struggle, Antin also subverts the dominant autobiographical pattern. While I believe that Bree is correct in noting this trend, she may be overstating her case. A number of recent theorists have warned against trying to precisely delimit a women’s tradition in autobiography, and in consequence re-essentializing difference. Kristi Siegel, in Women’s Autobiogra phies, Culture, Feminism (1999), provides a useful summary of these arguments. Antin describes the process of renaming, so common among newly arrived immigrants at the time: Fetchke, Joseph, and Deborah issued as Frieda, Joseph, and Dora, respectively. As for poor me, I was simply cheated. The name they gave me was hardly new. My Hebrew name being Maryashe in full, Mashke for short, Russianized into Marya (Mar-ya), my friends said that it would hold good in English as Mary; which was very disappointing, as I longed to possess a strange-sounding American name like the others. (188) While renaming is frequently considered a first step toward assimilation, Antin suggests an interesting motive for desiring a new name; she is attracted by the exoticism of the “strange-sounding American” names. Renaming frequently occurred at the point of entry into the United States or in the public schools. Antin’s use of the term “my friends” in the passage above, however, suggests that her family voluntarily adopted new names in an attempt to Americanize. My position on Antin’s individualism versus her communalism differs slightly from that expressed by Wendy Zierler in “In(ter)dependent Selves: Mary Antin, Elizabeth Stern, and Jewish Immigrant Women’s Autobiography.” Zierler argues that “Mary’s (masculine) individualism repeatedly cracks under the pressure of her prior ‘interdependent existence’” (6; my emphasis). However, Antin refers to her autobiographical subject’s reliance on others throughout the autobiography; it is not just part of her past. The importance of the autobiography’s first half to Antin is suggested in a letter she wrote to her publisher. Responding to a suggestion that she focus the book on her experiences in the United States at the expense of those in Russia, she asserted that doing so would “leave me out of the book” (qtd. in Sollors xxvi; emphasis in original).

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16. This assumption about Antin’s agenda is supported not only by the text of The Promised Land but also by Antin’s other writings. Her They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914) is an overt argument against xenophobia. 17. Antin remarks in The Promised Land that Horatio Alger, after Louisa May Alcott, was one of her favorite authors when she was a child (257).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. For examples of such discussions, see the essays “Shall the United States Exclude the Immigration of Japanese and Korean Laborers?” by Burton L. French, “Immigration from the Orient” by H.C. Nutting, and “Immigration of Asiatics” and “Japanese Exclusion,” both by E.A. Hayes. 2. In A Different Mirror, Ronald Takaki discusses the interconnection between these economic arguments and racism (206–8). For an interesting examination of the interconnection between social arguments and racism, see Megumi Dick Osumi’s “Asians and California’s AntiMiscegenation Laws,” especially page 8. 3. The Independent also published Sui Sin Far’s “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” which I discuss later in this chapter. 4. Much of the biographical information about Sui Sin Far I include here comes from Annette White-Parks’ important study Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography. It is unclear whether Edith Maude Eaton adopted the name Sui Sin Far as a pseudonym or whether this was the name she was called by family and friends. White-Parks claims that Sui Sin Far was a name used from early childhood; however, her evidence is not entirely convincing (xvi). Elizabeth Ammons’ Conflicting Stories, Carol Roh-Spaulding’s “‘Wavering’ Images: Mixed-Race Identity and the Stories of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far,” and Xiao-Huang Yin’s “Between the East and the West” all contain discussions of the meaning and connotations of the name Sui Sin Far. 5. I present the section title Mrs. Spring Fragrance without punctuation or italics in order to distinguish it from the book Mrs. Spring Fragrance and the short story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” 6. As with many of her stories, Sui Sin Far does not mention a specific city as the setting of “Its Wavering Image.” She does, however, note that Pan had lived in Chinatown all her life, and she describes Pan’s father running an “Oriental Bazaar on Dupont Street” (85). Grant Avenue, one of the oldest streets in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was named Dupont Street until 1906. 7. For a discussion of similarities between Fanny Fern and Sui Sin Far, see Ning Yu, “Fanny Fern and Sui Sin Far: The Beginning of an Asian American Voice.”

