Narrative Privacy: Evading Ethnographic Surveillance in Fiction by Sherman Alexie, Rigoberto González, and Nam Le

As a method of anthropological inquiry predicated on observing and describing foreign cultures to institutional authorities, ethnography is a historically fraught form of compulsory visibility for indigenous people and people of color in the United States. From the early amateur and semi-professional forms produced by colonial explorers, missionaries, and traders to the later scientific, academic incarnations and the early twenty-first century's more self-reflexive, politically aware studies, ethnographic accounts have long shaped public knowledge and policies about indigenous and nonwhite peoples in the United States. If, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, "Imperialism and colonialism are the specific formations through which the West came to 'see,' to 'name,' and to 'know' indigenous communities," ethnography has been an authoritative meaning-making mechanism that enabled this colonial seeing, naming, and knowing (63).¹ Moreover, classical anthropology has insisted on unilateral visibility by dividing the world "in the form of us and them, of viewing subject and viewed object" (Chow 180). Peoples subjected to ethnographic study, objectified and assumed to be knowable and available to researchers, have historically experienced a form of compulsory visibility. This visibility compromises personal and communal understandings of privacy and makes the objectified peoples more vulnerable to dramatic social and cultural change. Contemporary practices of looking for differences between groups of people, objectifying otherness, and assuming the privilege of observing other cultures' bodies, sacred institutions, epistemologies, and stories, for example, are learned behaviors with colonial, ethnographic genealogies; they constitute an ethnographic gaze, or "a dominant mode of looking that is culturally sanctioned as well as circumscribed and often contested" (S. Smith 2). The continued vulnerability of individuals and communities to dominant ethnographic gazes—collectively, ethnographic surveillance—attests to the enduring, uneven power relations between powerful institutions, such as governments, universities, and publishing houses, and the nation's marginalized populations.²

Contemporary US literature is one of the heirs to legacies of ethnographic influence, as ethnographic inquiry continues to inform the way literature is produced and consumed "within an increasingly commodified literary marketplace" (Farebrother 117). Increasingly, representations of individuals' and communities' stories, epistemologies, and cultural practices circulate as literary commodities made available to curious readers. In her analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial travel writing, Mary Louise Pratt argues that any "ideology that construes seeing as inherently passive and curiosity as innocent cannot be sustained" (67). The authors under consideration in this essay extend Pratt's suspicion of curiosity to contemporary literary practices by directing readers' attention to how views of and curiosity about ethnic and indigenous characters are implicated in colonial ways of knowing and seeing the Other. Sherman Alexie, Rigoberto González, and Nam Le explore how storytelling by Native American, Mexican American, and Asian American authors still contend with a legacy of colonial power relations between "native informants" and their audiences.³ By explicitly drawing attention to the ways they limit readers' access to characters' lives, these authors challenge the role of native informant so often expected of nonwhite and indigenous authors by US audiences, instead creating spaces of narrative privacy in an act akin to what Audra Simpson terms "the staking of limits" ("On" 70).⁴ In doing so, Alexie, González, and Le theorize issues of access and visibility in contemporary ethnic and indigenous literature by using metafictional techniques to formally highlight the fictionality of their stories while also destabilizing readers' expectations of access to fictional characters. These writers also critically consider their potentially fraught positions as fiction writers of color in a nation still deeply influenced by ethnographic legacies of visibility and difference. They do so by drawing on contemporary discourses of privacy and access, terms with increasing relevance in a century marked by the dramatic expansion of the Internet and by post-9/11 surveillance politics. By considering ethnographic curiosity in recently politicized terms of privacy, access, and surveillance, Alexie, González, and Le illuminate the invasive and unequal nature of ethnographic imperatives in literature while recontextualizing contemporary discourses of visibility and privacy in much longer colonial histories.

Ethnographic Imperatives and Contemporary Ethnic and Indigenous US Literature...