Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars

Introduction

BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page ix / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [-9], (3) Lines: 24 to 58 ——— -1.46098pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-9], (3) Introduction Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?” “Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden force of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself.A symptom that precisely turns“we”into a problem,perhaps makes it impossible . The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my differences arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves On Ethnic Modernism Ethnic moderns have been the strangers in the house of American high modernism . Tom Buchanan’s view of the nation’s changing racial makeup in Fitzgerald ’s The Great Gatsby expresses the anxiety many felt during the early 1920s over the white race being overrun by the“colored”and immigrant masses. Similarly , advocates of literary high modernism have been unable and sometimes unwilling to account for ethnic and minority texts as modern. Du Bois’s lament BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page x / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [-10], (4) Lines: 58 to 64 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-10], (4) about the status of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century and Kristeva’s later recognition of the “stranger within” are vivid and accurate depictions of the position ethnic and minority others have occupied within the nation-state in general and within American modernist literary discourse in particular. Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars attempts to reframe the way we conceive of modernist literature of this period and at the same time challenge conventional images of America and American literary history. By engaging with modernist literary studies from the perspective of minority discourse, I aim to achieve two main goals. First, I suggest that we rethink and redefine modernism with the help of critical tools that postmodernism and ethnic and postcolonial studies have introduced. Consequently ,I question the validity of modernism’s claim to the neutrality of culture, the leftover cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment project. Second, I argue that American literary high modernism grew out of a racially biased and often xenophobic historical context that therefore necessitated a politically conservative and often prejudiced definition of modernism in America. The writers I discuss represent an international cast of ethnic artists, all of whom address the condition of modernity within the United States, in its borderlands with Mexico, and from the eastern, western, and southern ports that are its cultural contact zones with Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Strangers at Home examines American ethnic modernist fiction written by African American, Native American, and immigrant (Eastern European Jewish and Mexican American) writers during the era of cultural modernism. In the first half of the twentieth century new groups of American authors entered the literary scene with an unprecedented force and called into question the aesthetics and politics of high modernism. Up to the 1970s, critics focused their analyses of high modernism, both in Europe and the United States, on middleclass male white writers who were often sympathetic to racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and authoritarian politics even while being radical in the formal...