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8. In this opening episode, the nurse uses the name “Sui” to refer to her charge. I will use the name Sui to refer to the autobiographical subject in order to distinguish this subject from the author. 9. For an interesting discussion of some of these rewards and penalties of passing, see Adrian Piper’s “Passing for White, Passing for Black.” 10. Similarly, the Orientalized text of Mrs. Spring Fragrance can be read as Sui Sin Far’s publisher’s attempt to conform to the European-American audience’s expectations of an “Oriental” writer. For a fuller discussion of the material reality of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, see Ammons, “Audacious Words” in Conflicting Stories. 11. This passage suggests that Sui Sin Far was quite familiar with the basic tenets of Confucianism. Central to Confucianist ren, or human virtue, are the notions of self-awareness and fidelity to one’s true nature.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. For some recent analyses of ethnicity in My Ántonia, see Sally Allen McNall’s “Immigrant Backgrounds to My Ántonia: ‘A Curious Social Situation in Black Hawk’,” Ann Moseley’s “A New World Symphony: Cultural Pluralism in The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia,” and Helen Wussow’s “Language, Gender, and Ethnicity in Three Fictions by Willa Cather.” One additional recent critic who has examined race in My Ántonia is Mike Fischer, whose “Pastoralism and its Discontents: Willa Cather and the Burden of Imperialism” addresses the erasure of the Plains Indians from the novel. 2. See William H.Tucker’s The Science and Politics of Racial Research, chapter 3. 3. Examples of these articles include E.T.Brewster’s pro-eugenic “When a Man Marries: Selection and Heredity as They Apply to the Individual” (1906), Burton J.Hendrick’s “The Skulls of Our Immigrants” (1910), which summarizes Franz Boas’s anti-eugenic contributions to the Dillingham Commission’s reports, and Marion Hamilton Carter’s “The Conservation of the Defective Child” (1909) which argues against specific eugenic tenets without directly naming them. 4. See fig. 2. While Grant envisions a number of “Nordics” in central Europe, Bohemia is shown to be almost entirely “Alpine.” 5. It is, of course, the narrator Jim who tells the story; however, in this case, I think it fair to say that Cather rejects these racial categories, as she gives the reader no reason to question Jim’s reliability in respect to his physical description of characters. I address this complex relationship between Cather and her narrator Jim later in this chapter. 6. Nor does Reynolds reconcile his alternating use of biculturalism and mul ticulturalism.

NOTES 125

7. I choose to use the term cultural pluralism (rather than a term such as multiculturalism) with some trepidation. The term has been used by recent writers to refer to a related yet different concept that has evolved within the context of postmodernism. Iris Marion Young, for example, cites Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Frank Cunningham, and James Nickel in developing a concept of “democratic cultural pluralism” (163). In this postmodern version of cultural pluralism, “there is equality among socially and culturally differentiated groups, who mutually respect one another and affirm one another in their difference” (Young 163). In contrast to this postmodern version of cultural pluralism, what I term cultural pluralism in the context of the 1910s is restrictive regarding just what kinds of difference are to be respected and affirmed, as I shall show. When I refer to cultural pluralism, then, this concept should be read as historically situated. Referring to Cather’s views as culturally pluralistic is, in a sense, anachronistic, as it would be to call her ideas multicultural. The term cultural pluralism gained currency after Horace Kallen used it in 1924 (Foner 436); however, the concept it describes was articulated earlier by a number of writers, including Kallen himself. 8. In Immigrant Mothers (2000), Katrina Irving also reads Bourne’s writing alongside My Ántonia. 9. For a fuller discussion of Cather’s cultural pluralism, see Guy Reynolds’s Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (1996), chapter 4. Regarding Cather’s racism, see Elizabeth Ammons’s Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (1992), chapter 8, in addition to her essay “My Ántonia and African American Art” (1999). 10. Katrina Irving asserts that “the cultural pluralists’ construction of the immigrant woman as a primitive earth mother was an attempt to foment an antirestrictionist temper among the public” (Immigrant Mothers 4). 11. Walzer borrows Benedict Anderson’s term. 12. Bourne wrote “Trans-National America” immediately prior to the United States’ entry into World War I. While some proponents of the war saw U.S. participation as an opportunity to renew an imagined fraternity of European-American men, Bourne vehemently opposed the war, and Walzer notes that the United States’ entry into it caused Bourne to lose faith in the ideal of the national fraternity (17). See also Bourne’s essay “Twilight of Idols” (1917). 13. Paralleling My Ántonia to other pluralist works, Katrina Irving sees another way that Ántonia, along with other immigrants, has “value”: “that value…is directly indexed to the immigrants’ retention within poorly remunerated and nonprofessional forms of labor” (Immigrant Mothers 107). 14. See Moseley’s “A New World Symphony: Cultural Pluralism in The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia.”

