atlantikos_springjournal

Atlantikos is published semi-annually by the graduate students of the Department of English at Michigan State University.

Atlantikos Editorial Board General Editor

Diane Saylor

Associate Editors

Brian Holcolmb Geoffrey Johns Kelly Battles

Publication Coordinator

Michelle Parke

Editorial Staff Aryn Bartley Kelly Battles Timothy Bielawski Christi Blythin Huang-Hua Chen Todd Comer Michele Costello Peter Ford Stephen Gaertner Ana Holguin Sarah Lanius Maureen Lauder Lauren Mason Kaustav Mukherjee Jennifer Nichols Gregory Nicholson Faculty Advisors

Lance Norman Julie O'Connor Ildiko Olasz Elizabeth Pellerito Barbara Postema Kristina E J Quynn Hannah Rule Regina Salmi Parama Sarkar Amrita Sen Jason Vanlier Michelle Veenstra Katherine Whitney Greg Wright

Dr. Patrick O’Donnell Dr. A.C. Goodson Dr. Judith Roof

Contact us at atlantik@msu.edu The staff would like to thank the MSU Graduate School and Department of English for their financial support.

Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2006

Copyright Š 2006 by Michigan State University

Spring 2006

Volume 1 Number 1

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Letter from the Editor

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Q & A with Jonathan Gil Harris

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Irina Anisimova Métissage as an Oppositional Practice

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Stephanie T. Taitano Critical Anxiety: The Language of Ethnic Discourse

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Timothy Johns Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Garveyism, American Film, and Red Agitation During South Africa’s Rand Revolt

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Ashley Hales Fictive Emigrants and America as Fiction

Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2006

Copyright © 2006 by Michigan State University

Letter from the Editor Back in 1973, graduate students from the English Department at Michigan State University established The Gypsy Scholar, a journal conceived to provide a venue for academic scholarship written by graduate students from universities around the country. This peer-review periodical was edited and run entirely by graduate students in the department. It has now been twenty-five years since the last issue of The Gypsy Scholar was published, and we are proud to resurrect the student-run journal, albeit with a new name, face, and format to reflect the changing field of academic literary scholarship.

As our subtitle indicates, Atlantikos is journal dedicated to publishing the scholarly work of graduate students (and others) in the field of Transatlantic Studies. We feel this focus encourages both traditional and innovative scholarship of textual, critical, cultural, and theoretical issues related to Transatlantic Studies.

Atlantikos is a site for discussion that is not limited by discipline or theoretical approach, but which allows for contrasting ideas and continually reevaluates the field. This semi-annual online journal (with permanent archives in the Michigan State University Library and English Department) represents the recent work by the most active graduate scholars in the field.

As part of our project, we will also publish interviews with noted scholars in the field of literary study. We are honored to include in this issue an interview with Jonathan Gil Harris, Ph.D. of George Washington University, a keynote speaker at Critical Institutions: "Waste and Want: The Cultural Politics of Value" (organized through the English Graduate Department at Michigan State University, March 31- April 1, 2006). We are grateful to him for graciously agreeing to take time out of his busy schedule to participate in an online interview.

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Finally, we are indebted to the English Department and to the Graduate School of Michigan State University for not only providing us with financial and professional support but for providing us with encouragement and enthusiasm which allowed us to take Atlantikos from the idea of a few graduate students to the realization of our first issue. We invite you to read the following articles selected as the best of transatlantic scholarship.

Diane Saylor

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Q & A with Jonathan Gil Harris Dr. Harris recently visited Michigan State University in March as one of the keynote speakers for Critical Institutions: "Waste and Want: The Cultural Politics of Value" (a conference by and for the faculty and graduate students of the MSU Department of English). His address was entitled "The Writing on the Wall: London's Old Jewry and John Stow's Urban Palimpsest."

Dr. Harris received his Ph.D. from the University of Sussex and is currently a professor in the English Department at George Washington University. His published works include Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourse of Social Pathology in Early Modern England and Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare's England. His upcoming project, Reworking Material Culture in Shakespeare's England, considers the palimpsest as a model for both materiality and historiography in the Renaissance and the present, and spans the work of early modern writers such as Shakespeare, Robert Wilson, John Stow and Margaret Cavendish, and contemporary theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh. Dr. Harris was generous to answer some questions generated from his keynote address and his work.

Q:

Could you further differentiate the concept/model of the palimpsest you describe in the paper you presented at Critical Institutions ("The Writing on the Wall: London's Old Jewry and John Stow's Urban Palimpsest") from the Freudian mystic writing pad?

With the figure of the palimpsest, I'm trying to introduce the problem of poly-temporality into current conversations about mate6

Q & A with Jonathan Gil Harris rial culture. The "material" of material culture remains terribly under-theorized: there has been a tendency in much recent scholarship, especially in early modern studies, to regard the object's materiality as simply a synonym for its physical form, and hence to reify the object within the freeze-frame of a singular historical moment.

By contrast, I argue that objects are almost by definition poly-temporal. They aren't simply of a moment; they can bear multiple traces of past workings and reworkings. For that reason, I compare the material object to a palimpsest. The palimpsest is, after all, not the product of a single moment, but a site of ongoing textual production that fails to erase the traces of earlier inscriptions.

I am drawn to the figure of the palimpsest for several reasons. In the palimpsest, the present is written over multiple pasts. That doesn't mean those pasts are transparently legible or completely recoverable. What interests me, rather, is that even in their very opacity or inscrutability, the most archaic inscriptions in a palimpsest do work by transforming and displacing what has been written over them (even as the latter equally transform and displace their predecessors). I very much see the Derridean resonances of writing at play in the palimpsest, whose multiple inscriptions produce not only a deferral of presence, but also a deferral of the present. But I should stress that I don't see the palimpsest simply as writing in the Derridean sense. The early modern European palimpsest is not just an occasion for diffĂŠrance. It is also a complex assemblage of agents: it includes a writing surface, whether parchment or vellum, that enables, even as it is transformed by, the writing on it. In the palimpsest, then, writing is accompanied by a material substrate that is not so much "hors de texte" and hence independent of it, as "sous de texte" and working in conjunction with it.

Thus described, the palimpsest both resonates with and differs from Freud's famous "mystic writing pad," the child's writing tablet from which notes can be magically removed by the simple ruse of lifting a sheet of semi-transparent paper that covers a block of dark wax beneath it. For Freud, the pad entails simultaneous processes of permanent inscription (the multiple impressions left on the block of wax) and erasure (the lifting of the sheet). The notable similarity between palimpsest and pad is that both are complex metaphors of over-writing on one surface. Obviously Freud uses the pad to 7

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describe a problem of the subject (the relations between perception and consciousness), while I use the palimpsest to get at a problem of the object (the relations between materiality, temporality, and labor). Still, I am struck by how—contra Derrida's redaction of Freud—both metaphors are not simply graphological; they also involve some kind of material remainder that interacts with, and is transformed by, the inscriptions on it.

There is, of course, one significant difference between Freud's pad and the palimpsest. The visible surface of the pad—which corresponds to Freud's understanding of perception—permits the utter erasure of whatever has been inscribed on it. By contrast, the palimpsest retains everything written on it, even if the legibility of its inscriptions diminishes with more and more over-writing. But this is in some ways a false dichotomy. As I noted before, the palimpsest resists any fantasy of total historical legibility or recovery. In the palimpsest as much as on Freud's pad, past inscriptions are constantly rendered opaque even as their traces remain. What the palimpsest foregrounds is how this process is more material, and less "mystic," than the name of Freud's pad would have it. Most practices of erasure cannot remove writing without leaving some waste or material trace. An eraser makes smudges; even our computers' backspace or delete buttons imprint the data of old phrasings and typos on our hard drives. Erasure is just as much an inscription as is any "positive" piece of writing. Nietzsche seems to have realized this in The Use and Abuse of History when he commended not just the antiquarian's "instinctively correct reading even of a past which has been written over," but also his "swift understanding of the erased and reused parchments (which have, in fact, been erased and written over many times)." I have found Nietzsche's remark very useful, partly as a means to understanding the reading practices of the early modern antiquarian John Stow, but also in theorizing the extent to which erasure is a practice less opposed to than constitutive of the palimpsest, and hence of the material object.

Q:

Is it possible to conceive of a non-Marxist model of materialism?

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Q & A with Jonathan Gil Harris Some Marxists might complain that the problem with what has recently masqueraded as materialism—especially scholarship on early modern material culture—is that it's not really Marxism at all.

So in their view, it's all too possible to conceive of a non-Marxist materialism, although some of them have disputed that it can even be called a materialism if it isn't Marxist. Of course a lot depends on what one regards as the sine qua non of materialism. Is it a dialectical understanding of the relations between economic base and superstructure, coupled with a commitment to revolutionizing the means of production? A physical determinist explanation of all phenomena? A scholarly interest in material objects? No matter how much some of these supposed materialisms may shun Marxism (and vice versa), I would argue that any contemporary theory of matter, materiality or materialism - at least in our interpretive community - is inevitably a palimpsest containing some traces of Marx.

That said, it's worth noting that Marx's materialism is itself a palimpsest of non-Marxist materialisms. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the materialism of the pre-Socratics, including the atomism of Epicurus, and much of what has come to be known as "Marxist" materialism is a complex rewriting of Aristotelian materialism. One can recognize traces of the latter in Marx's famous rejoinder to Feuerbach, where he argues that a focus simply on the form of objects ignores the dimension of praxis. The object, he insists, should not be confused with form; it is sensuous, workable matter that implies a past, present, and future. Here Marx reworks Aristotle's understanding of form as actuality and matter as dynameos or potentiality.

I am fascinated by these traces of earlier materialisms in Marx's writing. I refer to Marx often in my own work, but I do so less to invoke him as the original authority on materialism, and more to reactivate the archaic, non-Marxist materialisms at work in his writings. This strategy serves as a neat theoretical corollary to my claims about the poly-temporality of objects, and how the past can irrupt through these objects with heterodox and even transformative effect. Indeed, the classical materialisms that Marx reworks can sometimes chafe against other aspects of his thought. Pre-Socratic atomism, for example, presumes no teleological end to history. And 9

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it is Marx's debt to atomism that Althusser's so-called aleatory materialism of the 1980s, with its emphasis on contingency and chance encounter, picks up on as a "Marxist" means of resisting the teleologism of later Marxist thought.

When, as in Althusser's reading of Marx, an apparently homogeneous text is disclosed to be a palimpsest riddled with untimely traces of the past, those traces can be used to critique its supposed homogeneity. This is the method of reading I am most interested in, especially when it is applied to material objects. And this method is precisely what I see John Stow doing with his reading of London as a palimpsest. In the terms of Freud's mystic pad, Stow reads London's Protestant present as the magically clean sheet that disavows but cannot fully conceal the multiple inscriptions of a nonProtestant and even Jewish past that is legible in the material substrate of the city's architecture.

Q:

How do your ideas in this talk relate to an emerging early modern identity of London?

In my reading, Stow is a cranky maverick with Catholic sympathies who resists the post-Reformation re-branding of London as a Protestant New Jerusalem. That re-branding—which, I should add, Stow's fellow Londoners never quite bought!—exemplifies the supersessionary logic of Christian typology so ably outlined by Kathleen Biddick, in which the Hebrew Old Testament is admitted to, even as it is temporally distanced from, the more spiritually advanced time of the Christian New Testament. Stow reveres London, but not as a Protestant beacon pointing its light towards a glorious future. He casts his adoring gaze backwards rather than forwards: the city is great for what it has been prior to an age of commercial expansion and religious reform.

That Stow feels nostalgic for pre-Reformation rituals and monuments erased by several decades of Protestant iconoclasm is hardly a radical claim. Most modern scholars of Stow are in agreement about that. The one thing I want to argue is that Stow reads the matter of London's past in order to locate fissures within a supposedly monolithic and triumphant Protestant present. This leads him to record not just surviving inscriptions on Catholic monuments, but 10

Q & A with Jonathan Gil Harris also Hebrew letters that he finds in the ruins of the city's Ludgate wall. Whereas Christian typology treats Hebrew writing as the hallmark of an excessively materialist past that has been superseded by a spiritual present and future, Stow allows the Hebrew writing on the wall to speak back to the present and critique the triumphal Protestant narratives of London favored by the city's leaders.

In this way, Stow is doing something that anticipates not Hegel's but Benjamin's philosophy of history. Whereas for Hegel history is the teleological progression of Spirit towards a final end, for Benjamin history is the centrifugal process whereby the past is allowed to irrupt into and explosively shatter the present. I'm not saying that Stow is Benjamin avant la lettre; his politics are too conservative for that. But it's interesting that, just as the flaneur Benjamin was mesmerized by the objects in the arcades of Paris, so too is the perambulatory Stow entranced by the physical minutiae of the city through which he walks. And like Benjamin, he is attracted to the critical power of ruins and fragments.

Q:

During your keynote, you used the word "uncanny" to describe the antiquary Stow's perception of the traces on the palimpsest. Could you elaborate on this notion of the "uncanny" as it relates to Stow's process of interpretation?

The word I used throughout the talk to characterize Stow's reading of the Hebrew letters was "untimely," which I've cribbed from Nietzsche via Gilles Deleuze and Elizabeth Grosz. For Nietzsche, the untimely is that which is not in and of a singular moment, but rather out of joint with it or surplus to it. The untimely is a very useful term for thinking about the ways in which the traces of the past are not necessarily superseded by, but can continue to have a heterodox agency in, the present.

During the question and answer period after my presentation, I suggested that my use of "untimely" might resonate also with Freud's "unheimlich," or the uncanny. The uncanny is in crucial respects untimely: it spells the return of an archaic, long-repressed experience or affective state that is now apprehended as alien, yet also possesses a frightening power inasmuch as it is unconsciously remembered. Hence the paradoxical status of the uncanny as both 11

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unfamiliar and familiar. What I'm interested in is how Stow's treatment of the Hebrew writing on the Ludgate wall replicates the temporal logic of Freud's uncanny: the writing belongs to London's disavowed past yet resurfaces in the present as something both irrevocably alien and heimlich.

It's perhaps fitting that the Hebrew inscription was discovered within the ruined wall of Ludgate. This gate commemorated the city's supposed founder, King Lud, and was thus a special source of civic pride and identity. Little wonder that it became a hotly disputed site in the religious struggles of the sixteenth century. Since 1260, the gate had had a statue of King Lud at its crest. The Protestant King Edward saw the statue as a relic of paganism, and had it toppled; the Catholic Queen Mary restored it. Queen Elizabeth remodeled the gate in 1586: she refurbished the statue of Lud, but superimposed a figure of herself on its west side (thereby rendering her image visible to anyone entering the city). That the Hebrew inscription was discovered in this contested marker of the capital's identity underlines its uncanny power. In the very structure that supposedly commemorates London's origin, Stow finds not singularity, but a repressed multiplicity; in what should be heimlich he finds the unheimlich.

Q:

In the question and answer following your keynote address, you seemed to evoke a phenomenological theory of performance in your characterization of gunpowder's role in early productions of Macbeth. How does a phenomenology of smell differ from a phenomenology of sight (such as that evoked by studies of the Eucharist wafer)?

I'm fascinated by the special effect famously called for at the beginning of Macbeth—"thunder and lightning." This would have necessitated the detonation of small firecrackers called squibs, which would have not only simulated the visual and acoustic properties of foul witchy weather, but also generated a hell of a stink.

Squibs were made with cheap gunpowder, which was notoriously smelly—a common ingredient in early modern do-it-yourself gunpowder recipes was hog dung. So what would the pungent smell of gunpowder have done to an audience watching Macbeth in early 12

Q & A with Jonathan Gil Harris 1606, just months after the failed Gunpowder Plot against King James? It could have called to mind that recent event. But I think it may have also evoked more archaic memories - the conventional detonation of squibs in old entertainments featuring devils and, more generally, a supposedly superseded Catholic olfactory morality in which incense signified the odor of sanctity, and sin stank of sulphur. In other words, the smell of Macbeth may well have produced an untimely effect in its audience or, rather, olfactors.

This is speculative, of course. But I think that from a phenomenological point of view, smell tends to have a greater power than sight to produce this kind of untimely effect. As Proust repeatedly attested, smell can trigger memory. MallarmĂŠ, picking up his abandoned smoking pipe, expressed amazement at how its odors sent him back in time. Shakespeare likewise remarks on the time-traveling effects of smell in Sonnet 5, where he observes that perfume is not simply an object in the present, but also a remembrance of past beauty. Smell can conjure up an otherwise inaccessible past experience, and make it crash into the present with exceptional vividness.

Sight can do this too, of course. But there is a way in which sight has tended to operate culturally in the register of identification: you see something, and you work out what it is. Sight is the lubricant of ontology, of presence. By contrast, smell tends to function in the register of metonymy; it reminds you of where you were when you last experienced that smell, of what you were doing, of what you were thinking, of things and experiences contiguous with the smell.

Olfaction is much more open, therefore, to the slippages of the trace.

Tellingly, early modern debates about the Eucharist wafer take place almost entirely in the register of sight. Protestant polemics debunk the Eucharist as fraudulent theater, as Papist spectacle complete with eye-catching histrionics and stage properties (including the priest's sumptuous vestments). Given this association of the Eucharist with seeing, it is perhaps only fitting that the sixteenthcentury debates about the Eucharist turn on the problem of presence. For Catholics, the communion wafer is the divine Presence.

