Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African-American Writing (review)

"Ethnic literary criticism ought to be comparative," argues Dean J. Franco in this ambitious study, urging a departure from conventional single-ethnicity scholarship (6). But to do comparative criticism of ethnic American literatures well, one would have to be not only well informed in several ethnic literary and cultural traditions, but also an especially alert, sophisticated, and subtle thinker, adept at managing differences among both material histories and cultural vocabularies. One would need the imagination and the theoretical rigor to persist beyond facile likenesses or contrasts, risking moments of the incommensurate for the sake of conceptually illuminating alignments. Happily, Franco has just the sort of creative, syncretic mind and the substantial knowledge across several sub-fields to carry off these feats. Though often warned, he admits, against attempting to span the cultural production of such historically divergent peoples, Franco seems compelled to think across boundaries, and may indeed do his best work when challenged to yoke distant consonances. The result is a rich contribution to scholarship in the field of ethnic American literatures.

Comparative ethnic studies are in fact on the rise, mostly in the form of journal articles comparing texts from two traditions, or examining interracial relations within a single text. But evidence of a paradigm shift is gathering in recent important books like Anne Anlin Cheng's The Melancholy of Race (2001), and Daniel Y. Kim's Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow (2005), both of which draw at once from African American and Asian American sources. I know of no scholarly book, however, that crosses the particular lines Franco chooses (and the subject of the inclusion or non-inclusion of Jews and Jewish culture in "multiculturalism" is one to which his work makes a valuable contribution). Moreover, I have seen no book that searches out as deeply as does Franco's the theoretical problematics, the political stakes, the ethics, and the promises of this model of criticism. His study will help the field reevaluate its dominant paradigms, for a new moment of fruitfully dialogic multiethnic scholarship.

The propositional, experimental tone of the book's introduction draws the reader into the revisionary project of setting literatures in dialogue, to let them unsettle one another, and the essentializing assumptions of the field's usual practices. Their doing so depends upon Franco's convincing presentation of three ethnic traditions, which draws richly on the archives of their literary and theoretical texts. (African-American tradition is a less substantial presence in the book, which primarily pairs Jewish and Chicano literature and critique, but the one chapter dealing with African American work is an engaging, ethical intervention in the politics of the reception of Toni Morrison's Beloved).

Another strength is Franco's nuanced treatment of ethnic cultures; he is at once mindful of the historical losses and material suffering of the minority populations whose lives give rise to literature, and insistent upon an anti-essentialist, open-ended notion of cultures. Historical traumas produce ethnic American identities, according to this book, but these identities continue to be open to historical flux. Franco usefully critiques the positions of well-known scholars of ethnicity and literature, notably Werner Sollors, David Hollinger, and Walter Benn Michaels, countering reductive arguments that disregard the lived experience of ethnicity or race or the power of ethnic cultural legacies. Historically scrupulous and evidencing a steady ethical commitment, Franco's arguments also offer an appealingly open-minded, searching quality, so that cultures are honored but not rendered static; the energies of collating and collecting are balanced by an ethos of precise distinctions; and the assembling of what the chapter on Alejandro Morales calls "the Archive of cultural knowledge" is tempered by an awareness of cultural "malleability" that favors "ever-expanding archives over closed canons" (59, 3, 70). Perhaps this book's finest quality is the balance it strikes between tough-mindedness, where respect for others' lives and stories is concerned, and flexibility, where there are opportunities...