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

In Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing, Dean Franco raises important questions concerning changes in conceptions of ethnicity in America. The study examines ethnic American literary and critical writing with an emphasis on Jewish and Chicano literature, drawing on theories of trauma, and diaspora, as well as postcolonial studies. Modelling a comparative approach to ethnicliterary criticism, Franco wishes to bridge the gap in existing scholarship, which distinguishes between an early generation of ethnic Americans of European heritage, a group widely regarded as white, and a more recent generation from colonized or third-world countries, construed in racial terms. Instead, he illustrates how certain critical methods can help us approach different literatures and at the same time “rethink the objectivity of our critical tools” (24).

The book is divided into two sections entitled “Traumatic History and Ethnic American Literature” and “The Location of Cultures.” There is a productive symmetry in the ways in which tropes, themes, and questions are revisited across the five chapters. The introduce two simultaneous but different historical moments as far as first the development of Jewish and Chicano thought are concerned. The opening chapter asks how Jewish literature can respond to trauma when it becomes appropriated and reified by popular culture. The second chapter, on the other hand, confronts the state of ignorance in America about Chicano history as, contrary to the attention the Holocaust receives, Chicanos’ traumatic past is either ignored or overwritten by official American history. This dichotomy is complicated in the third chapter, which inquires into whether the strategies of cultural mourning outlined in the previous chapters are appropriate to describe how African-American culture responds to the history of slavery. Mourning and reparation in this first section become defined according to the cultural specificities of the different ethnic groups, and initial remarks or comparisons between texts are revisited. For example, juxtaposed with African-American writing, which engages with the material consequences of trauma through social criticism of racism, Chicano and Jewish American writing on trauma, however different they initially appear to be, offer a similar, namely allegorical, approach to traumatic histories. Similarities and differences are then contingent upon each other and context-bound, and this seems to inspire the general philosophy of the book.

In the introduction, Franco outlines the advantages of employing a comparative approach. For Franco, such an approach builds on the pioneering work of ethnic studies, particularly the ways in which the field has interrogated and expanded theories of the nation state. While a number of critics, such as Lisa Lowe, point to the risks of prematurely adopting a comparative approach to ethnic literatures, Franco argues that “not to compare is to miss the opportunity to critique the postethnic school of thought, and to examine the historical and literary development of social identities in relation to one another” (20). More interesting than these two often-cited arguments is perhaps his suggestion that this method “can be a strategy for addressing the postmodern problems of knowing and the pragmatic problems of doing while maintaining respect for multiple cultures and literatures” (6). According to Franco, “an ethic [or method] of comparison” (6), which is firmly placed in the context of history and geography, can contribute to the practical and political goals of ethnic studies.

“The Jew who got away,” the title of the first chapter, refers to the Jew who lives in the present but looks towards the past for answers, and in particular to the category of the Jewish- American writer who opts for different strategies in order to negotiate (but not necessarily resolve) the tension between survivor and belated witness of the Holocaust. Franco reads Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm, two novels which criticize in their different ways “the wish-fulfilling tendencies of America and American Jews and the archive-ism of Holocaust melancholy, respectively” (37). Indicative of these attitudes towards the Holocaust in popular American culture are...