126 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

15. See especially Lott, chapter 5. 16. The term Bohemian, of course, has a number of connotations in English, and a full discussion of all of these connotations is not within the scope of this chapter. While I focus on how characters described as Bohemian are racially figured as white, I do not mean to deny the slipperiness of the term itself. I refer the reader to Marilee Lindemann’s Willa Cather: Queering America (1999), especially pages 61–9, for an interesting discussion of the ambiguity of Bohemian and its sexual, as well as ethnic, resonances. 17. I borrow this term for the stereotype from Nell Irvin Painter’s “Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype” (208).

NOTES TO THE EPILOGUE 1. See also Naomi Glauberman and Russell Jacoby (eds.), The Bell Curve Debate; Joe L.Kincheloe, Shirley R.Steinberg, and Aaron D.Gresson III (eds.), Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined; Bernie Devlin et al. (eds.), Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve\and Claude S.Fischer et al. (eds.), Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth. 2. I completed this epilogue, as well as my original draft of this book, before I read Katrina Irving’s Immigrant Mothers: Narratives of Race and Mater nity, 1890–1925. In that study, Irving begins her introduction by noting the racialized, anti-immigrant ideology inherent in much of Time’s special issue. Irving’s work explores intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class in literary works about immigrant women, and she pays particular attention to the multiple and differing racist discourses between 1890 and 1925. Considering our similar concerns, I find it especially significant that we both found a connection between our studies of literary women immigrants in the Progressive Era and Time’s late twentieth-century special issue. Rather than viewing this as a coincidence, I see it as further evidence that contemporary antiimmigrant anxieties often take a shape similar to those a century earlier. As Irving puts it, “Time had reached back to [the Progressive Era] for its rhetoric in order to bring subsequent immigration history up to date” (Immigrant Mothers 2). While Time’s morphed cover image reveals how differently the literature of immigration can operate in processes of racial formation today, as I discuss in this epilogue, the influence and continuance of Progressive Era formations of race emphasizes the importance of understanding and critiquing them.

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Index

abjection, 104–107 Addams, Jane, 37, 39 African Americans, 1, 4, 9–10, 62, 88, 95; and identity, 56; literary representations of, xvi, xx, 15–16, 22, 88, 100–108; stereotypes of, xvi, 100–108 Alcott, Louisa May, as literary model for Mary Antin, 40, 122n17 Alger, Horatio, as literary model for Mary Antin, 40, 54, 122n17 Allen, Theodore W., 8–10, 12–13 Alpine race. See European races American Indians, 1, 85, 95, 123n1 Ammons, Elizabeth, 65–66, 82, 88, 101–102, 122n4, 123n10, 124n9 Anderson, Benedict, 124n11 Anderson, Siu Wai, 58 Andrew, A. Piatt, 119n12 Antin, Mary, xvii, 7, 22, 28–57, 60, 116, 119n1, 120n4, 120n5, 120n6, 121n8, 121n10, 121n11, 121n13, 122n14, 122n15, 122n16, 122n17; writing by: From Plotzk to Boston , 35 The Promised Land , xvii, 22, 28–57; reviews of, 28–29 They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration , 122n16