For Protestants, it is just a metaphor for the Presence; it is a wafer rather than the body of Christ. In either case, the wafer gets read ontologically, for what it is or what it is not. Macbeth's smells are, by contrast, not embroiled in problems of presence. They instead 13

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unleash untimely slippages into and from the past, very much in keeping with the logic of the play—"nothing is but what is not," says Macbeth.

Q:

Are there any available labels with which you are comfortable to name your methodology?

In general, I'm none too fond of labels; they tend to assume the solid entities that I am trying to call into question. Of the available labels, Derrida's "hauntology" as elaborated in Specters of Marx may come closest to capturing what I'm doing, though with some strict caveats. Obviously, I'm speaking about material objects and he is speaking about writing. And I'm not as in thrall as he is to the vocabulary of ghosts, specters, or dead revenants. In my work, the matter of the past is very much alive, even if it isn't ever fully recoverable.

For that reason, I'm also quite drawn to Deleuze and Guattari's "rhizome." Their organic metaphor, based on the underground connective networks of tubers and cutgrass, is more physically grounded (literally!) than Derrida's "hauntology." I like the way in which the rhizome presumes no singularity, but is rather a proliferating aggregation without origin, sequence, or end. If I have a reservation about the metaphor, it is that it tends to evacuate labor and agency—that is, it leaves unanswered the question of how aggregations are put together, and to what ends.

One label I might embrace is anachronic materialism. It suggests both something of the critical traditions in which I've been trained, and my beef with them. Structuralist linguistics and certain versions of Marxism posit a distinction between synchronic and diachronic analysis, as if static structure and linear sequence are the only two options for understanding temporality. There's been a tendency amongst critics on the left (myself included) to privilege the diachronic; change has a political valence, and so both Foucault and new historicism have come under fire for fetishizing frozen synchronic systems and having no hermeneutic, other than the rupture or break, with which to understand change. But I have also come to be suspicious of diachronic analysis as a disingenuous form of synchronic interpretation, inasmuch as it often does little more than to 14

Q & A with Jonathan Gil Harris posit a linear sequence of synchronic systems (like a reel of film that comprises a succession of freeze-frames). The anachronic suggests an intriguing alternative to the synchronic and the diachronic.

We have been powerfully conditioned to reject anachronism as improper, queer, and historically incorrect. Hence Jameson's famous injunction, "always historicize!", tends to be interpreted as a refusal of anachronism in favor of the straighter temporalities of synchronic or diachronic analysis. But I recall what Jameson has to say later in The Political Unconscious about the propensity of literature to resist any univocal reflection of the material circumstances of its production: "form, secreted like a shell or exoskeleton, continues to emit its ideological message long after the extinction of its host."

This exoskeleton is an untimely, living growth from the past anachronistically surviving into the present. The metaphor shows how Jameson's "always historicize!" might also be glossed—as Marjorie Garber has suggested—as "sometimes anachronize!" The untimely dimensions of material objects, be they palimpsests, rhizomes, or exoskeletons, give us an opportunity to transform anachronism from an embarrassment into a radical materialist methodology.

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Métissage as an Oppositional Practice Irina Anisimova University of South Carolina

Introduction In Moi, Tituba, Sorcière Noire De Salem (I, Tituba, Black Witch Of Salem),

by Maryse Condé and Paradise, by Toni Morrison, the supernatural acquires communal significance and becomes a space of resistance. In both novels, the supernatural occurs through conjuring, which in the Americas can be seen as a hybrid experience. Moreover, the main characters of both novels, Consolata and Tituba, are conjurers of mixed descent.

Using the aesthetics of métissage, Condé creates Tituba's fictional autobiography. Similarly, Morrison uses métissage in the creation of a new woman-centered religion.

The term métissage includes both the process of hybridity and creolization, which manifest in I, Tituba, and Paradise. According to Lionett, the terms "métissage and métis" combine the meanings of cultural and racial mixing. These terms encompass both creolization (usually associated with cultural and linguistic mixing) and hybridity (usually associated with racial integration) (4). In the Caribbean context, where the term (métissage) has first appeared, it signifies not only the mixing of different elements, but also the fabrication of a new entity out of disparate fragments. Métissage is a highly imaginative process, as it involves the re-creation or even fabrication of history and identity (Glissant 97). For Lionnet, métissage is not limited to the Caribbean context; in her book Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture, she attributes métissage to Afro-Caribbean as well as to African-American writers, which is produced by their marginality to the West. The cultural backgrounds of Condé and Morrison are conducive to the notion of métissage. Both authors belong to and write from cultures, the hybridity of which is expressed by the combination of locales and identities. Both Condé and Morrison perceive the supernatural as a liminal space of openness and hybridity. According to Homi Bhabha, created through colonization, hybridity disrupts colonial power: "It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination" (112).

Accordingly, both authors deconstruct Western ideals of racial purity through hybridity or métissage.

Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2006

Copyright © 2006 by Michigan State University

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Métissage as an Oppositional Practice Hybrid Nature of Conjuring In I, Tituba and Paradise, the authors contrast rigidity and purity to fluidity and hybridity. Unlike the communities of Salem and Ruby, the slave community of Barbados, and the inhabitants of Convent can be characterized by hybridity. The community of the slaves of Barbados is more diverse and open than the Puritan community of New England, since the slaves came from different African tribes and participated in the creation of a new collective culture. Moreover, slave communities had to face the hybridity enforced by the legacy of rape, which was hypocritically unacknowledged by whites. In Paradise, Morrison contrasts the Convent women (characterized by their racial indeterminacy) to the racist inhabitants of Ruby. The Convent women come from diverse social, cultural and racial backgrounds, whereas the inhabitants of Ruby are black, belong to the upper-middle class and ostracize lighter skinned members of the community. In both novels, the ideals of purity and unity are associated with patriarchy, while hybridity and fluidity are connected to the feminine.

Significantly, both authors place conjure women of mixed origin (Tituba and Consolata) at the center of their novels.

In I, Tituba, the main character is a métis, as she is the daughter of a European father and an African mother. Tituba's origin is closely connected to the history of her land. This connection can be illustrated through the story of her birth. Tituba's own existence originates in an act of violence — her mother is raped by an English sailor during the Middle Passage. This original violence can symbolize Caribbean history and is consistent with the historical vision of other Caribbean writers. For example, in her I is a Long-Memoried Woman, Grace Nichols contrasts the beauty of the islands with their violent history. "These islands green / with green blades" are "fertile / with brutality" (31). In the same way, Tituba's experiences are inevitably influenced by the violence that predates her birth. Jeanne Garane suggests that the story of Tituba is emblematic of Caribbean history. Like most West Indians, Tituba has no definite ethnic or cultural background with which she could identify: "As the daughter of a white European and a black African, Tituba symbolizes West Indians who can look neither to Africa nor to Europe [nor, in Tituba's case, to North America] for an affirming mirror" (156). However, Tituba's identity is not limited to her tragic past. In accordance with the constructed nature of the Caribbean identity, Condé emphasizes the role of imagination in Tituba's story. Yao, Tituba's adoptive father, who chooses her name, does not give Tituba a name of African origin: "It was he who gave 17

Atlantikos me my name: Tituba. TI-TU-BA. It's not an Ashanti name. Yao probably invented it to prove that I was the daughter of his will and imagination" (6). Thus, Yao acknowledges that imaginative creativity can become one of the anti-colonial practices.

Tituba is not only half European and half African, but is also brought up by a woman whose culture is different from that of Tituba's own mother and adoptive father. While Tituba's mother and adoptive father are Ashanti, Mama Yaya comes from a different African tribe. As Tituba explains, she was not an Ashanti like her mother and Yao, but a Nago from the coast, "whose name, Yetunde, had been creolized into Mama Yaya" (9).

This woman, whose very name becomes creolized, initiates Tituba into the knowledge of conjuring. In the new geographical location of Barbados, Mama Yaya's conjuring becomes a hybrid experience. Nada Elia defines conjuring as "a product of the American 'contact zone.'" She points out the multiplicity of influences that contributed to the composite nature of conjuring. She defines it as a mix of various native African animist religions that blended together with Islam. In addition, in the Americas, these religions mixed with Christianity as well as various Native American religions and the skills of Native shamans (140-141). Elia's definition, which concerns conjuring in North America, can be appropriated for a discussion of conjuring in the Caribbean. Antonio Benitez-Rojo points out that most "plantation cultures" formed in the Caribbean include African, European, Asian, and American components (55).

In accordance with Elia's definition, Condé presents Tituba's conjuring as an art of hybridization: "Under [Mama Yaya's] guidance I [Tituba] attempted bold hybrids, cross-breeding the passiflonnde with the prune taureau, the poisonous pomme cythere with the surette, and the azaleedes-azalees with the persulfureuse" (11). The hybrid nature of Tituba's magical practices is further illustrated by their transformation in America.

Her healing practices in New England reflect the ability to adjust to different circumstances and to make the best out of her situation. In New England, where none of the herbs are familiar to Tituba, she has to adapt to her new environment. She again has to become an apprentice and to learn the secret properties of New England's nature from Judah White.

Moreover, due to Condé's irony, Tituba's conjuring becomes even more hybridized. Condé does not try to authenticate Tituba's conjuring. On the contrary, in an interview with Ann Scarboro, Condé states that she knows nothing about witchcraft, and that all her information came from books: "The recipes that I give in the novel are merely recipes that I found in seventeenth-century books: how to cure people with certain plants, what kind of prayers to say in certain circumstances, and so on" (206). Bruce 18

Métissage as an Oppositional Practice Simon notices that Condé not only hybridizes Tituba's conjuring in New England, but also gives misleading information about her practices in Barbados. He points out that, according to the novel's glossary, the passiflonnde, the prune taureau, the azalee-des-azalees, the persulfureuse, and the salapertuis (the plants used by Tituba in her magic) are all a literary invention by the author (445). He explains that "not only is there always mixing and substituting going on in Tituba, but it turns out that the 'originals' being mixed are usually inventions" (446). There exists the close connection between métissage and imagination that characterizes the creative re-writing of Tituba's story.

Like Tituba, Consolata is a conjurer of mixed descent. She is a woman of color; yet, Morrison emphasizes her tea-colored hair and her eyes the color of mint. Elia notes that, in American literature, conjurers were traditionally presented as very dark, and of "pure" African descent (142).

However, this description fits neither Tituba nor Consolata. By giving magical powers to women of mixed origin, Condé and Morrison redefine conjuring in the context of the Americas, where it turns into a hybrid experience. Like Tituba, Consolata is an orphan. Moreover, her parents are unknown, which leads to her being exposed to different cultures. An abandoned child, she is kidnapped by a group of American Catholic nuns on their trip to Brazil. Consolata is brought up by Mary Magna, the Mother Superior of the Convent neighboring Ruby. Consolata regards Mary Magna as her real mother and feels more orphaned after her death than as a child in the slums of Brazil.

Consolata also experiences hybridity in relation to language. The narrator describes Consolata's first experience in the United States as an existence between languages. In the narrator's words, "The first to go were the rudiments of her first language. Every now and then she found herself speaking and thinking in that in between place, the valley between the regulations of the first language and the vocabulary of the second" (242).

Although Consolata forgets Portuguese, the attachment to her native language is manifested in her fascination with Latin. For a very long time, Consolata seems absolutely oblivious to her past and cultural background. Until one day, she sees a celebration of the newly established town, Ruby, and recollects her previous life in Brazil: Then a memory of just such skin and just such men, dancing with women in the streets to music beating like an infuriated heart, torsos still, heaps making circles above legs moving so rapidly it was fruitless to decipher how such ease was possible....

And although they were living here in a hamlet, not in a loud 19

Atlantikos city full of glittering black people, Consolata knew she knew them. (227) Through this re-discovery of her past, Consolata gradually recognizes the hybrid nature of her identity and embraces her magical powers as an integral part of her individuality.

Like Tituba, Consolata discovers her magical power through a woman of a culture different from her own. Lone, a midwife and a root worker from Ruby, realizes that Consolata is gifted from the moment of their first encounter. Initially, Consolata resists her healing powers, as she feels they cannot be reconciled with Christian beliefs. Consolata's acceptance of her magical power, the return to her roots and the realization of the inclusive potential of Christianity initiate the revival at the Convent.

In Paradise, the supernatural is represented by elements of Christianity, conjuring, and finally goddess worship, the latter of which emerges in the presentation of Piedade. Describing her new beliefs, Consolata explains to her tenants, "Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary's mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve" (263). Traditionally, Mary is exalted as spirit or salvation, whereas Eve represents corporeality. By connecting the two, Consolata creates a bond between the physical and spiritual worlds. Further, Consolata initiates ritualistic story telling by describing Piedade, "a woman who always sang, but never said a word" (264). Her ritualistic stories of Piedade take the form of the recollection of a dream or the distant past. As she tells other women during their loud-dreaming in the cellar: We walked on the shore walk. She bathed me in the emerald water. Her voice made proud women weep in the streets. Coins fell from the fingers of artists and policemen and the country's greatest chefs begged us to eat their food. Piedade had songs that could still a wave, make it pause in its curl listening to language it had not heard since the sea opened. Shepherds with colored birds on their shoulders came down from mountains to remember their lives in her songs. Travelers refused to board homebound ships while she sang. At night she took stars out of her hair and wrapped me in its wool. Her breath smelled of pineapple and cashews. (245-246) Like Consolata, Piedade is a mĂŠtis: the image of Piedade combines the features of a mother, a divinity, a sorceress and a street performer.

Consolata's stories of Piedade can be traced back to her childhood. For 20

Métissage as an Oppositional Practice example, Piedade is the name of a resort city in Brazil. Her stories represent the carnivalesque beauty of a big city that she could no longer experience as a Convent maid. Like the women's return to the maternal space of the cellar, Consolata's stories represent the imaginary order of the maternal realm.

Water is the most recurrent image in Consolata's stories. In Consolata's first account of Piedade and the magical city, she tells of "a place where white sidewalks met the sea and fish the color of plums swam alongside children" (263). In Paradise, water and fluidity in general are associated with the feminine. Another explanation for the abundance of water connected with the image of Piedade is Osun, a water Goddess, central to the Yoruba tradition. In the introduction to Osun Across the Waters: a Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas, Murphy and Sanford explain that Osun possesses elemental power as water to make life possible and to preserve life for creation (2). Brazil, the homeland of Consolata, is one of the centers of Osun worship. In the Brazilian context, the goddess becomes Mama Oxum, and is particularly associated with sensuality and maternity (Hale 213-214). It is not surprising then, that the healing of the Convent women is accomplished through the ritual of cleansing water.

The drawing and loud dreaming in the cellar transforms into a symbolic rebirth ritual of the dance in the rain: "There are great rivers in the world and on their banks and the edges of oceans children thrill to water. In places where rain is light the thrill is almost erotic. But those sensations bow to the rapture of the holy women dancing in hot sweet rain" (283).

The healing power of Consolata's stories and cleansing water allows the Convent women to overcome their traumas. Her new myths have multiple functions of psychological healing and reclamation of the past. The new magical rituals become instrumental in the search for identity and recovery of the self.

Both Tituba and Consolata have hybrid experiences. Tituba is a hybrid because her identity has to be constructed. The creation of Tituba's legend by Condé is similar to the formation of Caribbean history and identity. Condé creates Tituba's oral legend and written history, deliberately emphasizing the primacy of the oral legend and the role of the imagination in the formation of Tituba's identity and Caribbean history.

Through the new rituals that combine magic, Christianity and Goddess worship, Consolata initiates the post-traumatic recovery of the Convent women. These new rituals allow for a space of inter-personal subjectivity where the women can overcome their traumas and acquire new identities.

Both Morrison and Condé show that the formation of identity and history is a continual and creative process.

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Atlantikos American Puritanism in Black and White In the novels, the ethics of métissage serve as an alternative to the utopian and patriarchal ideals of purity. The self-narratives of the communities of Ruby (Paradise) and Salem (I, Tituba) are centered on the beliefs in their purity and moral superiority, which lead to rigidity and stasis. Condé and Morrison present patriarchal communities which are sustained by the projection of failures and fears onto the other in order to preserve their utopian vision. In the communities of Ruby and Salem, the fear of the feminine is connected to the fear of racial impurity. In both novels, the Salem Witch trials become a metaphor for racism and sexism in the contemporary United States.

The theme of the Salem Witch Trials is central to Paradise and I, Tituba.

Although Condé treats this theme directly and Morrison explores it through numerous allusions, for both authors, the Salem Witch Trials become a representative episode of American history. Condé and Morrison's critique of Puritanism and exceptionalism (the belief in the superior nature of the American self) becomes an implicit critique of modern American values. Both authors present continuities in the hypocrisy, racism and misogynism of Puritan America and the America of today.

Condé uses the Salem Witch Trials as a setting of the central chapters of her book. Because of her race, gender and unconventional behavior, Tituba is seen by the Puritans as the ultimate Other. In Puritan New England, Tituba becomes a victim of the racist and misogynist stereotypes of the community. Tituba's skin color serves as a proof of her (supposed) connection with evil forces. Gradually the situation becomes worse, as all of her actions are misinterpreted. For the community of Salem, her storytelling and healing practices prove that she is with the devil. Accused of bewitching her master's children, the heroine finds it impossible to convince the Puritans of her innocence. At the end, she needs to conform to the rules of Puritan society. She presents her conjuring in concurrence with the views of the Puritan authorities. She also has to accuse other women (Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne) of witchcraft, in order to survive. The author presents Salem as a very closed community, afraid of any natural feeling and any expression of difference. By doing so, Condé shows the hostility of the Puritans to all forms of otherness. For example, the family of Portuguese Jew Benjamin Cohen d'Azevedo, like Tituba, cannot be tolerated in Salem. His property is destroyed, and his family is burned together with his house. The Puritans suppress not only all forms of difference, but also all forms of natural self-expression.

