Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries

Chapter 14. The Art of Assimilation: Ironies, Ambiguities, Aesthetics

CHAPTER 14 The Art of Assimilation: Ironies, Ambiguities, Aesthetics Michael P. Kramer Ironies Circa 1990, the heyday of ethnic literary study. African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans were all boldly claiming their place in the academy, demanding critical attention and respect for neglected literatures that they jealously claimed as their own. Canons were exploding everywhere, curricula were being challenged and rewritten, and faculties were being confounded and reconfigured.1 The intellectual movement of ethnic literary studies in the last decade of the twentieth century was markedly centrifugal, away from an encroaching cultural mainstream, away from the phenomenon that Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, in the first decade of the century, called ‘‘The Melting-Pot.’’ The objectives of the new movement (cultural, political, and personal) were particularist—the discovery, assertion, and celebration of difference. The movement was buoyed by quasi-essentialist assumptions and quasiromantic nationalism—pervasive, if often unarticulated and unacknowledged —that linked personal identity and spiritual health to the reclamation of cultural heritage and opposition to assimilation. Students and scholars looked to literature for glimpses of difference, of ethnic pride and purity, and they recoiled when the texts themselves suggested otherwise. Minority students looked for cultural heroes and for role models for themselves—not necessarily as they were but as they felt they should be. (Nonminority students looked on jealously and identified vicariously.) So while they read 304 Chapter 14 W. E. B. Du Bois’s cultural-nationalist The Souls of Black Folk voraciously, they didn’t know quite what to do with Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. They would take hold of it, with its undisguised accommodationist message, cleverly twisting it this way and that, searching for evidence of resistance, of mimicry, of ‘‘puttin’ on ol’ massa’’—or they would put it aside.2 But the literature of difference also could be seen to contain something surprising and troubling and, finally, fascinating. Those of us trained in broader Americanist perspectives, particularly those of Sacvan Bercovitch and Werner Sollors, tended to regard ethnic literatures with a skeptical, unreconstructed Americanist’s eye, to gaze ‘‘beyond ethnicity’’ toward the larger culture in which it did its cultural work, suspicious of proprietary particularism and alert to the ‘‘rites of assent’’ that both constrained and energized the writing.3 With Bercovitch, we looked with wonder at nineteenth -century German church historian Philip Schaff, who came to the United States in 1844 ‘‘to save emigrant Pennsylvania Germans from the dangers of Americanization [and] stayed to join the consensus,’’ marveled at ‘‘the Jewish anarchist Paul Goodman berating the country for abandoning its promise,’’ and then looked at ‘‘the descendant of American slaves, Martin Luther King, Jr., denouncing injustice as a violation of the American Way.’’4 While consensus historians may have been blind to the conflict and diversity of American culture as charged by oppositional critics, we believed that scholars who focused obsessively on diversity and dissensus were equally myopic, guilty of what Ulrich Beck has recently called ‘‘autistic ethnicism .’’5 Because they wanted to see something else, they repeatedly missed what we thought so obvious in the texts: the irresistible power of America to make Americans. This was the irony of ethnic literary studies: the literary works thought to be a hedge against assimilation were themselves, to borrow Leslie Fiedler ’s term, ‘‘acts of assimilation,’’ inextricably bound up in the myth of America, always in earnest conversation with it.6 Even if they seemed markedly different, ethnic writings were no less expressions of American culture than the writings of Mark Twain or Kate Chopin or William Dean Howells. Indeed, their authors were not merely striving to be American but were already, ineluctably American—and not only avowed assimilationists, such as Booker T. Washington or Charles Eastman.7 Opposition, too, had American roots. When Zitkala Ša provocatively declared her belief in paganism, she used terms borrowed from the poetry of Wordsworth, no doubt learned Art of Assimilation 305 in American missionary school.8 Du Bois, the great proponent of African culture, the great defender of the souls of black folk, saw his project fundamentally in terms of American exceptionalism.9 It was not that cultural otherness did not matter: plainly, Du Bois’s agenda was profoundly different from that of Washington. But otherness was only part of the story—and a part that could not stand in for the whole. In my case, I had begun studying ethnic literature because, like...