From Allegories of Identity to Sites of Dialogue

Diaspora 4:2 1995 From Allegories of Identity to Sites of Dialogue Paulla Ebron Stanford University Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing University of California, Santa Cruz In the last decade, a set of impassioned debates on race and representation have made minority writing an important national political arena. At the heart of the issue is the right to speak and to be heard in US American politics: Whose voices will be counted as "the American public"? In the context of these debates, fiction and first-person narratives written by minorities have assumed an extraordinary theoretical and political significance. Read as voices of a people, they have become guides to minority culture and community . In this charged moment, conversations held in university classrooms about "communities" made in novels influence policy reconceptualizations and enter political contests. This essay investigates the concepts of culture and community formed in this academicpopular intersection. What possibilities do these concepts of minority culture and community open as they enter United States political debates? What problems do they bear?1 In framing this inquiry, political and intellectual context are inextricably mixed. Our particular agenda is to examine the ways novels and first-person narratives by Asian American and African American authors are used to formulate nationalist-populist notions ofminority identity and community. Discussions about race and ethnicity that draw on these texts build programs for defining and affirming community. These discussions empower minorities by fine-tuning a community-based voice—that is, a form of agency creatively forged from marginalization. Yet, we argue, these same discussions can become programs of containment to the extent that they promote agendas in which communities should be imagined units ofindependent difference from a dominant white center. In defining their empowering difference as a "speaking community" in relation to a dominant center, imagined as the source of language, minority communities become unable to speaktoeach other. Instead ofmerelycelebrating these segregating, center-focused enunciations, we argue for the importance ofdialogue that stretches from one marginto another. Diaspora 4:2 1995 We take as a starting point the need for an engaged but reflexive deployment of the notion of people of color. In moments of political solidarity, minorities have successfully formulated collectivities through the unity ofpeople ofcolor. For black and Asian Americans, this solidarity offers appropriate recognition ofour intertwined histories , for example, as domestic servants, as victims oflynching, or as the objects of exclusionary laws and regimes of terror in the United States. Yet black and Asian American histories also show striking contrasts, involving slave experience, class mobility, regional trajectories, ethnic fragmentation, immigration stories, and much more. Furthermore, African Americans and Asian Americans have been set against each other in powerful white stereotypes that depict them on opposite ends ofa continuum ofminority citizenship that reaches from criminality to successful assimilation. Community activists for each group find themselves working against distinct challenges, and the dominant structure of thinking about minorities often works against their making connections. Activists do not often make the connections between legislation against criminals , on the one hand, and legislation against immigrants, on the other, even as each draws from discriminatory racial categorization. In the universities, supporters ofethnic studies or affirmative action manage with difficulty to present a common front. Behind the visionary hope ofsolidarity, our separate challenges and distinct positions within structures of dominance create tensions. In this essay, our aim is to move beyond an easy rhetoric ofcollectivity to build tools ofdialogue among minorities. In our experience, political arguments among minorities often deploy varied "allegories ofidentity" through which each group respectively understands its history. Too often, each group uses its allegory to silence other stories as it competes to compose the narrative space of oppression and struggle. A beginning place for dialogue, then, is to recognize the allegorical ways we portray our discrimination and agency, in order to move from that recognition to respect for the possibilities ofother strategies ofidentity. We turn to novels, films, and memoirs not to blame their authors for identity politics (indeed, we discuss works we enjoy) but because these works are one key site from which public allegories are constructed. Public interpretations of news stories can work similarly; but that would be another essay. Our analysis involves several steps...