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MĂŠtissage as an Oppositional Practice It is children who suffer the most from this kind of oppression. The narrator is impressed with the intolerable conditions of the lives of Salem children: "Although I didn't like them all, I pitied them with their waxen skin and their bodies so full of promise yet mutilated like those trees that gardeners try to dwarf" (60). The influence of Puritanism on the children is stressed through the metaphor of the mutilated trees. The narrator emphasizes the unnatural influences of The Puritan ideology, which directly affects the bodies of the children. Ironically, Tituba finds her own childhood as a Barbadian slave much happier than the childhood of these little Puritans: In contrast, our childhood as little slaves, bitter though it was, seemed glowing, lit up by the joy of our games, our rambles, and our ravings together. We floated rafts made of sugarcane on the rushing streams. We grilled pink and yellow fish on little criss crosses of green wood. We danced. (60) She contrasts her own childhood, full of entertainment and small joys, with the bleak life of these Puritan girls. Even earlier in the novel, Tituba notices the oppressive clothes of Betsey and Abigail: "My eyes caught those of two little girls wearing long black gowns that contrasted with their small white aprons. Their brows were capped with hoods, where every wisp of hair had been pushed out of sight. I had never seen children attired in such a fashion" (39). The fact that children are dressed as little adults emphasizes the absence of the notion of childhood in Puritan society.

It is significant that the narrator focuses her attention on girls. Of course Tituba's exclusive focus on the girls of Salem can be explained by the simple fact that there were only girls in the Parris' family, as well as by the historical reality of Salem, as mostly girls were afflicted with hysteria.

However, it is also clear that, in the conditions of patriarchal society, the position of girls would be much more abject than the position of boys. It is only natural then that the unhealthy atmosphere of Salem has, first of all, its effect on girls. The lack of usual children's activities leads to their interest in magic. It is this absence of childhood that makes girls of Salem vulnerable to hysteria. In a strict patriarchal society such as that of the Puritans', hysteria was one of the limited forms of agency available to women. Catherine Clement suggests that both sorcery and hysteria channel femininity, suppressed and marginalized under patriarchy (5).

However, unlike sorcery, considered a crime, hysteria was seen as an affliction or a disease. The example of the Salem Witch Trials shows that 23

Atlantikos the hysterical girls had the role of victims, whereas the supposed witches were to be executed for their crimes.

In the Puritan community, the suppression of women is closely connected to the suppression of sexuality. The revulsion against the body and sexuality in Puritan society is best represented in the conversation between Tituba and Elisabeth Parris. When Tituba asks Elisabeth whether her husband has noticed the change of her body produced by Tituba's medicine, Elisabeth replies: "If you only knew! He takes me without removing either his clothes or mine, so hurried is he to finish with the hateful act" (42). Responding to Tituba's protest that, for her, "it's the most beautiful act in the world" because it perpetuates life, Elisabeth exclaims in horror: "Be quiet! Be quiet! It's Satan's heritage in us" (42). Tituba's uninhibited view of sexuality is contrasted to Elisabeth's perception that demonizes sex. One can sense a certain contradiction in Elisabeth's reply.

She seems to be ironic about her husband's absolute unawareness of the state of her body. However, she is unable to free herself from the Puritans' perception of the body and sexuality as earthy and impure. This fear of sexuality in any form can be further illustrated by Elisabeth's fear of undressing the girls for the doctor's examination, to which Tituba remarks, "These people could not bear nudity, not even a child's" (81).

Drawing a parallel between the Puritans and the contemporary U.S., Condé argues that not much has changed in three hundred years. In her interviews, Condé explicitly states that to a large extent, the Puritans symbolize America as a hypocritical, misogynist and racist society. For example, in the interview with Clark, she states: "I could not have written the book if I had not been in America, because I had to breathe the American air, understand what white American society is, and look at white faces to portray some of the characters in Tituba" (129-30). In the interview with Scarboro, reprinted in the afterword, Condé further explains that for her writing Tituba was an opportunity to express her feelings about presentday America: "I wanted to imply that in terms of narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, and racism, little has changed since the days of the Puritans" (207). According to Condé, Salem reflects white America. She apparently accepts the thesis of the Puritan origins of the American self. In this way, she emphasizes continuities of racism, misogynism, and intolerance in the U.S., since the Puritans suppress others on the basis of race, gender, and religion.

Along the same lines, Morrison models her imaginary community of Ruby on a society with a utopian idea and constricted by patriarchal power. The community of Ruby is reminiscent of the community of Salem because it projects its problems onto five unconventional women living in 24

MĂŠtissage as an Oppositional Practice the Convent. Morrison presents the Puritan fear of racial impurity and miscegenation, internalizing it in her fictional black community.

Depicting the similarities of the black community of Ruby to the historical Salem, Morrison claims that the Puritan spirit can be replicated in the patriarchal black community. Dalsgard finds that, starting from the nineteenth century, American exceptionalism has always been an important part of African-American discourse. She interprets Morrison's "signifying on Salem Witch Trials" as her critique of exceptionalist or nationalist narrative (233). By showing the dangers of exceptionalism and self-isolation, Morrison criticizes certain forms of Black Nationalism. Linda Krumholz suggests that the example of Ruby's patriarchs challenges the models of black nationhood, which often focused on the ideals of manliness and fatherhood (24). She cites Wahneema Lubiano, who argues that "conflations of black and patriarchal power become a form of black selfpolicing for the dominant white state, which replicates white systems of power and oppression" (qtd. in Krumholz 24).

The story of Ruby is clearly reminiscent of the history of the Puritans.

Like the Puritans, the people of Ruby believe in their superior and exceptional nature. The history of the Ruby community starts with an exile and a collective movement. Like the historical narrative of the Puritans, the narrative of the ancestors of the community is characterized by trials, perseverance and triumph. According to their self-narrative, they are the descendants of twelve families of ex-slaves who, after having lost the prominence they acquired during Reconstruction, began to search for a new life in the West. Their exceptionalist history is shaped by the fact that they have been rejected by several already established communities of wealthier and lighter-skinned blacks. They eventually succeed in creating the perfect, all-black community of Haven, Oklahoma. In order to protect this "one all-black town worth the pain"(5), the community is later removed to an even more secluded place. The new town is named Ruby.

By the time of the present narrative of the novel, the community of Ruby seems to witness the fulfillment of the promise of its founding fathers. To most inhabitants of Ruby, the town seems the closest replica possible of an earthly paradise. Nobody dies in Ruby, which seems to serve as a proof of its paradisiacal nature.

However, upon closer examination, this immortality turns out to be a sign of stagnation. Local historian Patricia Best notices that the insistence on pure bloodlines leads to generations "narrow as bale wire" (217).

Rejected by whites as well as by lighter-skinned blacks, the community of Ruby internalizes and reverses the racism of others. Patricia Best believes that in Ruby, people get chosen and ranked based upon skin color (216).

25

Atlantikos For example, the community forces Menus to "return the woman he brought home to marry. The pretty sandy-haired girl from Virginia" (195).

It also marginalizes Roger Best's wife (Delia), daughter (Pat), and granddaughter (Billie Delia) on the grounds of their complexion, described as "sunlight skin" (196).

According to Dalsgard, for the Puritans, the prosperity of their community signified the approval of their lives by God (234). Puritans' emphasis on prosperity as a sign of God's approval still constitutes an important part of American ethics. Morrison criticizes the emphasis that modern society places on material values. From the materialistic point of view, the town of Ruby is beyond reproach: The women who were in their twenties when Ruby was founded, in 1950, watched an increase of bounty that had never entered their dreams. They bought soft toilet paper, used washcloths instead of rags, soap for the face alone or diapers only. In every Ruby household appliances pumped, hummed, sucked, purred, whispered and flowed. (89) However, in Ruby, this material prosperity is downplayed by the emotional state of its inhabitants. On the emotional or spiritual level, the life in Ruby is very far from the perfectionist self-narrative of its community.

By 1976, the community witnessed the accumulation of events that brought its "paradisiacal vision" into question: "A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day" (11). Significantly, the patriarchs of Ruby focus their attention on the violations of gender and generation roles. Moreover, nine men of Ruby, who plan the assault on the Convent women, feel that the women are guilty of all the recent misfortunes that have befallen their community: "One thing that connected all these catastrophes was the Convent. And in the Convent were those women" (11). The nine men feel that the Convent women are disruptive because they set a dangerous example for the women of Ruby and because they seduce men. After all, two of the men (Dick and K.D. Morgan), both of whom participated in the assault, had long-lasting affairs with Convent women (Consolata and Gigi). The men see the Convent women as racially impure.

The patriarchs of Ruby draw a parallel between the feminine and racial impurity. In the words of Patricia Best, the generations of Ruby "had to be not only racially untampered with but free of adultery too" (217).

26

Métissage as an Oppositional Practice Thus, she sees a connection between the fear of adultery and miscegenation: "In that case, she thought, everything that worries them must come from women" (217). Morrison draws a parallel between the Puritans and the community of Ruby by making this community to scapegoat four unconventional women living in the Convent.

Like the Puritans, the inhabitants of Ruby insist on their superior nature. Their self-narrative is based on the belief in their purity and prosperity. However, in order to preserve their pure and superior image, they constantly need to create the impure outsiders. Similar to Condé's description of the inhabitants of Salem, the inhabitants of Ruby find that all of their problems come from the sexual and racial Other. In contrast to the Puritans' vision of purity, Morrison's image of the afterlife is a multiracial experience. In her essay "Home," Morrison claims that: The defenders of Western hegemony sense the encroachment and have already defined the possibility of imagining race without dominance, without hierarchy as “barbarism”. We are already being asked to understand such a world as the destruction of the four-gated city, as the end of history. We are already being asked to know such a world as aftermath as rubbish, as an already damaged experience, as a valueless future. (9) In her presentation of the afterlife, Morrison actually surrounds the women of different races by rubbish: In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman's lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman's face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottlecaps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf. (318) The afterlife becomes a very physical and sensual female experience.

Placing two women of different races surrounded by debris in the center of paradise, Morrison subverts traditional notions of purity and beauty.

In I, Tituba, Condé criticizes the persistence of the ideals of purity and unity in the white America. Morrison shows that these ideals can be replicated in black communities and movements. Morrison and Condé use métissage as the means to introduce plurality and polyphony into their 27

Atlantikos presentation of history and the present. Unlike artificial constructs of racial purity and moral superiority, métissage corresponds to the geopolitical condition of the new world: the Caribbean Region and North America.

The Supernatural as a Site of Resistance In I, Tituba and Paradise, the marginality of conjuring turns into an effective space of difference, a source of identity and power. As bell hooks states in her essay "Marginality as Site of Resistance," a marginal position can become a part of identity one wishes to preserve: "I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose, to give up, or surrender as part of moving into the center, but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one's capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternative, new worlds" (341). Condé and Morrison present powerful conjure women, Tituba and Consolata, who, through their positions of marginality, are able to change their communities effectively.

Through her magical power, Consolata is able to cure illnesses and even raise the dead. She prolongs the life of Mary Magna, revives Steward Morgan after the car accident and helps Soanne Morgan resist the depression that ensued after the death of her sons in Vietnam. Through new rituals and women-centered ethics, Consolata heals the Convent women from their traumas. With the aid of Consolata, the women achieve harmony in their lives. The change in the women occurs in a feminine space.

This exclusively female space and the women's new power alarm Ruby's patriarchs. The violence erupts because the men think that the women are capable of disrupting and polluting their town. Justifying the necessity of violent intervention, the men of Ruby call the Convent women "witches" (277). The men clearly accept the Western perception of witchcraft. They perceive witches as destructive to their community, as do the Puritans in I, Tituba.

In La Parole des Femmes, Condé juxtaposes the Western perception of witches (where they are seen as the epitome of evil) with the African and Antillean views of the witch as an intermediary between the natural and the supernatural worlds. She explains that, in the Antilles witches are not considered an evil force, but rather are thought of as the connection between the visible and invisible worlds (54). However, in the colonial context, Tituba's conjuring acquires a disruptive function. After becoming a slave, Tituba afflicts her mistress, Suzanna Endicott, with a humiliating and incurable sickness. In Salem, Tituba's conjuring serves as a catalyst 28

Métissage as an Oppositional Practice for the hysteria of the Witch Trials. Returning to Barbados, Tituba inspires a slave revolt. Condé uses Tituba's conjuring as an oppositional practice.

Comparing Condé's presentation of Tituba's story to that of Ann Petry's, Jeanne Garane suggests that "Contrary to Ann Petry, whose Tituba possesses no supernatural abilities, Condé embraces the accusation, and makes it the very space from which Tituba opposes both patriarchal colonial discourse and cultural imperialism" (157).

Similarly, in the interview with Bessie W. Jones and Audrey Vinson, Morrison suggests that questions of what is probable and rational are not limited to literature and philosophy, but acquire political significance: "what distinguishes the colonized from the colonist was viewing what is rational and what is not" (181). Therefore, Condé and Morrison present the supernatural as an alternative to colonial discourse. The supernatural becomes a source of resistance to patriarchy and a source of empowerment for the women characters in the two works. Both authors position themselves as marginal to the dominant Western discourse, and use the supernatural as the space of difference. In both novels, the supernatural disrupts the social order, represented by Puritan America. At the same time, the novels present new possibilities, in the form of a new legend of a Caribbean woman (I, Tituba), and a new woman-centered ethics (Paradise).

Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. "Three Words toward Creolization." Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on The Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity. Ed. Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnes Sourieau.

Gainesville: Florida UP, 1998. 53-61.

Clement, Catherine, and Helene Cixous. The Newly Born Woman. Trans.

Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Condé, Maryse. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Trans. Richard Philcox.

Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1992.

---. La parole des femmes: Essai sur des romancières des Antilles de langue française. Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 1979.

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Atlantikos Clark, VeVe A. "'I Have Made Peace with My Island.' An Interview with Maryse CondĂŠ." Callaloo 12 (1989): 85-133.

Dalsgard, Katrine. "The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: (African) American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise." African American Review 35.2 (2001): 233-48.

Elia, Nada. Trances, Dances, and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in Africana Women's Narratives. New York: Garland, 2001.

Garane, Jeanne. "History, Identity and the Constitution of the Female Subject: Maryse CondĂŠ 's Tituba." Moving Beyond Boundaries, II: Black Women's Diasporas. Ed. and Intro. Carole Boyce Davies. New York: New York UP, 1994. 153-64.

Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse : Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1989.

Hale, Lindsay. "Mama Oxum: Reflections of Gender and Sexuality in Brazilian Umbanda." Osun Across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess In Africa and the Americas. Ed. and Intro. Joseph M. Murphy and Mei-Mei Sanford. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 213-30. hooks, bell. "Marginality as Site of Resistance." Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture. Ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornell West. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990. 341-43.

Jones, Bessie W. and Audrey Vinson. "An Interview With Toni Morrison."

Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Denille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1994.

Krumholz, Linda J. "Reading and Insight in Toni Morrison's Paradise."

African American Review. 36.1 (2002): 21-34.

Lionnet, Francoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture.

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Morrison, Toni. "Home." The House that Race Built. Ed. Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Vintage, 1998.

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Métissage as an Oppositional Practice ---. Paradise. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998.

Murphy, Joseph M., and Mei-Mei Sanford. Introduction. Osun Across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess In Africa and the Americas. Ed. Joseph M. Murphy and Mei-Mei Sanford. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 1-10.

Nichols, Grace. I is a Long Memoried Woman. London: Karnak House, 1983.

Scarboro, Ann Armstrong. Afterword. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. By Condé, Maryse. Trans. Richard Philcox. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1992. 187-225.

Simon, Bruce. "Hybridity in the Americas: Reading Condé, Mukherjee and Hawthorne." Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Ed. and Introd. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt.

Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2000. 412-43.

Author Biography Irina Anisimova is currently a PH.D. Candidate in the Comparative Literature program at the University of South Carolina. A Russian native, she received her BA from the Saratov State University and her MA from the University of South Carolina. Her dissertation in progress is a comparative study of representations of the rural South in African-American literature and the peasantry in Russian literature. Her research interests include gender studies, hybridity, and performative identities.

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Critical Anxiety: The Language of Ethnic Discourse Stephanie T. Taitano University of Texas - Arlington

There have been more accounts of genocide in the last century than in any other period of history. The word genocide itself had to be created, became necessary, in this troublesome age. Other words such as "ethniccleansing" and "ethnic massing" have entered the vocabularies of academia and popular culture as well. Marvin Harris writes that"[i]f there is anything that recent history of racial and ethnic conflict has to teach us, it is that ethnomania kills people, neighborhoods, communities, and whole societies" (129). While I would certainly not characterize the current academic discourse regarding ethnicity as an example of ethnomania, I will argue here that the concept of ethnicity has been overemphasized in the discourse of literary analysis. Consequently, the dialog has lost its moorings, if it ever had them, and has drifted into that dangerous, nebulous somewhere that enables too broad a discussion to foster grounded scholarly work.

