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Reviewed by:
  • Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature
  • Dr. Carol Batker
Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature. By Catherine Rottenberg. Lebanon: Dartmouth College Press. 2008.

In Performing Americanness, Catherine Rottenberg argues through close readings of Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska's texts, that narratives of passing and assimilation offer a complex challenge to "hegemonic notions of Americanness" (4). She uses performativity to highlight how characters become intelligible in relation to dominant gender, class, and racialized "norms," which they contest as they "cite and mime" them throughout the novels (6).

Rottenberg begins with Abraham Cahan's character, David Levinsky, whose gender performance fails to live up to cultural ideals in Eastern Europe and to dominant understandings of masculinity in the U.S. She demonstrates how Levinsky "must attempt to approximate dominant (gender) norms" to be intelligible but "can never fully embody a specific norm once and for all" (26). This movement among conflicting social norms destabilizes gender categories and offers a radical critique of Americanness, according to Rottenberg. When Rottenberg is sensitive to these cultural conflicts, her analysis is contextualized and successful. However, Rottenberg's focus on identification and desire rather than historical and political negotiation limits her theoretical and specific reading of race and ethnicity in the texts of Yezierska, Johnson, and Larsen.

For example, Rottenberg suggests that Jewish writers created characters who successfully identified and desired to be white to gain racial privilege, a strategy denied African American writers. Describing Adele Lindner as a new woman in Arrogant Beggar, she argues that "Jewishness, whiteness, and femaleness were being (re)configured as increasingly compatible with one another" (98). According to Rottenberg, this representation contrasts sharply with Nella Larsen's depiction of Helga Crane in Quicksand, since "a black woman was always already oversexed, Helga can find no way of successfully fashioning herself as a new woman" (106). Rottenberg's lack of historical grounding keeps her from seeing that Yezierska's characters do not simply identify as white, and like Larsen, they too reject the dominant version of the new woman. In Salome of the Tenements, Yezieriska exposes the racialized positioning of Sonya Vrunsky who is seen as oversexed and a prostitute from the perspective of white, upper class gentiles regardless of Sonya's class position or unsuccessful intermarriage. Both Adele and Sonya offer subtle revisions of class and gender norms in Jewish cultural terms as well.

To examine the shifting and difficult history of race and ethnicity during the Progressive Era, Rottenberg needs to take into account the specific discourses of segregation as well as nativism and anti-immigration restriction. Her discussion of immigrant groups as "off-white" would be more substantive if she used Roger Daniels' work to outline racialized discourses of foreignness, including the writings of 1924 law-makers who claimed America was being "diluted by a stream of alien blood" (Guarding the Golden Door, 55). Rottenberg could expand her analysis of the African American textual performance of race to include Jessie Fauset and others' strategic distancing of their characters from foreigners because of this discourse, for example (Batker 71-88). If Rottenberg's analysis of performativity used political context to build the contestatory discourses through which characters in these novels became intelligible, then her analysis would speak more carefully to the complexity of racial and ethnic affiliations during this turbulent time. [End Page 202]

Dr. Carol Batker
Empire State College
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