African, Native, and Jewish American Literature and the Reshaping of Modernism (review)

Responding to Johnnella E. Butler’s call for canon transformation rather than reform, Alicia Kent’s book moves African American, Native American, and Jewish American literary traditions from margin to multiple centers, revising discussions of modernism by demonstrating how authors’ self-representation subverted stereotypes of “primitive” against which Euro-American modernist artists and critics positioned themselves (4). Contributing to the burgeoning body of ethnic literary studies, as well as to discussions reevaluating modernism, Kent argues that these writers “confronted a crisis of representation parallel to that of the Modernist writers, and, also like the Modernists, they envisioned art as a response to the fragmentation of the modern world” (17). Pointing out that unique historical situations caused this representational crisis, Kent reframes writers’ genre and style choices as responses to modernist dislocation and pervasive cultural stereotypes rather than attempts to accurately represent reality, as realist writers did.

Kent investigates the causes of American cultural attitudes by drawing on migration patterns, laws, media images, popular entertainment, and anthropological trends. She demonstrate the pervasiveness of racial stereotypes on the legal and social identities of African Americans, Native Americans, and Jewish Americans, as well as the profound impact of geographic dislocation on writers and communities. Kent traces historical circumstances of forced and voluntary migration that caused modernist alienation in each culture, and her close readings of two main texts in each chapter map divergences and commonalities within each literary tradition. Kent charts how these three literary traditions have used similar methodological approaches such as experimenting with genre forms to resist cultural stereotypes, yet she demonstrates how and why these choices vary (anthropology vs. free indirect discourse, fiction vs. autobiography) according to each culture’s unique historical circumstances.

Native Americans’ historical experience of forced assimilation, via Indian removal and mandatory participation in boarding schools, caused authors to resist cultural assimilation by integrating oral stories into novels and to resist the role of “authentic” native informant by writing fiction. Kent asserts: “Native American writers have adopted and adapted writing as a mimetic response to forced cultural assimilation, as a discursive tool against colonialism” (83–84). Outlining the ways Okanogan Indian Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood (1927) does not fit typical modernist definitions, Kent argues that the focus should be on Dove’s experimentation with the novel form and her break with literary traditions that favored autobiographical accounts from native informants. Drawing on Ezra Pound’s call to “‘make it new,’” Kent demonstrates how Dove’s inclusion of orality in the narrative manipulates the novel form and preserves Okanogan culture (7, 84). Reading these authors through a socio-cultural lens allows Kent to redirect scholarship in the direction of authors’ literary missions and away from debates about “authorship and authenticity” (88) such as critics’ focus on Dove’s “Euro-American male collaborator, anthropologist L.V. McWhorter” (87). Dove’s use of romance conventions (the villain loses and the novel ends in marriage) and her formulaic happy ending become subversion in the context of Euro-American readers’ expectations that Native American autobiographical narratives end with tragic or vanishing Indians (76–77).

In contrast to Native American writers’ refusal to assimilate, African American modernists used literary forms to prove their humanity through assimilation to literary traditions. Contrasting forced assimilation of the former with forced legal and social segregation of the latter, Kent makes a compelling argument that both assimilation to and separation from Euro-American literary traditions can become resistance when seen in different cultural contexts. In another circumstance, Jewish immigrants endured exile from their homeland in order to escape oppressive circumstances, and their project in America was to create a new identity. Abraham Cahan’s literary response was to subvert dominant stereotypes about Jewish Americans through elimination of dialect. However, like Hurston, Anzia Yezierska chose to use dialect to recover and preserve cultural traditions.

The most intriguing discussion involves Kent’s examination of varying approaches to African American modernism, in “African Americans...