I am not suggesting that we should ignore ethnicity but insisting that when we attend to this complex and emotionally charged topic we pause to reflect upon our assumptions. For instance, the discourse of ethnicity has fueled newfound interest in unconventional literary language, socalled hybrid forms. Analyses of language hybridity in literature reveal a questionable association between ethnicity and language choices. There is a deeply-felt, established precedent for seeing Orthodox English as Anglo and unorthodox English as something else altogether. In The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures, Braj B. Kachru presents a sociolinguistic model wherein global English use is reflected in superimposed circles: English use in the inner circle includes English spoken natively (e.g., the United States and Great Britain); the outer circle includes English acquired as a second language (e.g., India); and the expanding circle, where English is acquired as a foreign language (e.g., China and Japan). While Mustapha Marrouchi and others have since asserted that, despite the best of intentions, such paradigms are misleading since "[t]here is no Archimedean point outside culture from which to observe it objectively" (Marrouchi 53), Kachru's model has endured the ebb and flow of the ethnic debates regarding English as a world language. One of the most compelling aspects of Kachru's model is its capacity for capturing the irony of "inner" and "outer" paradigms for populations of English speakers and writers.

According to Janina Brutt-Griffler, "[i]t is in the latter two 'circles' where Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2006

Copyright Š 2006 by Michigan State University

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Critical Anxiety the vast majority of speakers reside (over a billion) and where language is acquired 'non-natively'" (1). The research of Brutt-Griffler and others begs many questions: what is standard English? On what basis do we distinguish between English and hybrid English? If English is learned concurrently with languages historically considered native to a particular community, is it not also a native language? If not, are we prepared to acknowledge a preference for the English of monolingual speakers over that of multilingual English speakers? There seems no basis upon which we may logically claim particular versions of English as standard, and so we are here: there is no English, standard English, proper English against which all speakers and writers may be evaluated. If this is so, then why is so much attention provided to hybrid language in analyses of ethnic literature?

In the inaugural issue of the journal World Englishes, the following guiding principle is proclaimed: "The editorial board considers the native and non-native users of English as equal partners in the deliberations on users of English and its teaching internationally" (Kachru qtd. in Bolton 78). As this World Englishes statement articulates, English is not, Englishes are. Yet such mindsets have certainly not made their way down through academic ranks into undergraduate composition courses, into mainstream book publishing, or even into popular culture-not in the West. Deviations from accepted English standards in the West are noted by Western readers. The affects/effects of deviations are interpreted as either intentional (and thus acceptable and critical for interpretation) or unintentional (and thus unacceptable). Writers from Kachru's two outer circles, in particular, have been bound by such perceptions. To participate in a dialogue with inner circle practitioners (Westerners), they must speak and/or write in the English of the inner circle. Or, their expressions must allude to the inner circle in such a way as to confirm language proficiency akin to that of inner circle speakers. They must write to confirm that their incorporation of outer circle English is intentional, even artistic, or it will be viewed as simply erroneous. One manner of doing so is to incorporate English as artistic method and subject. Poets such as John Agard do so directly: So mek dom send one big word after me I end serving no jail sentence I slashing suffix in self-defense I bashing future wit present tense And if necessary I making de queen's English accessory to my offense. (44) While one might have predicted that multicultural studies and multi33

Atlantikos lingual education in a postcolonial era would foster a tolerance for the polylingual and certainly for those speaking varying forms of English, we cannot make this claim. The last century's preoccupation with ethnicity has created a climate of what Rosemary V. Hathaway calls vulgar multiculturalism: "a pedagogical and theoretical homage to cultural diversity that, in reality, reinforces racial, class, and ethnic boundaries by insisting on an essentialized and monodimensional narrative of oppression" (172).

The critical discourse, through a reliance upon disputed theories of language association; the application of vague terminology; and the deterioration of ethnic studies to holy victim status studies leaves the writer labeled ethnic in a precarious position-one where, consequently, the language of artistic expression is affected.

In Weird English, Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien insists upon a literary position for multicultural writers that enjoins language practices and conscientious artistic expression. While postcolonial theory posits English as more than a language (e.g., as Homi Bhabha, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Taba Lo Liyong, and Henry Owuor-Anyumba argue, it is a method of indoctrination), Ch'ien reorients this position, interpreting particular authors as repositing English from a master's tool to a tool of the oppressed: one that may be applied artfully to both communicate meaning through fictional elements and, in using English flexibly, to comment upon English itself.

Ch'ien terms it "takin' the community back" (Ch'ien 6, italics retained).

Ch'ien's work is insightful and critically refreshing. That her work is so impressive makes her use of terminology all the more baffling and my point here about ethnic terms all the more poignant.

For instance, Ch'ien founds her thesis upon the concept of a hybrid writer yet does not adequately define what she means by this term. At some points she refers to authors with affinity to more than one culture, who speak and write one language proficiently (though they may integrate phrases and words from other languages). At other points hybridity seems to refer exclusively to polylingual authors. Ch'ien also discusses authors who are global citizens, indicating that weird English could be an unintended effect of the influences of world Englishes. In that her analysis includes primary texts from authors as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, and many other published and previously unpublished samples from popular culture domains (such as web sites), her literary analysis does little to clarify our sense of who or what she considers hybrid and whether hybridity refers to nationality, religion, race, or language. But how can this be? Certainly the nature and imprint of religious hybridity (e.g., Jewish Diaspora) differs from, for instance, that of language hybridity (e.g., second-generation 34

Critical Anxiety Russian-Americans). When the term hybridity is applied this widely, the net is cast too wide; we are unable to discern exactly what we are discussing and, therefore, equally troubling, whether there is merit in the discussion. That Ch'ien has based a thesis upon a term without defining it adequately does not necessarily reflect poorly on Ch'ien but rather demonstrates the state of the ethnic discourse. The scholarly dialog has arrived to a point where the terms are understood to be understood: they have been applied repeatedly, for decades, in vague manners. Through this repetition, the hegemonic building of related theories, academic communities have accepted vague terms as self-evident enough for intellectual discourse. Obviously Ch'ien and others understand the term hybridity with such flexibility that the book was published without explanation for how or why fictional writers may be associated upon these grounds. In essence, Ch'ien's application of terms is confusing because terms that imply ethnicity are employed impalpably throughout the discourse from which she writes and to which she responds.

In "The Love that Dare not Speak its Name: Englishness and Suburbia," Vesna Goldsworthy ponders how to determine who she is: Should I describe myself as an Anglo-Montenegrin-HerzegovianSerb, a "Serbo-Herzegovian-Montenegrin-Englishwoman," or should I just adhere to the British-Yugoslav tag for the sake of simplicity, even if the bloody break-up of the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s has rendered my Yugoslav identity meaningless, and my Britishness is in fact almost entirely Englishness? Or should I—and this seems the most practical solution, although the census forms do not recognize it —simply say that I am a Londoner? (95) As Goldsworthy's musings reveal, public identity is associated with ethnic markers and the relative accuracy of these markers has little to do with the individuals who must employ them to be recognized. While the hyphen-happy climate has certainly peaked, the impetus which spawned it has not. There is a great demand, in both mass- and academic-markets, for literature with such recognizable ethnic markers. Ironically, this demand has led to the abstraction of what it is to be ethnic. Much as in the case of Judith Butler's sense of performative gender, many of us understand less about our own ethnicity and that of others and much more about what particular ethnic labels imply (or are supposed to imply). As John Lowe writes in "Theories of Ethnic Humor," "American society dotes on a largely consensual and symbolic ethnicity" (448). Being Guamanian 35

Atlantikos in America amounts to a bumper sticker: "Here today. Gone Chamorro!" and the Irish-American experience has become green rivers, green beer, and parades for everyone. Most of us are not so sure about how much our ethnicity, if we think of ourselves as having one, contributes to who we are or how we imagine ourselves to be, but we have a sense of what others mean when they reference particular ethnicities. While I suppose ethnic stereotypes would be included in such associations, so would a complex set of assumed experiences. These communally-shared ethnic associations enable dialogs within which individuals who are labeled ethnic must contribute a voice if they are to be heard. In Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impressions and American Identities, Laura Browder writes that such a social contract exists even for the ethnic autobiographer: "Both the reader and the writer of an ethnic autobiography understand the implied contract: the memoirist is not telling his or her own story as much as the story of a people" (5).

This is not a mistake of the masses. One need only recall the critical responses to authors such as Zora Neal Hurston and Maxine Hong Kingston-authors denigrated for misrepresentation because it was assumed, by literary critics, that while they were writing fiction, they were depicting an ethnic realism that represented a people more than individual persons. Jacques Derrida understood the dangerous waters of the "universal hostage" approach and asked but did not answer a critical question: What happens when someone resorts to describing an allegedly uncommon "situation" [. . .] by testifying to it in terms that go beyond it, in a language whose generality takes on a value that is in some way structural, universal, transcendental, or ontological?

When anybody infers the following: "What holds for me, irre placeably, also applies to all." Substitution is in progress; it has already taken effect. Everyone can say the same thing for themselves and of themselves. It suffices to hear me; I am the universal hostage. (20) Indeed, substitution is often in progress: the work of authors who are labeled ethnic is often marketed and criticized within an allegorical framework: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, et al.. Should it suffice to read an individual's fictional work? Should that be our form of ethnicity education? Beyond the absurdity of allegorical substitution, such a climate of expectations creates a dangerous demand for ethnic performances.

36

Critical Anxiety As Browder notes, in the late nineteenth century, "relationships between ethnic groups in America changed at a sometimes bewildering rate, and as urban populations swelled, ethnicity and ethnic impersonation began attaining the status of entertainment, of spectacle" (48).

Ethnicity evolved into a commodity. The commodity, that is, those aspects of the commodity that rendered a product most marketable, then began to drive the boundaries of ethnicities. The Education of Little Tree inspired many, but it was not written by an American Indian-it was written by a Klansman. When ethnicities are pre-packaged in a communally shared sense of ethnic boundaries and definitions, anyone can sell it. Most cringe when learning of the authorship of the beloved Little Tree, yet there are instances of ethnic performances that are far less inauthentic and deceitful.

The contemporary work of Shirley Taylor Haiz, Gregory Howard Williams, James McBride, and others express autobiographical experiences through the lens of ethnic performance, but these texts "are all testaments to and analyses of the consequences of choosing-or being assigned-a racial identity other than the one designated at birth [. . .] [and therefore deconstruct] racial categories" (Browder 271). McBride had a Jewish mother of Eastern European descent and a Baptist AfricanAmerican father from New York City. His autobiography, The Color of Water, however, is clearly written from an African-American man's perspective. At what point do we step in and say, "Hey, you are Jewish! Hey, you are not the ethnicity your authorship implies!" and when we do, don't writers have the right to respond by saying, "Hey, why did you label me 'ethnic'?" or "How come I can't define my own ethnic boundaries?" One reason that we find it difficult to define our own ethnicity is that there are constituents policing border allusions.

Browder's discussion of ethnic imposters includes Helen Hunt Jackson, the Anglo-American woman who wrote Ramona. Jackson never made claims that she was the real Ramona; she included her own name on the text as the author, and she presented the text to publishers as fiction.

Yet, Browder contends that Jackson is guilty of ethnic impersonation.

Actually, Browder does not seek to prove as much but begins her argument with such a warrant. What does this say about how we see or are assumed to see ethnicities? Why would we find Jackson suspect? What personal identity markers disqualify her from writing Ramona? When idealized forms of ethnicities are performed fictionally, we flounder for a rationale which will expose the imposter. What is being performed in the impersonation and why is it convincing? That imposter performances are conceived of as possible proves we have a communally-felt sense or image 37

Atlantikos of recognizable ethnic markers-ethnic markers that most would deny as ethnic boundaries. If this is so, how authentic are ethnicities? Browder argues that reading imposter autobiographies "and analyzing them as ethnic performances can help us rethink the construction of American identities [. . .] and why the reader feels so unsettled at the idea of ethnicity as performance" (11). Yet perhaps the reasons readers may feel "so unsettled" are as varied as the readers themselves, or perhaps we have simply become so sensitive to the potential for implied racism that we are willing to sacrifice authentic identity to ensure recognized identity, for the recognized sort at least provides us something to talk about. Who will admit to participating in policing the boundaries that must exist for there to be recognized ethnicity?

In "'East is Where Things Begin': Writing the Ancestral Homeland in Amy Tan and Maxine Kingston," Ruth Maxey argues that Tan employs her position as a second generation Chinese-American to enjoy the privileges of being an ethnic insider, and in the process she has appointed herself representative of, and spokesperson for, her community (2). Maxey finds this appointment to be inauthentic since Tan's depictions of China are not "based on the lived experiences with which that insider status would presuppose, but rather on inherited memories and a China of the imagination" (13). True, Tan's China is inherited and imaginary, but the homeland memories inherited by second-generation immigrants are always and have always been imagined. Are we to condemn Tan with the label of "Chinese-American author" and then condemn her for being just that? Rather than posit her struggle to present China as indicative of an inauthentic voice-an imposter's story-I would argue that the struggle to present the homeland is a standard characteristic of the second-generation American story and that the ambiguity and angst we sense in Tan's work is the artistic consequence or response to writing within the climate of which Maxey's work is a part. Maxey positions Tan, and then faults Tan for being in such a position-how could this not affect an author's creative process?

If, as Derrida claims, "identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures" (28), then we may be sure that identities founded in ethnicities are unstable, and we may be doubly sure that ethnic labels upon artists will cause discernable artistic anxiety. Tan resists such labels and the inevitable (mis)interpretations they inspire, insisting (humorously) in The Opposite of Fate (OF) that [c]ontrary to what is suggested in CliffsNotes analyses, it is not 38

Critical Anxiety my intention to write about dumplings or fish or rice cakes as symbols of abundance. They are there for the simple reasons of hunger and pragmatism. The way I figure it, if I order prawns and sablefish and sesame-seed dumplings in a restaurant and the next day I write about these dishes, that food bill becomes taxdeductible as necessary research. (Tan OF 226) Clearly Tan resents restrictive ethnic associations and analyses. To a graduate student who wrote Tan to inquire about whether or not her analysis on the nature of the number (OF 4) four in The Joy Luck Club was correct, Amy Tan basically answered "no" (OF 301). When a literary critic praised The Joy Luck Club's postmodern, heteroglossic narrative structure, one that enables and empowers marginalized female voices-immigrants, the impoverished, sexual victims, the emotionally abused-for writing "a novel with eight voices, mysteriously interlocked like a Chinese puzzle box" (OF 304, Tan quotes but does not name the reviewer), Tan muses, "[i]magine how disappointed the reviewer would have been if I had told him that the structure of this so-called novel was instead the result of a more eclectic arrangement of sixteen short stories" (Tan OF 304, italics retained). Writers and their readers need not agree on results, but Tan's responses leave no doubt regarding her passionate rejection of ethnic identity-based analysis and the ultimate constraints it places upon artistic expression.

Even Rushdie, who has no doubt experienced postcolonialism, national exile, and language hybridity, who is unarguably the world's most popular writer of India's crises, expresses the desire to overcome the sociopolitical impetus to classify writers as ethnic. Despite his authentic position as a first-hand victim of postcolonialism, in Step Across this Line (SA) he rejects this position in favor of an artistic one with the potential to overcome and overwhelm worldly government power (SA 250), and therefore, the associative nationalistic labels. When he insists that [w]riters are citizens of many countries: the finite and frontiered country of observable reality and everyday life, the boundless kingdom of the imagination, the half-lost land of memory, the federations of the heart which are both hot and cold, the united states of the mind [. . .], the celestial and infernal nations of desire [. . .], the unfettered republic of the tongue, (SA 250) he invokes the image of the conceptualized, unified nation in order to capture and deflect the power of transnational discourse. Salman Rushdie's plea implies his refusal to be a postcolonial writer first, and only in weak second, an artist. Even in reference to his work, Midnight's Children, which 39

Atlantikos surely foregrounds India's struggle to imagine itself as a unified nation, he compels us to extend our imagination beyond the Indian nation, beyond Saleem as the allegorical nation, to find the inherent artistic value that far surpasses the socioeconomic and political systems that support nationalism. For those children born of India's midnight of independence whose voices resonate within Saleem's mind, Rushdie has grand dreams: he insists that "midnight's children can be made to represent many things, according to [our] point of view" (SA 240) and bounds the children themselves in their normalcy, writing that they were "just a bunch of kids" whose "problems, when they arose, were the everyday, human problems which arise from character-and-environment" (SA 238).

Perhaps Rushdie also seeks to dispel an exclusively postcolonial reading of Midnight's Children because he recognizes that ethnic studies have evolved into oppression studies-into what we might term holy victim status studies-where the oppressed become revered, and thus objectified.

When ethnic identities are unstable, and yet claimed, there is a sense that one may be claiming the right to a status for which s/he has not suffered and to which s/her has no right. Rushdie would be correct in foreseeing the problematic nature of being a writer labeled ethnic and being interpreted as telling a quintessential ethnic tale. For instance, Shailja Sharma finds Rushdie to have been improperly categorized as a migrant writer, arguing that "First World critics [are] eager to sacrifice ideological differences to easy definitions" (599), and therefore these critics have created a myth that Rushdie "represents, in some unproblematic way, the experience of immigration, or more generally, postcoloniality" (599). Sharma indirectly and subtly accuses Rushdie of being an ethnic imposter in that his "entire career is based on the questioning of historical givens and beliefs [. . .] [and that he invokes the] metafictional trope of migrancy to invoke an absolute rootlessness and hybridity" (605), and in doing so, he is somehow overreaching his postcolonial credentials.

Maxey makes a similar argument about Tan, asserting that her narrative projects are undermined by her "'self-orientalizing' tendencies" (2).

