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5 Disorienting Regionalism Jacob Riis, the City, and the Chinese Question 124 In the first two sections of this book, I argued against the critical consensus that pastoral regionalism turns away from the social problems attending capital and imperial expansion. My readings assert that the genre of regional writing helped make sense of these problems by narrating figures of cultural difference as potential participants in national culture. In this reading, genteel regional fiction negotiates literary representations of persons who are illegible in the logic of realist literature, describing them as familiar subjects in familiar literary terms. Pastoral regionalism is thus the signal genre for the accommodation of ethnicity in American fiction and culture. In this final section, I turn to urban local-color fiction. I look at Jacob Riis’s 1890 How the Other Half Lives (HtOHL), and in the following chapter I look at novels about Tammany Hall. By turning to urban fiction, I close the circle of this project. As we have seen in writers like Jewett, Garland, and Frederic, the roots of general problems in industrial capitalism (such as immigration and bourgeois selfestrangement ) are attributed to eastern cities. The crises in identity and community that these urban problems evoke become the backdrop for pastoral regionalism’s master plot. While I have been asking how urban material is processed in outlying locations, here I ask whether regionalism ’s project had affinities with urban texts that also interrogate the same nexus of location, identity, and community. I contend that pastoral and urban fictions share narrative strategies, relying on similar ideas about the local’s relation to the national. Urban and pastoral local color—particularly slumming literature—share strategies by which the observer/narra- tor arrives at a sense of individual wholeness by contrasting his or her sense of self with that of strangers or foreigners. Urban local color’s narrative practice of slumming and pastoral regionalism’s practice of tourism each rely on a narrator’s ability to occupy the twinned position of participant and observer. The two genres share similar techniques that draw on tourism and observation: a reliance on descriptions of folkways, the use of dialect, the imaginative exchange of natives and strangers. By privileging the tension between estranged narrators and strange subjects, pastoral and urban regionalism rely on similar appeals to the audiences’ desire for travel and for authentic experience. Urban local color is not exactly parallel to pastoral regionalism. Rather, urban local color replaces past/temporality with space/proximity, engaging the very historical facts that pastoral local color suppresses. Peopling the narratives of urban local color are “real” strangers: immigrants, tramps, workers, partially assimilated ethnic populations. In depicting cultural and ethnic differences that exist simultaneously with a standard, if equally fictional, American middle-class experience, urban local color makes the stranger and the native not merely likenesses of each other but like each other. Pastoral regionalism suggests that cultural difference might be compatible with American political citizenship, but urban local color phrases that possibility negatively. Cultural difference might produce political difference and so must be disarticulated from ideas of American citizenship. I believe that any analysis of Riis will bear out a convergence of narrative techniques between urban and pastoral regionalism, but it is equally important to note the similarities in their readership. The difference is that in pastoral regionalism, the reader—middle class, white, and urban—is asked to recollect the past, with all the market implications that entails. In urban local color, though, the same normative audience is asked to reform—to take an active role in the production of ethnicity, community , and space. The motivation behind urban local color was not, then, to assuage the reader but to scandalize and recruit. The same audiences likely to read pastoral regional fiction were, if not identical to the bourgeois readers of reform journalism like that of Jacob Riis interpolated as nearly identical through pastoral and urban regionalism’s shared narrative strategies. The object of urban local color was not to preserve or to chart the survival of distinct local traits but to reform cultural differences into political homogeneity. Cultural and political differences, uneasily balanced around figures of ethnicity, are always in conflict, always poised temporally to undermine each other. In HtOHL, Riis’s emphasis on ethnic differences seems discordant next to his overall project of political reform—reforming the body politic as well as reforming immigrant communities to participate in that Jacob Riis, the City, and the Chinese Question 125 body. Before I analyze...

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