Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature (review)

Performing Americanness is the kind of unprecedented, richly comparative study that significantly changes the nature of the conversation by cogently presenting how African-American and Jewish-American writers of the early twentieth century narrated the critical categories of identity that enlivened their era. Rottenberg begins with the important premise that both minority literary traditions experienced vital transformations at roughly the same moment; aware of their inherent liminality, writers from both backgrounds strategically created a place for themselves within American letters analogous to the struggle of each group to accommodate itself in American society as a whole. The seminal novels addressed in Rottenberg's six lean and lively chapters include classics of the Harlem Renaissance such as James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen's novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), alongside representative texts of the early Jewish-American literary canon: Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements (1923), Arrogant Beggar (1927), and others.

In my courses on the dynamic of "Passing" in twentieth-century American literature I was long ago struck by the glaring fact that both Johnson's and Cahan's troubled protagonists conclude their narrative journeys by expressing regret for having somehow failed to keep faith with their own better natures. Rottenberg is the first writer I have come across to successfully delineate the implications of that shared narrative dynamic, and she does so in ways that greatly complicate the notion of the individual's "authenticity" or "essence" while also raising important questions about each group's collective identity. And of course such an analysis is fully warranted; after all, during the period that Rottenberg examines, Jewishness was still mediated within a racial discourse of identity, not only by others but by Jews themselves. Thus, she argues that the conclusions of both Autobiography and Rise of David Levinsky alert readers to "the coercive aspect of race identification, and the punishments meted out to subjects who attempt to identify differently" (p. 118). Rottenberg seeks to transcend the well-worn paradigm of reading early Jewish American works as struggles with assimilation by aligning them with the performative/reiterative nature of passing narratives. In this context she adroitly draws on Judith Butler's groundbreaking work on social identity and performativity: "performativity, as the most efficacious form of positive power, tends to reinforce the hegemonic order and upholds existing hierarchal power relations. Reiteration produces the illusion of an identifiable and stable referent for regulatory ideals" (p. 28). Butler's theoretical paradigm exposes the inevitable dissonance between normative roles and actual social behavior or lived experience. Hence, Rottenberg is excited by the premise that the novels she discusses each "dramatize a certain moral imperative—the necessity of ensuring that, at any given historical moment, there are always many possible, socially sanctioned, and thus normative ways of performing Americanness" (p. 15). Precisely because hegemonic order requires the reiteration of racial codes for its survival, avenues for potentially subversive variation open up with exactly the same frequency.

Deeply engaged with the critical stakes over whether Larsen's Passing, a milestone in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, should be read as an argument for passing as a subversive cultural strategy or one that merely serves the individual's separate survival, Rottenberg posits that its two female protagonists each dramatize the "regulatory ideals that circulate and operate in the service of particular relations of power" (p. 35) and, even more significantly, reveal how in the dominant culture, "though whiteness is privileged over and against blackness . . . the very repetition and circulation of different, and, at times contradictory, racial norms create the possibility of subversion" (p. 50). Similarly, Yezierska's fiction, while exposing the rigidity of American class structures of the 1920s (which bear roughly similar regulatory ideals to the racial norms critiqued in the racial novel of passing), present...