She writes: "[t]o apply the words of Edward Said (1995), but in a rather different context, such texts [as Tan's] turn China into an American-imagined construct of despotism, splendour, cruelty and sensuality" and that such texts serve to "re-inscribe negative Chinese stereotypes when all the time their work seems to be attempting the opposite" (2). But again, for second-generation immigrants who reconstruct their homelands from family lore, the imagined China is the authentic China. While Maxey finds Tan at fault for (according to Maxey) asserting herself as the essential voice of the Chinese in America, other critics, such as Patricia Chu and 40

Critical Anxiety Sao-Ling Cynthia Wong, seem to be fault Tan for doing the opposite, for failing to provide the essential China, for failing to be the essential Chinese-American woman, not because Tan is disqualified by birthplace from this role but because what she constructs contains historical flaws.

Wong acknowledges that these errors could perhaps be intentional, but is so bold as to conclude that they, nonetheless, do "nothing to advance her plots of characterization" (181). Tan's critics seem to be united in their conclusions that Tan constructs "images of an exotic, barbaric motherland" (Maxey 4), yet would not a child hear and interpret any stories from ancestral homelands as exotic? Aren't terms such as "barbaric" rather dependent upon where one is located and to the comparisons one chooses to make? Writers labeled ethnic beware! Because ethnicities are unstable and your officially recognized ethnicity is something of a public and not personal nature, when you extend your work beyond that of the idealized ethnic associations, you may be accused of duping your readers!

Of course, the climate in which Sharma, Maxey, Chu, Wong, and others write is the well-intended reaction to real, as opposed to perceived, atrocities. The literary ethnic imposter is seen as having committed the ultimate betrayal because, in a sense, s/he is kicking a woman who is already down. Or worse, s/he is using access to the power of the dominating group to exploit the assets of the dominated group. While abhorrence is a righteous response to colonization, slavery, and genocide, thinking in polarized terms is problematic and unproductive. As Kwame Anthongy Appiah proposes in "Is the Post- in Post-modern the Post- in Postcolonial?," "Postcolonialism has become, I think, a condition of pessimism" (18). He means, of course, that postcolonial studies has argued itself into a theoretical conundrum. When we address postcolonial subjects, even, apparently post- postcolonial subjects, as holy victims, we reiterate (and reinvigorate) their victim status and, even with the best of intentions, we keep them at bay. The subject of the dialogue is powerless to control the dialogue and is therefore, even in the case of Rushdie, vulnerable to personal attack in an area, ethnic identity, in which s/he has little control.

While postcolonial studies began, as Paul A. Cantor notes, as "the focus on literature from areas formerly colonized by European nations," it has evolved beyond texts, or behind texts, into a set of assumptions about postcolonial writers. Cantor finds these methods at odds with those inspired by continental philosophers. He questions why "traditional" texts are analyzed within a framework that downplays (or altogether discounts) authorial role, authorial intention, while third world texts are examined with traditional literary methods where the author is found in 41

Atlantikos a "subject position" (Cantor 26). Cantor calls for the recognition of "the true complexity of how cultures operate and develop" and the refusal to "straightjacket postcolonial authors as simple spokesmen for, and hence captives of, hypothetical pure native cultures" (Cantor 28). In "Fear of the Other, Loathing the Similar," Marrouchi similarly concludes that for postcolonial studies, the author is indeed "[n]o longer dead" and has arisen as "the very condition of the book's reality, its mediatized life" (19). Ironically, the very labels that qualify an author to be accepted as postcolonial prevent that very author from constructing worlds and states irrespective of oppression studies.

The authorial emphasis in postcolonial studies is also problematic for postcolonial critics. "[I]f one argues that the quiddities of the various Third World cultures can only be truly understood 'from within' those Third World experiences, then the West too would seem to be closed to analysis by the postcolonial critic, and we would have a kind of totalized segregation, obviating truly transcultural debate" (Dayal 116). In other words, if those who qualify as having the ethnic markers of postcoloniality should be recognized as having the capacity to theorize about Western literature, then Western critics, in theory, should be able to theorize about postcoloniality.

Samir Dayal proposes a "world systems approach or one that recognizes the complex heterogeneities as well as homogeneities of the global culture flow" (134) and extricates itself from the us and them paradigm.

Unfortunately, postcolonial studies is not the only ethnic studies sub-discipline to define itself through a status of oppression. This is not to suggest that oppression concerns are not relevant to literature, Native American literature, Mexican-American literature, Irish literature, French literature, Russian literature, etc., but to issue caution; defining ethnic studies in terms of oppression and then proceeding to label particular authors as ethnic is most certainly to cause artistic anxiety. Who, after all, wants to be positioned as victim indefinitely? When one is labeled ethnic, must one's work be relegated to oppression studies, to a laundry list of personal life hardships?

The unfortunate depths of the oppression focal point in ethnic studies criticism becomes apparent when one begins to review the literature that condemns readers for not reading such texts from the proper framework or state of mind—some even suggest, although not overtly, that ethnic literatures should not be read by those who are not self and publicly identified as oppressed themselves. (These suggestions come from critics, not artists.) This supposedly erroneous practice, referred to as "touristic reading," is defined by Hathaway as "the fallacious practice whereby a reader 42

Critical Anxiety assumes, when presented with a text where the writer and the group represented in the text are ethnically different from herself, that the text is necessarily an accurate, and authorized representation of that 'Other' cultural group" (169). Are universities encouraging touristic reading by offering courses entitled African-American literature, queer studies, and even women's literature? Hathaway goes on to explain that touristic readings insist on recomposing the literary text according to what the reader has, in a sense, already seen and expects to see. [. . .] the literary tourist imposes a predetermined cultural awareness on a text and an author; the interaction between text and the reader thus results in cultural ascription, the projection of an authentic cultural identity onto a group by "outsiders" to that group. (169) I would suggest that perhaps touristic reading is the result of, for lack of a better term, touristic writing, where authors labeled ethnic who hope to market a text must construct to a communally-shared sense of how particular ethnicities are bound. In "The Englishes of Ethnic Folk: From Home Talkin' to Testifyin' Art," Bonnie TuSmith insists that the stakes remain high when an "interlingual" writer opts to draw from the full range of his or her sociolinguistic experience rather than conform to the domination of "standard" English.

Such writers frequently find themselves confronting not only the limitations of reader expectation and preparation in a whitedominated society, but their own internalized sense of inadequacy as well. (44) Yet would we recognize a particular text as ethnic if it did not vary from the inner circle English (Ă la Kachru) to which I assume TuSmith refers?

Aren't the stakes just as high (or higher) for writers who are labeled ethnic who do not reference ethnicity in their oeuvre? Hasn't the phenomenon of ethnic tourism been ignited precisely because writers labeled as ethnic are pressured to produce texts that may be marketed as ethnic?

The power of the global media to overtly thematize is fully supported by the traditional practices of literary reviews, curricula, and cycled, or rather spiraled (or re-cycled?) journals and their special issue topics.

Media, literary institutions, mass-marketing, each has a place, and stake, in the cult of multiculturalism. In "Politics of the Exotic," Susan Hawthorne makes such an argument, finding the trend toward publish43

Atlantikos ing, reading, and rewarding multicultural literature as more closely related to consumerism than significant paradigmatic cultural shifts; the visibility of multicultural literature reflects the need for producers to provide new products-or at least the perception of such. Thus, multicultural movements amount to little more than misappropriations. She writes that [t]his misappropriate occurs because of the emptiness of Western culture, its rootlessness arising out of its expansion into every corner of the world, and its failure to provide any kind of sustaining spiritual dimension in the lives of its inhabitants. In the hands of Westerners who have the money to buy the books, the art, the music, the clothes, the food -these things become merely exotic. (621) While many may disagree with Hawthorne's characterization of Western culture, there can be little doubt that the demand for the ethnic is the demand for the exotic-which is always and forever seen from a distanceby the dominant culture which, through the demand for and consumption of products marketed as ethnic, dehumanizes the idealized "other."

Hawthorne believes this dehumanization is intentional, asserting that "the empty dominant culture seeks to locate the secret of the 'other's' vitality," yet as this vitality is exoticized and distanced, ultimately, "the 'other' is destroyed in the outer world by disempowerment through the devaluing of language and culture" (623-624).

Morrouchi concurs, noting that "[b]ooks by emigrant writers on the fringes acquire a nearly mythic significance; they are covered in the exotica of the cultural commodity fetish" (23). Morrouchi terms this form of exoticism a "post-imperial hangover," but the phenomenon extends to other literatures as well. The demand for literatures labeled ethnic may certainly be a fascination with the perceived exotic, a way for readers to entertain themselves safely, keeping the stranger at bay (sort of a literary equivalent to reality shows or documentaries about serial killers) from the comfort of the living room, but there is something not quite right in this logic. How do we provide a theoretical argument that supports writing from varying lenses and not be equally tolerant of reading from varying lenses? Why should the rules for reading How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents be any different than those for reading Emma? Who gets to establish these reader rules?

In The Opposite of Fate, Tan discuses this phenomenon in terms of ethnic authority, an entitlement, vested through identifiable, recognized, ethnic markers, to write about a particular group. She writes: 44

Critical Anxiety I am alarmed when reviewers and educators assume that my very personal, specific, and fictional stories are meant to be representative, down to the smallest detail, of not just ChineseAmericans but sometimes all Asian culture. Is Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres supposed to be representative of all American culture? [. . .] Why do readers assume that a book with ChineseAmerican characters can encompass all the demographics and personal histories of Chinese America? (OF 305) Indeed, when we make personal identity markers a requirement for writing about particular groups, we increase the burden upon those who fit the bill. They must speak for the people we have decided, acknowledged, they represent. The phenomenon of ethnic authority has created a literary climate where, as Tan notes, a growing number of readers, educated readers, now choose fiction like cans of soup on a grocery shelf. If the book is labeled ethnic, it must contain specific nutritive ingredients: a descriptive narrative that provides lessons on culture, characters who serve as good role models, plots and conflicts that contain socially relevant themes and ideas, language that is wholesome in its political and ethnic correctness. (OF 308) What is happening to artistic expression when artists must create in this climate—even more frightening, when artists must create for this climate?

Rushdie has responded to this question in Imaginary Homelands (IH), arguing that "literature is self-validating" (15): a book is not justified by its author's worthiness to write it, but by the quality of what has been written. There are terrible books that arise directly out of experience, and extraordinary imaginative feats dealing with themes which the author has been obliged to approach from the outside. Literature is not in the business of copyrighting certain themes for certain groups.

(IH 15) I suppose Rushdie means that literature certainly should not be in this business, but as documented here, it sometimes is.

The analytical errors apparent in ethnic studies scholarship have been made possible by groupthink (to borrow the term coined by Iving Janis) in literary communities vested in self-preservation. Reed Way Dasenbrock would probably concur in that he seems to find literary theorists who rep45

Atlantikos resent identity theories (e.g., sexuality) to be detrimental to scholarship in that identity representation has created "a situation corresponding to its own theoretical model" where "increasingly [critics] attend only to [other] critics who speak to their concerns" (148). In consequence, interpretations and "[w]hat counts as truth [are] thus [. . .] contingent [. . .] [upon] tradition or discipline or community" (Dasenbrock 9). In these literary communities, literary theory no longer references a "centripetal force" (Dasenbrock 148) of texts to which most scholars attend (or are assumed to have read) regardless of specialty areas: theory is produced by the interpretive community itself and theory is the method in which these very same productions are evaluated. In other words, if a group identifies itself in terms of a particular ethnic group's studies, and there are no guidelines, no clear definitions, for what constitutes this group or acceptable methods for the group's analysis, then the potential for erroneous analysis is perilous.

Opponents of the overarching and underlying arguments of this article might counter-argue as Malini Johar Schueller does when she cautions against defusing ethnic terms: "[t]o completely give up the model of oppression in formulations of ethnicity is to give up too much" (4).

According to Schueller, those who wish to do so are "Anglo-American critics," who "depoliticize the term [ethnicity], disassociate it from marginalization and oppression, and oppose it to a supposedly fixed concept of race" (4). These critics, Schueller argues, not only demonstrate insensitivity to sociopolitical power relationships but simplify notions of ethnicity by finding "similarity among all 'ethnic' groups" (4, quotations retained). I would not jettison Schueller's accusation of insensitivity because I am not clear about to whom she is referring and, equally confusing, how she knows they are Anglo (unless she is referring to the field of Anglo-American philosophy?). I will state, however, that I cannot at this moment think of anything as insensitive as the critic who claims that an ethnic label is valuable, and asserts that particular authors are ethnic (or are not), and then proceeds to attack these authors for their ethnic representation or for their failure to provide ethnic representation.

There is great irony in finding that intellectual factions have, with the very best of intentions, created a critical and creative climate that discriminates (a purposeful use of a nostalgic term) against those labeled ethnic.

An attempt to write ethnicity into popular culture, intellectual discourse, and academic coursework canons (not necessarily in that order), has had unintended consequences. Writers labeled ethnic are validated to artistic death with terms that hopelessly envelop them within their assigned ethnicity. Yet we cannot deny that, regardless of the instability of ethnic 46

Critical Anxiety terms, there are language differences to consider. While the discourse reflects the difficult nature of interpreting language variations apart from ethnic identity markers, certainly this effort has not been exhausted.

Whether and the extent to which variations in language applications reflect currently recognized identity associations is not unimportant, but as any such analysis is founded on evolving, unimpacted, even suspect ground, we must consider other possibilities as well. We must be vigilant in our own introspection and in the examination of social pressures-from any group-to think, write, speak, and act in particular ways. If we are not willing to risk everything to vet the authentic results of these examinations, then we can never be sure about the ground upon which we stand.

If we think back to Kachru's inner, outer, and expanded circular model for representing English practitioners worldwide, and consider it in the context of the inevitable language anxiety that arises in a climate of ethnic labeling, we must acknowledge the need for a model with blurred, not hard boundaries. Perhaps our ethnicities and their associated languages may be better presented in Venn diagrams, where the members of each section are not individuals or cultures but rather instances, interlocutions, textual expressions, any location where we may find language. The individuals and the cultures gravitate toward particular language practices for specific purposes, but are not defined or confined to language standardizations beyond those that specific instances of language require for success. In such a model, the language border would not reference ethnic labeling—terms, identity markers, misappropriation, or oppression—but would move toward an impossible and yet approachable ideal where, consequently, language choices are not evaluated within standardized language, national, or cultural hierarchies but in terms of their effectiveness in particular instances. In this sense, language choices may be seen as (or revealed to be) apolitical. Susan Friedman presents an analogous notion in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter: [The] new geography involves a move from the allegorization of the self in term [sic] of organicism, stable centers, cores, and wholeness to a discourse of spatialized identities constantly on the move [. . .]. Instead of individualistic telos of developmental models, the new geographic figures identity as a historically imbedded site, a positionality, a location, a standpoint, a terrain, an intersection, a network, a crossroads of multi-ply situated knowledges. (19) Writers labeled ethnic who emancipate themselves from static identity are 47

Atlantikos seeking this authentic community—places where we are invited to be members of an imagined community, where the borders of ethnicity are permeated, are revealed for what they are, and where writers and readers exchange theories of the world through words until common ground is found—fertile ground from which imagined communities may flourish.

Works Cited Agard, John. "Listen Mr. Oxford Don." 1985. Mangoes and Bullets. London: Serpant's Tail, 1990.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "Is the Post- in Post-modern the Post- in Postcolonial?" Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 336-357.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Rutledge, 1994.

Bolton, Kingsley. "Symposium on World Englishes Today (Part II): Where We Stand: Approaches, Issues, and Debate in World Englishes." World Englishes 24.1 (2005): 69-83.

Browder, Laura. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impressions and American Identities. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Brutt-Griffler, Janina. "The Development of English as an International Language: A Theory of World Language." Diss. The Ohio State University, 1998.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

Thinking Gender. New York & London: Routledge, 1990.

Cantor, Paul A. "A Welcome for Postcolonial Literature." Academic Questions 12.1(1989/1990): 22-30.

Chien, Evelyn Nien-Ming, Weird English. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Dasenbrock, Reed Way. Truth and Consequences: Intentions, Conventions, and the New Thematics. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

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Critical Anxiety Dayal, Samir. "Postcolonialism's Possibilities: Subcontinental Diasporic Intervention." Cultural Critique 33 (1996): 113-149.

Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; Or, the Prosthesis of Origin.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Goldsworthy, Vesna. "The Love that Dares Not Speak its Name: Englishes and Suburbia." The Revision of Englishness. Eds. David Rogers, and John McLeod. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. 95-106.

Harris, Marvin. Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press, 1999.

Hathaway, Rosemary V. "The Unbearable Weight of Authenticity: Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and a Theory of Touristic Reading." Journal of American Folklore. 117.464 (2004): 168-190.

Hawthorne, Susan. "The Politics of the Exotic: The Paradox of Cultural Voyeurism." NWSA Journal 1.4 (1989): 617-629.

Janis, I.L. Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions and Fiascos. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1982.

Kachru, Braj B., ed. The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures. 3rd ed.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Lowe, John. "Theories of Ethnic Humor: How to Enter Laughing."

American Quarterly 38 (1986): 439-460.

Marrouchi, Mustapha. "Fear of the Other, Loathing of the Self." College Literature 26.3(1999): 17-58.

Maxey, Ruth. "'East is Where Things Begin': Writing the Ancestral Homeland in Amy Tan and Maxine Kingston." Orbis Litterarum 60 (2005): 1-15.

