The American Genome Project: A Biopolitical History of the Contemporary Ethno-racial Novel

As American readers approached the end of the twentieth century, we knew what the ethnic novel was supposed to do, and what it had been doing, through various iterations, for over 100 years from both reconciliatory and radical positions. The ethnic novel’s first task was to use realist style and historical specificity to give a convincing and sympathetic account of an ethnic or racial Other’s experience of the American social order and to suggest ways in which that experience, once understood, necessitated changes in social order that would allow the racialized individual, like the protagonist in a nonethnic novel, to be reconciled to interpellation into the nation. Such changes could range, as is well known, from abolishing slavery to just being a little nicer to one’s Jewish acquaintances. The logic of these narratives is paradoxical, like their forerunner the slave narrative. The slave narrative showcased an exception, someone who was startlingly (to the mainstream) different from the population of which s/he yet claimed to be representative, else there was no point to the argument—an individual but not too individuated. The act of writing, regardless of where it was on the scale from assimilationist to race-war separatist, presupposed a reading public trained to read the novel’s particular ability to bestow something like humanity on its protagonists and a nation with which the author was engaged. There were, unsurprisingly, problems with exoticizing, condescending, and ignorant texts and readings (we all have our favorite betê noire here), and these all folded into the way reading the ethnic novel became a familiar national pastime. Over its decades, the ethnic novel developed some secondary duties as it began to address not only the nonethnic mainstream, but also ethnic readers. It could be used to conceptualize and build ethnic identity and political solidarity as well as to explore the unique subjective development of those who, as Rey Chow describes it, are subject to a different psychoanalytic. Freud’s analysis of the self as experiencing thwarted narcissism, as having to give up love of oneself to be part of the social order, is premised on an opposition between self and society. Members of marginalized groups (“African American,” “Asian American,” and “Native American,” for example) are understood to belong to a group (culture or community) that mediates between the individual and society. They belong to an “extra category—one that is neither strictly a private, personal self nor strictly a public society that includes everybody” (141). It is doubtful whether everyone reading ethnic novels understood this with the sharpness of Chow (or earlier, W. E. B. Du Bois), but a kind of understanding of group identity was established.

Thus writing, reading, teaching about, and writing about ethnic literature came to be understood as a liberatory political act fundamental to the various ethnic movements for community building, advocacy, and radical social change. The San Francisco State University student strikers, to cite one instance of the rise of this dovetailing of literary and political ideologies, demanded the institutionalized study of ethnic narrative, both fictional and historical, as an integral part of the struggle for racial justice. This model of ethnic cultural production points to the common belief that a group’s lack of access to benefits enjoyed by the majority of society is at least in part attributable to the dominant majority’s lack of knowledge about—and therefore lack of sympathy for—various minorities and their experiences. It assumes that the thematic and factual content of ethnic literature—as understood through the situation and story of the protagonist—challenge dominant ideologies about the treatment and capacities of ethnic peoples that naturalize unequal treatment. In other words, the argument for the political value of ethnic American texts (whether imagined as pleas produced for dominant audiences or as community production) is grounded in the idea that ethnic peoples’ material realities are affected by state policy determined by citizens who can be influenced by narrative. The drive for institutionalization of ethnic cultural production (and the fights against it) testifies to this belief.

At the level...