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 28, 32, 73, 120n5 Appiah, Anthony, 5 Arthur, Chester Alan, 60 Asian Americans, 1, 58–82; and identity, xix, 22, 59–60, 67, 69–82 assimilation: cultural, xix, 17, 24–25, 28–29, 35, 37, 39–42, 47–48, 54–57, 62, 65, 67–71, 94, 98, 110, 118n12, 120n2, 121n13; English language as indicator of, 40; patriotism as indicator of, 38–40, 43; structural, 68. See also melting pot autobiography, narrative structure of, 43–49, 54, 122n15 Babb, Valerie, 40–41 Bacon’s Rebellion, 9 Barkan, Elazar, 21, 108 baseball, as indicator of structural assimilation, 68 Baudrillard, Jean, 113–115 The Bell Curve , 109 Bergland, Betty, 120n3 binarism, racial, xx, xvii, 11, 49–53 Blair, Sara, 118n10 Bliven, Bruce, 62

135

136 INDEX

Boas, Franz, 17–18, 89, 119n13, 119n16, 123n3 bodies: race and the study of, 17–22, 68–69, 90–91, 92; women’s, as locus of racial reproduction, xiv, 24–26, 115 Bohemian immigrants, xix, 27, 86. See also Cather, Willa; My Ántonia boundaries: physical, 31–32, 56–57; of identity, 34, 56–57, 108 Bourne, Randolph, 88, 94–96, 98–99, 119n12, 124n8, 124n12 Bree, Germain, 44, 121n12 Brewster, E.T., 123n3 Brodkin, Karen, 11–12, 49, 52, 120n6 Carter, Marion Hamilton, 123n3 Cassuto, Leonard, 106–107 Cather, Willa, xix, 22, 27, 83–89, 91, 92–94, 96–108, 116, 116n3, 124n5, 124n7, 124n9; relationship to narrator Jim Burden, 96–97, 103; writing by: “The Bohemian Girl,” 91 My Ántonia , xix, 22, 27, 83, 88, 91, 92–94, 96–108, 123n1, 124n8, 124n13 Chicana/os, 85. See also Mexican Americans children: education and, 33, 37–40, 44–47; of immigrant women, 25–26 Chinese Americans, 63–82; and identity, xix, 22, 59–60, 67, 69–82; literary representations of, 60, 65–82. See also Asian Americans, Asian immigrants, Sui Sin Far

Chinese Exclusion Act, 1, 60, 63, 118n5 citizenship, American, 49; race and, 1, 49 class, socioeconomic, identity and, xvii, 11, 13 Commons, John R., 15–16, 86 Congress, United States, 13, 16–17, 25, 60 critical race theory, xiv, xvii, 3–14, 36 Crosby, Ernest, 119n12 cultural pluralism, xix, 88, 94–100, 124n7, 124n10; gender difference elided by, 95; racial difference elided by, 95 Cunningham, Frank, 124n7 Curran, Thomas J., 16 Cutter, Martha J., 70, 79–80 Czech immigrants: see Bohemian immigrants Degler, Carl, 8 Devine, Edward T., 119n19 Devlin, Bernie, 125 Dillingham, William, 21–22 Dong, Lorraine, 58–59 Du Bois, W.E. B., 9, 55–56, 120n5; on “double consciousness,” 55–56 Eaton, Edith Maude. See Sui Sin Far ethnicity: identity and, xvii, xvii, 65, 85, 98; theory of, 4 eugenics, xix, 15, 22, 24–26, 88, 89–92, 99–100, 108, 123n3 European Americans, xvi, 8–9, 12–22, 66–69, 76, 85, 95, 108; and identity, xvi, xvii, 39–41, 46–49, 78. See also Irish Americans; Jewish Americans; Italian Americans; Antin, Mary;