49

Atlantikos McBride, James. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991.

1991. London: Penguin Books, Inc., 1992.

- - -. Midnight's Children. 1980. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.

- - -. Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002. 2002. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

Schueller, Malini Johar. "Theorizing Ethnicity and Subjectivity: Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club."

1992. Amy Tan. 2nd ed. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001.

Sharma, Shailja. "Salman Rushdie: The Ambivalence of Migrancy."

Twentieth Century Literature 47.4 (2001): 596-618.

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. 1989. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.

- - -. The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life. 2nd ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.

Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, Taban Lo Liyong and Henry Owuor-Anyumba. "On the Abolition of the English Department." Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics. Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972.

TuSmith, Bonnie. "The Englishes of Ethnic Folk: From Home Talkin' to Testifyin' Art." College English 58.1 (1996): 43-57.

Ty, Eleanor. "Rethinking the Hyphen: Asian North American and European Ethnic Texts as Global Narratives." Canadian Review of American Studies 32.2 (2002): 240-252.

Wong, Sao-Ling Cynthia. "Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour?

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and the ChineseAmerican Autobiographical Controversy." Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives. Ed. James Robert Payne. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. 248-279.

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Critical Anxiety Author Biography Stephanie Taitano is a graduate student at the University of Texas Arlington. Her research interest includes humor, world literature in Englishes, and literary theory. She has presented papers at the American Literature Association, College English Association, and regional Modern Language Association conferences. This essay is part of a larger project, "Ethnic Provincialism and Other Ironic Targets of the Humorous Mind."

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Garveyism, American Film, and Red Agitation During South Africa's Rand Revolt Timothy Johns New York University

I Tell the Kaffirs to awake, awake, put on the whole armor and prepare for Armageddon.

Rosetta Stenson, a supporter of the Marcus Garvey movement, quoted in the American newspaper Negro World, 1 October 1921

South African history, especially during the rise and fall of apartheid, might be thought of as a kind of hystory. Which is to say, in place of a measured, reasoned, and psychologically stable maintenance of daily life, the country often succumbed, at nearly every level, to bouts of collective hysteria. Hystory replaced history.

Elaine Showalter's Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), a book of obvious influence here, notes the paranoiac dimensions of this type of outbreak: "It is as though units of paranoia hitherto diffused through the population suddenly coalesce to form a new entity: a collective paranoiac fanaticism" (5).

This is precisely what the apartheid regime, with its almost farcically rigorous definitions of personal makeup, captured. In a region with a long record of racial miscegenation, one suddenly had to be—in official terms, particularly after the National party took power in 1948—white, "coloured," Indian, or black. Such stifling markers of race and social placement produced, at discrete moments throughout the twentieth century, excessive social delusion and paranoia—and, as I suggest, bizarre detours from traditional manifestations of identity.

What I argue is that, in the 1920s, a standard notion of sameness in Being—acting the part of the same person, the same racial identity— would be radically altered by 1) the arrival of foreign cultural ingredients and 2) the currents of apartheid's rise. In this pivotal decade of South African formation, consciousness came to be "invaded" by cultural and ideological imports from America and elsewhere: from a philosophy of black nationalism born in the Americas and Caribbean (in particular, Marcus Garvey's "Africa for the Africans" movement); by the potential, after the October Revolution in Russia, for capitalist overthrow by labor agitators at home; and, finally, by the powerful lure of Hollywood cinema and the silent screen. Under the duress and excitement of these concurrent, transatlantic "invasions," the politics of personal identity in the Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2006

Copyright © 2006 by Michigan State University

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers region began to assume a wide, even an extraordinarily fictional, accommodation.

Considering the fantastic inequities of apartheid's designs, it should not seem wholly surprising that fear of penetration by radical elements would emerge as a central ideological motivator for state maintenance.

But fear would also produce seeming lunacy. Fantasies of overland and overseas invasion played to a ceaseless drama of officially sanctioned hysteria and, more importantly, a will to both overdetermine and radically mistake identity. As white supremacy came to be rooted in the heart of the African subcontinent, wildly exaggerated grandstanding against "foreign" elements—black nationalist and communist, forces which might snatch up and transform otherwise docile bodies and identities—slouched into focus. Within this dense climate of official fear, in the midst of what Showalter calls "paranoiac fanaticism," domestic innocents came to be misunderstood as foreign invaders.

The greatest novel to allegorize this fear of imaginary foreign elements, this mistaken identity under apartheid, remains J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Although Barbarians fits into a later passage of historical development—in fact, fifty years after the 1920s, in decades dominated by the symbolism of the Sharpeville massacre—a brief examination of Coetzee's allegorization of hysteria will be of considerable importance.1 Part of a liberal, middle way tradition of white writing in South African literature, Coetzee's novel portrays, through the eyes of a sentimental Magistrate of the late apartheid years, a dose of high paranoia.

Waiting for the Barbarians embodies an idea of social hysteria through the figure of singular individual: Colonel Joll, a visitor to the outpost, to the allegorical border of the nation, who serves as state enforcer and, in the turns of the plot, the narrator's nemesis. What is queer about Joll is that he seems, during moments of savage brutality, remarkably clearheaded.

Indeed, the Colonel appears to enact a higher search for truth, a feeling for clearheadedness, in acts of torture. "I am speaking of a situation in which I am probing for the truth, in which I have to exert pressure to find it," Joll tells the skeptical Magistrate. "First I get lies, you see—this is what happens—first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth" (5).

A quest for reasoned truth comes to be produced through tools of torture—a tactic which seems, of course, a perversion of the Enlightenment project. To a figure like Joll, acts of hysterical brutality are seen to produce a bearable lightness. Yet there is another valence to the perversity, as the 53

Atlantikos subjects of mutilation on the colonial frontier remain mere "fisherfolk," not the suspected foreign fighters. Joll's treatment of these middling fishermen, these mistaken "barbarians," can only produce false—and forced— confessions. Inflated fear of overland invasion from South Africa's frontiers drives the official mind of the state toward what we might call a kind of rigorous madness.

"The next day the Colonel begins his interrogations," relates the narrator: Once I thought him lazy, little more than a bureaucrat with vicious tastes. Now I see how mistaken I was. In his quest for the truth he is tireless. The questioning starts in the early morning and is still going on when I return after dark...One by one the fisherfolk are taken into the room where the Colonel has established himself, to be asked whether they have seen movements of strange horsemen. (22) Here "strange horsemen" render something of the Colonel's—and, by way of allegory, the state's—delusional power: apartheid's relentless will to conceive imaginary phantoms and enemies, its incessant desire to artificially stoke fear and nightmarish apparitions. Yet the liberal narrator, attempting to purge himself of any deeper feeling of the day's torment, much less any paranoiac vision of "strange horsemen," frets alone in his private enclave. In essence, Coetzee's narrator, the voice of South African liberalism, attempts to ignore the larger problem. Scenes of torture are endured off-screen, out of sight, yet not entirely out of mind: " I sit in my rooms with the windows shut, in the stifling warmth of a windless evening, trying to read, straining my ears to hear or not to hear sounds of violence" (22). Discharged out of this vaguely Shakespearean language ("to hear or not to hear sounds of violence"), Coetzee's conflicted liberal expresses a fundamental inadequacy: a failure to stop the madness of the state—a state which serves as both an unwarranted expression of any humanist's citizenship and passport, and which, as Magistrate, the narrator also represents and upholds. As Mark Sanders' recent Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (2002) points out, intellectuals under the regime nearly always appear produced under such contradictions. "Opposition," Sanders contends, "takes its first steps from a footing of complicity." For when "opposition takes the form of a demarcation from something, it cannot, it follows, be untouched by that to which it opposes itself" (9).

Coetzee's narrator can never escape this imprisoning paradox.

Although Joll, the nemesis, finds the the narrator's cavalier atti54

Invasion of the Body Snatchers tude toward the frontier population "deranged" and careless and, eventually, treasonous, it seems evident that, in probing the private lives and private bodies of innocent native subjects, the Colonel fashions his own deranged designs. "Looking at [Joll]," the narrator tells us, "I wonder how he felt the very first time: did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that at that instant he was trespassing into the forbidden?" (12). Yet what is interesting is that the Colonel, when invading bodies, never shudders or blinks. The forbidden seems familiar. In Coetzee's late apartheid vision, a search for truth exists within this unfathomable illiberal will ("whatever it is they do"), behind the curtain of terror, and yet, in Joll's mindset, firmly within the Realm of Light. A claustrophobic sense of hysteria, strangely embedded in clearheadedness, thus repels any understanding of why the subject population might eventually invite, into their own midst, "strange horsemen" from afar.

II The paranoiac fiction of Barbarians nicely lends itself to our study of an earlier South African moment. Yet the precursor we explore remains somewhat altered in type. For in the 1920s, during an earlier episode of paranoiac overload, the dominant threat of invasion came not from overland, from dry outposts and peripheries of the southern African countryside, but from overseas, across the blue orb of the Atlantic. Perhaps the greatest figure of the time to embody a threat of invasion was Marcus Garvey. For South African authorities, and for many conservative black intellectuals as well, Garvey, the most celebrated black nationalist of the Americas, forged a frightening specter.2 Imagined on edge of the Atlantic's horizon, threatening to come ashore, the very idea of Garvey's embodiment fostered near delirious shades of alarm. As Robert Hill and Greg Pirio note in "Africa for the Africans: the Garvey Movement in South Africa, 1920-1940": "the South African High Commissioner in London was notified that he should refuse any application made by Garvey for a visa to travel to the Union. Moreover, principal immigration officers in all of South Africa's ports were notified of the prohibition...Such drastic precautionary measures arose out of a clear understanding of the potential political threat that a visit from the soi-disant Provisional President of Africa entailed" (230).

Garvey was never permitted ashore. Yet while his embodiment never touched South African soil, something of his philosophy snuck through the back way. As Jean Comaroff shows in her study of resistance to 55

Atlantikos apartheid in black churches: The foundations of the African Independent church movement in South Africa had been laid by the early years of the twentieth century. One of vital new offshoots was the Ethiopian church, which, as its name suggests, combined the symbolism of a biblically indexed millennium with an evolving African nationalism, itself cross-fertilized with the neatly overlapping ideology of Marcus Garvey—that blacks were the “dispossessed” of Ethiopia. (175) In African churches and, as we will see, in regional labor unions, a homespun version of the Garveyist platform began to take shape.

But what should interest us at the moment is not so much the absorption of a Garveyist, "Africa for the Africans" ideology, as Garvey-phobia: in other words, fear of black hegemony on the continent. In a sense, this phobia emerged even before Garvey's rise to preeminence. Fear of Garvey's pull during the 1920s revisited paranoia about the more general ideological trend: Ethiopianism. It was precisely this general discourse of black nationalism, preached by a variety diasporic intellectuals making a symbolic return to the continent, which had been savaged, years earlier by the British imperial novelist John Buchan. Produced around the time of the Union of South Africa agreement between the British and the Boers, Buchan's Prester John (1910) derides the villainousness of a "foreign," invading, Ethiopianist element. Yet in his fiction's demonization of "Ethiopian rascals," racial individuation appears in startling flux, suspended within a kind exaggerated mixture. The African "Reverend John Something-or-other," as the narrator calls his villain, appears to have accrued a "devilishly" white skeleton: [His skin] was black, black as ebony, but it was different from the ordinary negro. There were no thick lips and flat nostrils; rather, if I could trust my eyes, the nose was high-bridged, and the lines of the mouth sharp and firm. But it was distorted into an expression of such a devilish fury and amazement that my heart became like water. (14) Caught in this "distorted" moment of racial profiling (a moment which seems to unsettle, in a single bound, any lingering principles of phrenology), a "white" bone structure lurks beneath a mask of blackness. The two racial types become rudely conflated in a single body, that of the emerg56

Invasion of the Body Snatchers ing New African, the educated "Reverend John Something-or-other".

Buchan's shrill portrait of the modern hybrid suggests that black men of this sort pose considerable danger. Blurring a traditional template of identity, in which everyone literally knows his place, the Ethiopianist's mixed visage unsettles a strict racial order.

Yet a decade after the publication of Buchan's novel, during Garvey's preeminence, a certain kind of American blackness came to be wildly embraced. Curiously, in the 1920s, hysteria about the coming of the black nationalist, Marcus Garvey, emerged alongside the hysterically popular reception to "black face" Hollywood cinema.3 Thus, as overwhelmed crowds flocked to The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Singing Fool (1928), Al Jolson's "black face" minstrel movies, authentic blackness—in the name of Marcus Garvey—came to be barred at the gate. However, whether in the form of a minstrel movie or as a "potential political threat," an inviting and devilish cultural relation between South Africa and "black" America, across the Atlantic, had steadily spawned—a relation which would gradually ease the magnetic pull of South Africa's national identity away from Victorian Britain, toward the commercial prowess of the United States and Hollywood.

Nevertheless, the Garvey episode, much like the confusion in early cinema between the image on-screen and images of daily life, possessed even greater ripples of delusion.4 What is particularly bizarre, perhaps even more bizarre than Al Jolson's impact on the country, is how various leaders of labor organizations in the Cape, mostly from the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU), came to be understood—perhaps through the conflation of foreign actors in the news and in the movies— as "Americans". In an odd way, manufactured American cultural identity emerged out of the pan-Atlantic conversation of the day.

Clearly leaders of the ICU supported, even idolized and modeled themselves after, the militant American, Marcus Garvey. "My essential object is to be the great African Marcus Garvey," wrote Clements Kadalie, "the guiding light" of the ICU, in 1920 (Hill and Pirio 215). But when some of these same leaders traveled to the countryside, they were greeted, rather strangely, as the very foreigners they had modeled themselves upon. Hill and Pirio note that, when the "ICU penetrated rural Natal in 1927," one observer remarked how "[m]any country people thought that the ICU leaders were American Negroes who had come to deliver them from slavery...[T]he ICU's Thomas Mbeki became perceived by many rural Africans as so different from ordinary South African blacks that they nicknamed him 'America'" (215). Public consciousness in rural enclaves had snatched up the body of a labor advocate for a greater geographical 57

Atlantikos and cultural set of associations.

Wellington Butelezi, leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a labor group active in the rural Transkei, bought the "American" charade into its most fantastic bloom. Here, in the Transkei, where the peasants were engulfed in a "deepening crisis," the native leader's ruse of playing an American actor ventured to the very limits of what Hill and Pirio call "the mimetic 'American Negro' phenomenon."

Butelezi, a native of South Africa's Cape, went so far in his “American [transformation] that he even tried to have his name changed officially...Wellington's identity as an 'American' became so complete that in court he refused to admit his African parentage, in spite of the fact that his father was brought to court" (239).

Much like the legal case Partha Chatterjee chronicles in A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002), a book about mistaken identity in colonial Bengal, the notion of sameness, of being the same person throughout one's life, had been altered by the unusual currents of a national struggle. In other words, in order to defend the land against European rule and white domination, personal identity became a restlessly flexible vessel. Maintaining something of the ambiguous identity alive in Buchan's Prester John, it appears that—during the Garvey-influenced "Wellington movement," and within the span of an age which also cultivated a black impostor on film (Al Jolson)—personal relationships to politics took on profoundly disembodied states.

III As this examination of ICU and UNIA labor agitation suggests, odd transformations in South African identity can be discussed against the backdrop of a specific tension: tension between, on the one hand, the lure of American cinema in the 1920s, and, on the other, the rise of militant action during this same decade. My point is that, under hysterical duress, something about the language of South Africa's labor uprising came to be integrated—and even confused—with the language of film. Cinematic spectatorship took on a semblance of labor's dramatic crisis, and viceversa.

Any portrait of this novel relation between black laborers and cinema must include The Bantu are Coming (1930), a book about Johannesburg worker compounds and early film spectatorship in South Africa. Written by an American, the Carleton and Yale Divinity School-educated Reverend Ray E. Phillips, The Bantu are Coming borrows from the language of cinema to describe the vulnerable mood of black labor. Indicating the 58

Invasion of the Body Snatchers end of a more passive era, Phillips writes: The old days of the Bantu are disappearing before our eyes. Like the "fade-out" on the moving picture screen, the old days are going, giving place to a new order...The rapid change is responsible for severe strains in every department of native life.

At times it seems to the observer that the native people are headed straight for the rocks, and are going to crash. (33) Like a locomotive on-screen, an image "headed straight for the rocks," "the Bantu," immigrant African laborers of the city, men facing increasingly dire straights, appear on the verge of a wreck. What Phillips calls the "fade out on the moving picture screen" signals, through the form of film, the anxious difficulty of tracking and policing the engine of migrant labor.

For this reason, the black subject's engagement with the modern medium, in whatever way, may not produce the requisite Hollywood ending.

Instead of a pleasant "fade out," the system—and the state!—might suddenly "crash".

The real concern, then, was that "natives," vulnerable to the despair of the city and the worksite, might not crash alone. Without proper mediation, detritus of the crash might reach the top echelons South Africa's leadership, thereby rearranging property relations for the whole of society.

The Bantu are Coming must ultimately be read, therefore, as a cautionary tale, bordering on hysteria, about the explosive might of black labor power. Yet as a liberal intervention, Phillips' muckraking appeal is designed to confront not only the menace of labor militancy and perhaps even communism, but also the torpor of the state, which neglects its laboring subjects. Without proper institutional or cultural mediation, if the black proletariat were allowed to crash, militant elements appeared ready to rechannel and revive the train's power. Garveyism and a new South African communist party stood in the wings.

Ironically, Ray Phillips, though an American and a foreigner himself, assumes the role of a South African perspective. From this nativist point of view, he braces for the intrusion of a "foreign" ideology, what he calls the "Moscow" element. To this red siren call the black worker came listening: "To-morrow (Sunday) he may go to church, or he may listen attentively while the white agitator and his native assistants seek to arouse in him a spirit of revolt against the capitalist, the government, the missionary, and the white [anti-communist] labour leader" (32). Sensing the influence of radical alternatives, an abruptly frank political voice which entices the African worker away from the sentimental education of the church, 59

Atlantikos Phillips' fear and trembling reaches its high water mark. Picturing, for the reader's mind, the outcome of an African workers' revolt, armageddon appears on the horizon: Then! one dark night, as the white folks slept, the compound gates were all to be opened, the mines captured; looted; every shop was to be raided; banks broken open; and in every home the white people were to be disposed of quietly in their beds!

That day—THE DAY!—Johannesburg, with all its mines, buildings, homes, everything, would be in black hands.(118) Facing this nightmare, Phillips indeed appears at his most apocryphal.

During "one dark night," at the height of the Rand Revolt, if ownership was not vigilantly protected, if Africans were not properly buffered within institutional accommodation, a terrifying exchange of property might await: "The day—THAT DAY— [when] Johannesburg, with all its mines, buildings, homes, everything, [will] be in black hands." As a dedicated missionary, Phillips might well have believed that he was interested in improving the daily life and soul of the average African employee. Yet he also understands the possibility of black ownership as a kind of teleological apocalypse, an ultimate and final moment of terror (THAT DAY) which unsettles proper dominion over the land—a lesson which J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), a novel evoking fears of black ownership in a post-apartheid climate, speaks to even now.

IV By all accounts, South Africa witnessed great labor unrest in the 1920s.

Yet the Rand Revolt, part of the historical moment The Bantu are Coming braces for, was perceived by traditional historians as a white-on-white class war; an extension, in a loose way, of Boer and British hostilities at South Africa's turn-of-the-century.

For though black and "coloured" labor may have "loomed [for some whites] as a frightening specter behind the strikes," the Rand Revolt, much like the Anglo-Boer war two decades earlier, came to be officially understood as a struggle among Europeans (Simons 285). Ray Phillips proclaims something of this logic himself: "This strike was a protest by the white miners' union against the cutting out of certain superfluous whites by the mine management. It was purely a white man's quarrel" (Phillips 147). But blacks and "coloureds," easy to influence, still remained a problem for Phillips—and this is where film came in. As Phillips understood matters, movie watching, carefully censored, could help Africans pick the right side in the white-on-white labor 60

Invasion of the Body Snatchers struggle. Watching film, the African could—if I can use Phillips' own terminology—"discriminate" between the gentle guardians of the state and B-movie "bad guys," the labor agitators.5 In this way, film spectacle could hijack the momentum of a spreading conflict.

Backers of the 1922 Rand Revolt feared white wages, doled out by the mining magnates or Randlords, would sink to that of black and "coloured" wages. For this reason, their solidarity with black and "coloured" workers remained marginal. Poor white wage earners formed the backbone of the rebellion—a revolt which became, at one point, so ethically impoverished that "Workers of the World Fight and Unite for a White South Africa," a patently racist slogan, emerged as one of the factional themes of a communist party rally (Simons 285).

The opposing camp, which Phillips characterizes as "the capitalist, the government, the missionary, and the white [anti-communist] labor leader," hardly promised a less patronizing future for Africans. General Smuts, then the Prime Minister, had informed African workers "in a special message [that the strike] was no concern of theirs. 'Stay quietly in your compounds obey orders and you will be protected'" (Simons 286).

If the Rand Revolt was merely another sequel to the white man's endless war, Phillips' attempt to inculcate "discriminatory" values among black audiences must be understood, to some degree, as a last resort. A missionary once peevish about Hollywood influence, Phillips finally appears to have felt, in the heat of struggle, that movies might keep "otherwise idle natives off the street and occupy their leisure time" (Gutsche 379). Like the apartheid film historian Thelma Gutsche, perhaps he felt that "the direct value of the cinema" had to do with its way of "sublimating potential criminal tendencies" among Africans (378).

But for the brave new missionary of Africa, cinema came to be seen not simply as a buffer against black crime, but as a medium that might curtail the gathering swell of labor's menace, the danger of pronounced black agitation and nationalist consciousness.

This set the stage for a night of movies at the worker's compound. As Tim Couzens notes: "Phillips' greatest boast was his use of movies as a peacemaker during the Great Strike of 1922" (97). "When the strike was declared," Phillips writes, "we were asked by the Chamber of Mines to speed up the showing of films" (149). The "speeding up" of film before the African spectator was now, in the moment of crisis, not only under consideration but a desperate experiment. Not only disgruntled white laborers, but Africans, who were also in the process of organizing resistance, appeared hot to the touch ("hot as a wasp's nest" are Phillips' exact words).

But in the African workers' compound, movie magic appeared to heal all 61

Atlantikos social ills. At the height of the Revolt, in this often cited passage, Phillips comments that, after screening films, Soon all the 4000 [workers in the compound] were shouting themselves sick with laughter as they watched Charlie [Chaplin], Larry Sermon, Buster Keaton, and others do their funny stuff.

Never was there such a treat; so many laughs. At the end of two hours the compound was limp and weak from shouting, the vengeful spirit had long since vanished, and the great crowd bade us good night in the usual joyous way—many still laughing. There was no murder that night at the New Primrose [compound]. (148) During the critical moment, film proffered the necessary Hollywood ending. After the screening of comedies, the working class audience, once a seething "swarm," appears "limp and weak." Faced with such hysterical antics on-screen, radical agency in daily life seems to dissipate.

In Phillips view, the "vengeful spirit" of labor resistance could be cooled by the catharsis of silent cinema. Although alternative ways of understanding film would emerge in South Africa, it was this pacifying gesture, broached at a time of great paranoia about black rebellion, which largely held sway.

V What we have seen in these South African examples is, therefore, a remarkable confluence between hysteria and history. Any theory about this relation should remain, however, somewhat unfinished, a mere overture, perhaps only the beginning of an elaboration, for it seems impossible to fully connect the dots of such varied evidence—Coetzee's novel allegorizing the 1970s; the rise of film spectatorship, labor struggle, and a reception to Marcus Garvey's "presence" in the 1920s—into any set logic.

Indeed, merely playing history through a pattern of hysteria presents a certain unacceptable mystification of concrete relations. Nevertheless, an inability to fix a rational theory to historical incident undergirds something of my central contention: that the development of South African episodes, because of the raw stakes of inequality involved, often evaded any pure logic or clear accountability. When a healthy regard for one's neighbor slipped from the grasp of the South African imagination, an hysterical element—as well as a propensity to test the limits of identity— shined like a beacon.

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers Notes 1. "Sharpeville massacre March 21, 1960; the police killing of sixty-nine demonstrators and the wounding of one hundred eighty during the PAC's antipass campaign" (Williams 407) 2. For conservative African responses to Garvey, see Tim Couzens (1985).

3. For accounts of the reception to Al Jolson's movies, see Ezekiel Mphahlele (1962) and Thelma Gutsche (1972) 4. For a study of early cinematic spectatorship and confusion between real human beings and film imagery, see Tom Gunning (1999).

5. "We have often thought that one of the main things which the natives get from our bioscope shows on the Reef is a sense of discrimination. Occasionally the films are stories in which a villain and a hero contend for honours. White men are shown as heroes, also as villains. We have both in the white race, unfortunately, and it is just as well for the native people to know it, and early....Now, it is good for them to learn the facts and to be able to make their way and deal with good and bad whites, carefully discriminating between them. The moving picture helps to inculcate this valuable sense of discrimination" (Phillips 146).

Works Cited Buchan, John. Prester John. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Chatterjee, Partha. A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1980.

Comaroff, Jean. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985 Couzens, Tim. The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H.I.E. Dhlomo. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985.

Gunning, Tom. "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator." From Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Fifth Edition. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Atlantikos Gutsche, Thelma. The History and Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, 1895-1940. Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1972.

Hill, Robert A. & Gregory A. Pirio. “‘Africa for the Africans’: the Garvey Movement in South Africa, 1920-1940." From The politics of race, class and nationalism in twentieth-century South Africa. Eds. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido. London and New York: Longman, 1987.

Mphahlele, Ezekiel. Down Second Avenue. Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1962.

Phillips, Ray. The Bantu are Coming. London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1930.

Sanders, Mark. Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

Showalter, Elaine. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Simons, Jack and Ray. Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950.

International Defense and Aid Fund for Southern Africa ,1983.

Williams, John A. From the South African Past: Narratives, Documents, and Debates. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997.

Author Biography Timothy Johns is an instructor in the Writing Program at New York University. His dissertation, "Mixed Humanity: The Staging of Labor in South African Literature and Film, 1830-1930," was recently defended at SUNY Stony Brook. He is currently the Pictures Editor at Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press). This is his first published article.

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Fictive Emigrants and America as Fiction Ashley Hales University of Edinburgh "Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the ocean combined both. […] I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude and longitude, but out of myself." R. L. Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant

Beyond the first tales of explorers to America, the country's first major storytellers were emigrants. America (both before and after1776) was the ground upon which ideas of discovery and exoticism could germinate and take root, if not in the actual American landscape, then at least in the British imagination of it. Diverging accounts of what America actually was—everything from primordial wasteland to second Eden—brought to the fore that America had been (and still was) perceived primarily in fictional or imaginative terms. America was a transatlantic fairy tale symbolizing liberty, life with low taxation, or a life of boredom that was blighted by slavery. The stories told both of America and of emigration in guides to emigration from Britain to America offer penetrating insights into how and why America was imagined as it was, and about the creation of identity on a personal and national level. Marcus Hansen writes of the circulation of "mimetic capital" (Stephen Greenblatt's phrase) in guides to emigration: "If one was decidedly favorable in his appraisal, another felt obliged to be violently critical, whereupon a third took occasion to express a moderate view. Profiting by the vogue of such writings, landowners and emigrant agents learned to present their advertisements in travel form.

The popularity of American travel literature was to continue for at least a century" (Hansen 148-9). Although authors of these emigration guides in the first half of the nineteenth century were probably more concerned with the economic benefits of increased British emigration to the United States than with their literary merit, the guides nevertheless are texts which help create the "imagined community" of America.

The transatlantic emigrant and his writings must be re-introduced as an antidote to American literature conceived purely within national binaries. My analysis of fictive America and emigrants as fiction stems from the critically overlooked collection of emigrant guides primarily located in the National Library of Scotland; these were composed by successful emigrants, failed emigrants (who became self-styled “travelers” or backmigrants), and sojourners in America in the first half of the nineteenth century when emigration from Britain to America was at its peak. The guides cover all manners of things relating to emigration, such as, recomVolume 1, Number 1, Spring 2006

Copyright © 2006 by Michigan State University

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Fictive Emigrants and America as Fiction mendations about choosing a ship, provisions to take on the journey, whom to avoid, how to cross the Ohio River, where to settle, expectations regarding climate and soil changes and common prices for foodstuffs and other goods. But it is perspectival language that most clearly indicates how emigrants saw America both literally and figuratively and through their emphasis on empiricism, their reaching after language to describe and critique the unfamiliar through a vocabulary of "dazzlement," and their imaginative construction of America, that their accounts fictionalize America and through the process, themselves.

George Berkeley, eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish philosopher and cleric, and Jean Baudrillard, present-day French cultural critic, provide the theoretical vocabulary in which to analyze perspective in the emigrant guides. Both Berkeley and Baudrillard offer a transatlantic philosophic perspective as European travelers to America: Berkeley traveled to garner support for a college he intended to found in Bermuda and Baudrillard hoped to "get a distance on Europe" (Baudrillard 29). Both men's expectations changed upon arrival: Berkeley never did found his college but persuaded an American philosopher, Samuel Johnson, of his immaterialist idea -a legacy which grew to fruition in the so-called American renaissance. Baudrillard, although intending to understand Europe anew from actual and metaphoric distance, instead realized Europe "ha[d] quite simply disappeared"; he concluded, "there is really no need to adopt a critical stance on Europe from here. That is something you can do in Europe. [‌] What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction" (Baudrillard 29).

Berkeley's immaterialism exhibits striking crossovers with the fictionalizing of America that Baudrillard discusses more than 250 years after Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710); in this work Berkeley famously asserts that "esse est percipi" or, "to be" is "to be perceived." Berkeley first uses the example of a table in his study: "The table I write on, I say, exists, that is I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it" (Berkeley §3). Existence is not only in the passive state of being perceived but also in the active act of perceiving, a mental judgmental act whereby a requisite distance from the object at hand is required. Mental apprehension, or observation, is then translated from the mind through this judgmental act. The mental perception is what I will call a "first perception" occasioned by perception of an object's sensational qualities through sight.

Written perception is the filtering of the first perception into language, a translation of the individual's mental perception for an audience, a 67

Atlantikos process whereby one examines the object and through the distance of the empirical gaze continues to mediate the "original" through varying levels of authorial distance.

Berkeley's assertion that the physical world is reducible to mental perception coheres in some ways with Baudrillard's notion of simulacra, that we never arrive at the "real," but only images of images. Baudrillard's travel book, America, as much creates as describes the simulacrum that is the United States; using America as an example of his famous concept of hyperreality, he states not only that Americans encapsulate simulation but also that "a European, […] alone will discover here the perfect simulacrum—that of the immanence and material transcription of all values" (28). Because of Berkeley's belief in the ultimate signifier, God, Berkeley would deny Baudrillard's notion that all we have are images or signs without the signified, but would agree that it is only the image or the mental perception in which we can affirm that things exist. For Berkeley, identity is validated through an observer's mind perceiving an object (he also terms this "spirit, soul or myself"). In the Principles Berkeley hints at, and in later works articulates, this primary active perceiver is God. In Berkeley's correspondence with Johnson, we discover that an object may be singular in God's mind, but when we mentally perceive it the object becomes one of "many pictures of the original" (Berkeley 349). God keeps reality stable, but because all we have are our mental and written perceptions, this gap of representation—between the original and our awareness and subsequent translation of it—illustrates, in a theological idiom, our common "fallenness"; using another vocabulary, the multiplicity of one's perspectives may be also understood in terms of fictionality, a term Baudrillard stresses. The emigrant guides examined here allow us to "enter America as fiction." As the authors start from empirical observations of America and emigration, they create a fictional America, based first on perceiving it and then by translating the unnamable from a mental idea to a written perception—what Stephen Greenblatt highlights as an "expression of wonder [which] stands for all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed" (20). The imagining of America and the emigrant are evidenced in the British emigrant's roles as empiricist, translator, and as fiction.

Emigrant as Empiricist Berkeley's table exists in his physical or imaginative perception of it.

Likewise, America also must be physically or imaginatively perceived.

Berkeley notes that "ideas of sense are more strong, lively, and distinct 68

Fictive Emigrants and America as Fiction than those of the imagination" (Berkeley § 30). Applied to America, the country exists more strongly through sense impressions generated from being physically located within America than in perceptions based solely in the imagination. Of course, America may be imagined before emigration—and this is partly what emigrant guides intend to facilitate for future emigrants—but America may be most strongly perceived (or be said to exist) through physically setting foot in America. The emigrant also must perceive or be perceived to confirm his existence, part of which is concretized through writing. The emigrant's identity is enmeshed with his written America, and this is crucial for my analysis: his guide, as an empirical record of his experience in America, creates the necessity that he simultaneously act as author, critic, and protagonist and because he is so situated within the milieu about which he is writing, these three roles can never be clearly delineated from one another throughout his account. As much as the emigrant tries to get a “scientific” distance on America, it is not only his own judgment concerning the country that is complicated through his émigré position, but also that his identity (so entwined with being an emigrant) is multiplied as well. Textually, the amalgam of generic forms and styles in each guide exemplify this muddling of perception and identity; for an example of this generic mixing, William Faux's guide which will be discussed later, purports to be simply a documentary account espousing "the naked truth" in his preface (Faux vii), yet it is infused with narrative as it follows the format of a journal throughout and delves into a sort of nationalist rhetorical pamphlet (he writes: "To my countrymen disposed to emigrate, but who can, by encreased [sic] exertion, keep their unequalled comforts and honour unimpaired, I would say, in a voice that should be hear from shore to shore, "Stay where you are; for neither America, nor the world, have any thing to offer you in exchange!"

[429-30]) and concludes by advocating a type of translatio imperii trope (where the "native red and black man, the genuine aboriginal, and the unstained African, for whom alone this land of promise, this vast section of the earth, this new and better world, seems by nature to have been intended" [487]). More specifically, although the emigrant writer requires his reader to physically be in America to gain a “proper” perspective on it, this also makes his writing and the genre of the emigrant guide redundant through his own insistence on empirical experience.

In Berkelian terms, sense impressions gained from the United States communicate to the emigrant's mind an idea of America in much the same way that Berkeley's table mentally exists through seeing it. In an anonymous guide written as a series of letters by a "gentleman to his friend in England," Emigration to America, candidly considered published in 1798— 69

Atlantikos coincidentally, published the same year as the Alien, Sedition, and Naturalization acts which restrict emigration to the States and severely limits rights in the United States—the author returns to England after residing in the country for one year, concluding that the truth of America may be known only through observation: For a man to have a perfect idea of America, he must come and see it: it is so different in every respect almost from Europe, and yet so difficult to communicate by writing wherein that difference consists, that I feel myself very unequal to the task of giving you an idea of it adequate to what I could wish; I can only represent to your mind an imperfect conception of the reality.