INDEX 137

Cather, Willa; Sui Sin Far Fairchild, Henry Pratt, 14, 16, 86, 118n12 feminism, 6, 22; and race, 5–7, 11–12, 22–23. See also socialist feminist theory; women; bodies, women’s, as locus of racial reproduction Fern, Fanny, 77, 123n7 Ferrarelli, Rina, 83 Fetterley, Judith, 96 Fischer, Claude S., 125n1 Fischer, Mike, 123n1 Folkmar, Daniel, 18–21 Folkmar, Elnora C., 18–21 Foner, Eric, 124n7 Frankenberg, Ruth, 6–8, 12, 36, 118n7, 120n7 Franklin, Benjamin, and American autobiography, 44 Fraser, Steven, 109 French, Burton L., 16, 122n1 Friedman, Susan, 44 Gaines, James R., 114 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 3, 5, 108, 111–113, 116n1 Geary Act, 60 Gelfant, Blanche H., 96, 101 gender: and race, xvii, 11, 22–26, 47–49, 73; and autobiography, 43–49; and attitudes about immigrants, 22–26. See. also bodies, women’s, as locus of racial reproduction; feminism; socialist feminist theory; women Giannone, Richard, 88 Gilman, Sander L., 5, 118n2, 118n4

Ginsberg, Elaine K., 79–80 Glauberman, Naomi, 125n1 Gobineau, Arthur Comte de, 1 Gramsci, Antonio, 39 Grant, Madison, 15–16, 89–92, 123n4 Gresson, Aaron D., III, 125n1 Gwin, Minrose C., 83–85 Handlin, Oscar, 119n1 Harvey, Sally Peltier, 101 Hayes, E.A. , 119n19, 122n1 Hendrick, Burton J. 123n3 Herrnstein, Richard J., 109 Holte, James Craig, 120n3 Hom, Marlon K., 58–59 Homberger, Eric, 43 identity, American, xix, 37–57, 62, 65–68, 86, 102, 118n1. See also African Americans and identity, Asian Americans and identity, Chinese Americans and identity, European Americans and identity, Jewish Americansand identity, national identity ideology, hegemonic racial, xvi, xvii, 22–23, 35–36 Ignatiev, Noel, 10–12 Immigration Act of 1924 , xvii, 13–14, 27 immigration: Asian, 1, 14, 60–63; European, 1, 8, 12–13, 24–25, 39, 60 immigrants, and work, 9, 45, 64, 85 In re Halladjian et al , 50 Irish Americans, 10–11. See also European Americans Irving, Katrina, 26, 85, 124n8, 124n10, 124n13, 125n2 Italian Americans, 16. See also European Americans

138 INDEX

Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 3, 12–14, 21–22, 49–52, 92 Jacoby, Russell, 125n1 James, Henry, 15–16, 118n10 Japanese Americans, 62–63. See also Asian Americans Jewish Americans, 11, 15, 28–57; and identity, xix, 7–8, 29–57, 120n5. See also European Americans Jim Crow Era, racial binaries during, 49–53, 121n10 Johnson-Reed Act. See Immigration Act of 1924 Jordan, Winthrop, 8 Kahn, Julius, 63 Kallen, Horace, 88–89, 119n12, 124n7 Kaye, Frances, 100 Kincheloe, Joe L., 125n1 Kohler, Max J., 119n12 Kristeva, Julia, 104–106 Laclau, Ernesto, 124n7 Lambert, Deborah G., 96 Larsen, Nella, 70 Lindemann, Marilee, 125n16 Ling, Amy, 59, 64 Linnaeus, Carl von, xvii–1, 18 literary texts, as racial projects, 26–28 literature of immigration, defined, 116n2 Lott, Eric, 125n15 Lund, John M., 22 McGinity, Keren R., 120n1 McIntosh, Peggy, 5–6, 8 McNall, Sally Allen, 123n1 Mediterranean race. See European races “melting pot” model of assimilation, 94, 99. See also assimilation