(25-6) America may only begin to be conceived through physically locating oneself there, and through this experience, the author implies transatlantic differences may be intuitively grasped because they are incapable of being fully articulated. The "perfect idea of America" is un-writeable; however writing still presents America to the reader's mind even though such a second-hand experience is but an "imperfect conception of reality" according to the author. It is the "style in which they [the community, or here, the nation] are imagined" that defines America in the emigrant guide (Anderson 6). But according to the author, America as only imagined, without the corresponding empirical experience of it, remains nothing more than a mirrored and imperfect representation of itself, a fiction and a Baudrillardian simulacrum.

Even in the details of emigration, attention to sight is prevalent. Wiley and Putnam's Emigrant's Guide of 1845 mentions, "The emigrant should not choose a ship because it is puffed in print. Let his own eyes be his judge" (Wiley and Putnam16). There is no substitute for firsthand experience because it is considered to transmit a conclusive statement of reality via the senses, whereas writing risks or creates fictionality as it interposes itself between empirical experience in the mind of the subject and the audience. William Chambers, whose Edinburgh Journal and Information for the People "attained a phenomenal circulation, especially among farm servants and artisans who had hitherto read little" (Hansen 150), also comments on the clarity arrived at by observation; he states, "It is a very curious thing that nobody, till he sees it, can properly understand the situation of New York. Accounts of it are not clear. Our minds are perplexed by two opposite circumstances. [After seeing it,] I now got rid of this mystification" (Chambers 171). Writing, which may give an idea of America to 70

Fictive Emigrants and America as Fiction Britain (but which always points to the fact that a clear, or pure, translation is impossible), cannot provide the lucidity that direct perception can.

According to Chambers, writing obscures the reality of New York.

Although he previously notes that "the eyes of Europe" are directed toward New York, its particularities can be known only through personal observation. Yet underlying Chambers' emphasis on physical experience is the corresponding undermining of the experience by putting it into writing; Chambers' observations become yet another account of New York from which a reader infers from his experience to his/her imagination.

Emigrant as Translator: America as Fiction Both Benedict Anderson and Stephen Greenblatt (as well as many following them) emphasize the imagination as primary to travel writing.

Greenblatt succinctly states, "the principal faculty involved in generating these representations [of the other] is not reason but imagination" (Greenblatt 13), and Anderson, when defining the nation, argues that it is imagined because "in the minds of each [member of the community] lives the image of their communion" (Anderson 6). It is this "horizontal comradeship" (Anderson 7) of the nation that the writers of emigrant guides seek to demonstrate and help their readers to imagine; for if the would-be emigrant is able to imaginatively enter into the story of America, he may actually make a transatlantic trek to America, thus substantiating the multiple appeals of the guides' mimetic capital.

In bridging the transatlantic gap, the British emigrant is in a particular position to translate, re-write, or create America for Britain. In all acts of linguistic and cultural translation proceeding from an empirical experience of multiple cultures, the translator experiences what Michaela Wolf calls a "crisis of representation" (Wolf 182). In the case of the emigrant guides, this "crisis" manifests itself in a lack of specificity in articulating differences and continuities across the Atlantic, although there appears a corresponding desire to mention the disparities between Britain and America in a similar manner to the proliferating injunction to see America while also requiring the would-be emigrant to only read America.

Patricia Caldwell points out in her book The Puritan Conversion Narrative (1983), "[…] just as in spiritual autobiography the disclaimer about inexpressibility accompanies an intense verbal performance, so [attention to…] ineffability was not to discourage but to encourage communication" (Caldwell 91). Although Caldwell's research encompasses an earlier America and a different genre of representation, there is the same not knowing how to express America and a similar attempt to put one's 71

Atlantikos experience into words regardless of its ineffability in emigrant guides.

There is both an authorial struggle with the inadequacy of language to describe empirical experience and a critical distrust of other written perceptions—both reactions use visual imagery as a metaphor for the emigrant's mental perception of America.

What is visually perceived seems almost impossible for the authors to translate into a written perception. For example, William Amphlett writes in 1819, "How unequal is language to depict the effect of a wild and broken sea" (20), and Chambers' preoccupations with language largely serve as a register for the inability to accurately portray Philadelphia. An English farmer, William Faux, also attempts to bridge the gap between his perception of America and his readers' imagination of it but runs up against the limits of language. When describing a forest in May 1819, he writes: Language is inadequate to describe a journey through this interesting, romantic, fantastic forest. At one time the eye beholds large fleets or groves of naked masts, […] at another, roads apparently conducting to the houses of great men; spots, too beautiful for description […]. The roads and paths are so constantly and suddenly winding, and withal so beautiful, that common mortals might fear to proceed further, expecting to meet some mighty prince or celestial spirit in these sacred haunts; or perhaps some gigantic monster, rushing out of these dark shades to annihilate all. Imagination is here highly and almost fearfully excited. (Faux 52) Following on Caldwell's observations on Puritan conversion narratives, here as well the nod to the inadequacy of language leads to a profusion of it. But rather than wrestling with the ineffability of American landscape or confronting the "crisis of representation"—which is particularly striking for a farmer, and yet one which follows along the heels of Crèvecoeur's farmer tradition—Faux drapes his experience in aesthetic terms and specters of fairy tales. The forest's imaginative possibilities evidenced in Faux's repetition of "or's" provides multiple exits to the literal forest that lead to fictive entrances into storybook tales. The "great men," "prince," "spirit," and "monster" provide fictional figures familiar to Britain and reduce the actual complexities of American topography to a setting for a story of exotic otherness. Faux begins with his perception of "large fleets or groves of naked masts," but his sense perceptions are immediately translated into fictions. His mental perception of the forest is ignored for 72

Fictive Emigrants and America as Fiction the benefit of its transformation into written perception; although Faux is present physically to perceive the forest, it is still left to become only an imaginative reality.

The language of dazzlement also fictionalizes America. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the now obsolete reference of the verb dazzle as "To lose the faculty of distinct and steady vision" and the more common definition as "To overpower, confuse, or dim (the vision)." To be dazzled implies unsteady vision resulting from being visually overpowered and that one's perception is askew because one experiences something which upsets normal sight. The word is also used figuratively to apply to the mind; the adjective dazzling is "that [which] dazzles the mind of the observer." The word's literal and figurative meanings provide linguistic (not just philosophical or theological) precedent for associating the categories of sight with the mind. This "dazzlement" is also an actual experience. Tony Tanner describes this alienating, dazzling transatlantic conundrum of the emigrant coming face-to-face with the American wilderness thus: he "faced a landscape devoid of 'traces of men': clean, 'dazzling', but humanly speaking empty-potentially alien in a way that the European landscape, so saturated with history, legend, myth could never be" (Tanner 43).

The anonymous Emigrant's Guide; or, a Picture of America, published in 1816 when tensions after the War of 1812 were particularly high between Britain and her former colony, dissuades emigration to the United States and opens by discussing the dazzling or disconcerting tales of emigration: "America has been considered, by those who have been dazzled by the infatuating sounds of democracy, independence, liberty, and equality, as the only happy spot upon earth" (7). America is a fiction from the beginning. Given the association with physical and mental perception, it is curious that the author uses a mixed metaphor to describe what he would consider as over-zealous attempts to promote emigration in terms of being "dazzled by [‌] infatuating sounds." The intertwining of visual and auditory language arrests the reader's attention, providing a readerly re-enactment similar to the would-be emigrant being dazzled by written accounts.

Here the "sounds of democracy, independence, liberty, and equality" transfix the British person disposed to emigrate (as with a blinding light) and transform him into an emigrant.

Hugh Murray dissuades emigration in 1829—a year when the financial status of the United States was particularly shaky and while many British emigrants continued to pour into the country after a series of poor British harvests—and he also uses the language of dazzlement in his Historical Account of Discoveries and Travels in North America. He writes: 73

Atlantikos Emigration to America, as already observed, presents no longer any of those vague and brilliant prospects which dazzled the eyes of the early adventurers. They can hope no longer to share the spoil of kingdoms, to open sources of golden wealth, or to return and dazzle their countrymen with the treasures of the Western World. (Murray 528, italics mine) Murray's writes dazzlement as a thing of the mythic past and confines it to the stories of early adventurers. He presupposes the prospects for future gain, glory and wealth that America symbolized to have mesmerized the adventurers when all that is known is that the accounts dazzled the minds of their readers. Yet, Murray stipulates, because of this tradition of dazzlement, emigration continues unabated (indeed this decade sees a rapid rise in emigration) and rather than dazzling treasures, the emigrant is met with a "life of labour" and cultural exile. Whereas in Faux's guide his defamiliarization with the landscape affords him the imaginative play of princes and monsters stepping off the storybook page, the situation is reversed in Murray's account where the dazzling stories of America are not allowed to permeate the landscape. The language of dazzling evidences an author's critique of another's written experience of emigration.

Emigrant as Fiction The process of translating the idea of America to Britain requires the emigrant writer not only to conceptualize his mental perception of a foreign landscape and culture, but also to attempt to put these observations into an accessible language, not only for himself but most importantly to realize the commercial gains for publishing his emigration guide in London for future British emigrant-readers. Realizing the impossibilities in transparent translation where sign equals signified on both sides of the Atlantic ushers the writers into a broader understanding of translation as authoring and critiquing—which again is part of the inseparability of the emigrant as author, critic and protagonist—while physically and mentally being situated within that which he, as a writer, should have a critical distance. The emigrant writer occupies a position of authority as translator while also expressing his idea of Britain and America in terms of "disappearing," a word which registers an active or passive visual and mental abandonment—and possibly theological abandonment as well, given Berkeley's idea of God as He who keeps reality stable.

In the initial act of emigration, the transatlantic passage, the emigrant registers a cutting off from his homeland. From the first quarter of the 74

Fictive Emigrants and America as Fiction nineteenth century, the guides recommend the emigrant settle further from the eastern seaboard past the Alleghany Mountains, and this westward journey is another way in which the emigrant remains unperceived or disappears. This migration across the Atlantic and the overland journey plunges the would-be emigrant into a solitary landscape where civilization, much like his employment and status, is absent and must be created.

William Amphlett in the vein of Smithean sympathy writes of Ohio: Society here is considerably advanced; and what is existence without the charms of social life? Let bears and wolves inhabit the forests: man was made for conversation and rational inter course, and without them becomes a brute himself.

(Amphlett 185) Society is what constitutes existence, and without it a man disappears and degenerates. The emigrant can create society, but on this hinge of creation there remains the fear that the emigrant will be subsumed into the void of landscape, effectively disappearing into savagery.

Amphlett also observes: Americans, if they are not quite satisfied, move on, and think nothing of it; […] but the western country is a "bourne from which no traveller returns." We never hear of families emigrating thence into the eastern States, which is surely one strong proof of the superiority of the soil and the climate. (Amphlett 195) The western country is likened to the "undiscover'd country" in the famous soliloquy in Hamlet; knowledge and certainty concerning existence after death (the "undiscover'd country") is as shadowy as the "undiscover'd country" of the western territory and, consequently, the existence of the westward-bound emigrant is as unclear as the region to which he emigrates. The unknown of death and the unknown of emigration both leave the emigrant in a state of liminality wavering between bearing ills or flying to an unknown. In the role of critic, Amphlett writes the western emigrant out of existence because his suppositions are based solely upon never hearing differently that what he supposes.

On the positive side of disappearance is the opportunity to create an identity. When one crosses the Atlantic, the real or imagined evils, family, neighbors, hereditary land and reputation all disappear to be newly created or transformed in America. Without these externals to validate one's existence in the transition from Europe to America, identity and character 75

Atlantikos may be discarded and then created. One can disappear from Europe not only by turning one's back on the Old World but also by self-fictionalizing.

In a reversal of the language of dazzlement, Chambers writes of the "unfortunates" of New York as "flourishing in dark holes and corners, just as [they are] seen to do in any large city of the Old World" (Chambers 197).

The urban centers are a holding ground for these people where in "dark holes and corners" they can blend in and begin to create themselves and flourish. S. H. Collins's guide of 1830-the most popular at the time-also warns against emigration of these "unfortunates": If any hope to escape, by emigration, the odium attached to a vicious character, they will find they are in error; for they will suffer no less in the opinion of their neighbours in the new country, than they have already suffered, unless they have first reformed their conduct, and commenced a life of active, useful, and honourable employment. (Collins 75) America was touted as the land of opportunity, but according to Collins, it is opportunity only provided for those who are "active, useful, and honourable." Collins expects the would-be emigrant to transform his character before emigrating rather than seeing emigration as a process of transformation. He also neglects the possibility of emigrants re-writing their past according to their future and breaking from the past way of life, a secularization of the earlier Puritan association of the Atlantic crossing as baptism and a new birth.

To "enter America as fiction" as Jean Baudrillard recommends we must start with the transatlantic emigrant because he typifies the liminality and imaginative construction of America and his relation to the New World.

On the threshold of identity creation, the emigrant first experiences America, attempts to write his experience and finally constructs a story of America and of himself. The emigrant also complicates the tradition of national exclusivity in American literature: both through emigrant guides and emigrant characters scattered through American literature. This opening up of national and generic borders, this being in one place but not of it and the questioning and construction of identity that the emigrant figure occasions also models the Christian motif of the sojourner in a strange land, following in some ways the tradition of some of the first sojourners to America, the Puritan emigrants. The emigrant is a potent image not only necessary to our re-evaluation of the American literary tradition as inherently transatlantic, but also one whose writing both models and pro76

Fictive Emigrants and America as Fiction vides the reflexive framework whereby America and oneself are not only imagined but also created in later canonical works of American fiction.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991.

Amphlett, William. The Emigrant's Directory to the Western States of North America. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster-Row. 1819.

Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1986 (French), 1988 (English).

Berkeley, George. Philosophical Works including the works on vision. London and Melbourne: Dent, 1910, 1983.

Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. Cambridge: CUP, 1983.

Chambers, William. Things as They Are in America. 2nd ed. London and Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1857.

Chambers, William and Robert. Chambers's Information for the People. No. 5. London: Orr and Smith, 1835.

Collins, S. H. The Emigrant's Guide to and Description of the United States of America; Fourth edition. Hull: Joseph Noble, 1830. The American Immigration Library, a Facsimile Reprint Collection. Jerome S. Ozer, 1971.

Emigration to America, candidly considered. From a gentleman, resident there, to his friend in England. London: T. C. Rickman, 1798.

Faux, William. Memorable Days in America, being a A Journal of a Tour to The United States, principally undertaken to ascertain, by positive evidence, the Condition and Probably Prospects of British Emigrants […]. London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1823.

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Atlantikos Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World.

Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.

Hansen, Marcus Lee. The Atlantic Migration 1607-1860. 1940. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.

Murray, Hugh. Historical Account of Discoveries and Travels in North America; 2 vols. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green; Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1829.

Oxford English Dictionary online. http://www.oed.com/ Stevenson, R. L. The Amateur Emigrant in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes and The Amateur Emigrant. London and New York: Penguin, 2004.

Tanner, Tony. Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men. Cambridge: CUP, 1989.

The Emigrant's Guide; or, a Picture of America: exhibiting a view of the United States, Divested of Democratic Colouring, […]. London: Printed by W. Clews; For W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1816.

Wiley and Putnam's Emigrant Guide. London: Wiley & Putnam, 1845.

Wolf, Michaela. "Culture as Translation - and Beyond Ethnographic Models of Representation in Translation Studies." Crosscultural Transgressions. Ed. Theo Hermans. Manchester, UK and Northhampton, MA: St. Jerome Publishing, 2002. 180-192.

Author Biography Ashley Hales is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her interests lie in transatlantic studies, specifically in its theory and Atlantic emigration and American literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. She has published in Symbiosis and in edited conference proceedings. Ashley has also worked as Research Assistant for The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (forthcoming from EUP in 2006) and the much-anticipated Transatlantic Literary Studies Reader (forthcoming from EUP in 2007).

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Statement of Purpose Atlantikos is an online journal that accepts essays by graduate students in the field of Transatlantic Studies, broadly defined as the study of textual productions dating from the age of exploration to the present that originate in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. We encourage both traditional and innovative scholarship addressing textual, critical, cultural, and theoretical issues related to Transatlantic Studies. Comparative literatures are within the purview of the journal, although submissions need not be comparative in nature.

The journal is intended as a site of discussion that is not limited by discipline or theoretical approach, but which allows for contrasting ideas and continually reevaluates Transatlantic Studies. This peerreviewed journal will represent the most recent work by the most active graduate scholars in the field of Transatlantic Studies.

Submissions Submissions undergo a blind peer-review by graduate students and faculty members specializing in the areas or topics addressed in the submission. The author's name should appear only in the cover letter and should not appear in the submission, except in notes or bibliographical citations. Manuscripts should meet the following criteria: 1. Include a cover letter and a brief abstract (100-200 words).

2. Manuscripts should be between 12 and 24 pages and must be in MLA style (6th edition) 3. Authors must provide translations of all extensive quotations not orginally in English.

4. Send an electronic copy in Microsoft Word (.doc) format

by October 15, 2006 to atlantik@msu.edu to be considered for the Fall 2006 issue.

Website Atlantikos is online at http://www.msu.edu/~atlantik. Visit us online for electronic copies of Atlantikos and for updates.

Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2006

Copyright Š 2006 by Michigan State University

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