Mexican Americans, 1 See also Chicana/os Michaels, Walter Benn, 85 minstrelsy, 10, 100–101 miscegenation, xvi, 72; and “one drop” rule, 72 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, xiv, 115, 119n18 Montagu, Ashley, 109 Morgan, Edmund S., 9 morphing, computer-generated, 109–116 Morrison, Toni, 83–85, 88, 107 Moseley, Ann, 88, 100, 123n1, 125n14 Mouffe, Chantal, 124n7 Murray, Charles, 109 national identity, xvii, xvii, 39. See also identity, American Native Americans. See American Indians nativism, 23–26, 35 Neidle, Cecyle S., 120n3 Nickel, James, 124n7 Nordic race. See European races Nutting, H. C, 122n1 objectification, failure of, 106–107 O’Brien, Sharon, 96 Omi, Michael, 4–5, 26–28, 36, 108, 116n1, 119n20 Osumi, Megumi Dick, 122n2 Painter, Nell Irvin, 125n17 passing, racial, 70, 79–81 patriotism, race and, 7–8, 50 Phelan, James D., 16, 62, 119n12, 119n19 Piper, Adrian, 123n9 Posnock, Ross, 118n10 privilege, defined, 5–6 Progressive Era, defined, xvii–xvii

INDEX 139

races, European, 86–88, 90–92, 123n4 racial categories, early construction of, xvii–3 racial formation, defined, 4–5, 116n1 racial project, defined, 26–27 racism, xiv, xvi, 6–8, 27, 35, 72, 80 Reports of the Immigration Commission , 16–22, 68–69, 113, 118n3, 119n14 Revolution, American, 10 Reynolds, Guy, 92–94, 124n6 Ripley, William Z., 119n19 Roediger, David R., 9–13 Rogin, Michael, 110 Roh-Spaulding, Carol, 122n4 Rosowski, Susan J., 96 Ross, Edward Alsworth, xvii, 24–26 Rubin, Steven J., 29, 53 Russia, Jewish life in, 29–34, 120n6

Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), xix, 22, 58–82, 116, 116n2, 122n3, 122n4, 123n6, 123n7, 123n8, 123n10, 123n11; and Confucianism, 81; writing by: “Half Chinese Children: Those of American Mothers and Chinese Fathers,” 58 “Its Wavering Image,” 71–76, 116n2, 123n6 “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” xix, 60, 76–82 Mrs. Spring Fragrance (book), xix, 60, 64–76, 123n5 “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (story), 65–69, 123n5 “The Wisdom of the New,” 69–71

Said, Edward W., 26, 28 schools, as agents of assimilation, 37– 40. See also children, education and Schwind, Jean, 96 sexuality: immigrant women’s, 23–26; and identity, xvii Siegel, Kristi, 121n12 simulacra, 113–115; Disneyland as simulacrum, 114 slavery, 8–9 Smith, Rogers M., 23, 39, 118n1, 118n5, 118n6, 119n17 Smith, Sidonie, 44 Sochen, June, 43 socialist feminist theory, 6 Solberg, S.E., 62–63 Sollors, Werner, 50–52 Steinberg, Shirley R., 125n1 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 5, 118n2, 118n4 Stone, Albert E., 44 success, self-made, immigrant narratives and, 43–46, 121n11

Takaki, Ronald, 122n2 Time magazine, xx, 109–116, 125n2 Trinh T. Minh-ha, 73 Tucker, William H., 118n2, 123n2 Vaughn, Stephanie, 101 Walzer, Andrew, 95, 99, 124n11 Warren, Kenneth, 118n10 Watson, Julia, 44 whiteness: critical study of, xiv, xvii, xx–xxi, 5–14, 35–36; viewed as normative, xvii, 5–7, 14, 35, 85–86, 107–108 White-Parks, Annette, 59, 64, 70, 76–77, 122n4 white supremacy, bible used to justify, 80 Winant, Howard, 4–5, 26–28, 36–37, 108, 108, 116n1, 119n20 women: as “reproducers of the nation,” xiv, 23–26, 114–115, 119n18;

140 INDEX

in Russian Jewish society, 33; Irish American, and race, 11; reproduction and, 97–99, 110. See also bodies, women’s, as locus of racial reproduction; feminism; gender; socialist feminist theory Woodress, James, 97 Wu, William F., 59 Wussow, Helen, 123n1 xenophobia, xvii, 29, 35, 48, 54 Yin, Xiao Huang, 77, 122n4 Young, Iris Marion, 104–106, 124n7 Yu, Ning, 123n7 Zaborowska, Magdalena J. , 29, 48–49 Zierler, Wendy, 122n14