The Trials of the Ethnic Novel: Susan Choi’s American Woman and the Post-Affirmative Action Era

To make a large but I think useful generalization, the task of anti-racist literary work throughout most of the twentieth century was to establish the idea that racialized people are not at the mercy of their classification. In 1900, African-American writer Pauline Hopkins could envision the novel as a way of making black people human, a process that depended on the novel’s particular ability to produce resonant accounts of the individual and his or her social order. In her preface to Contending Forces she wrote: “No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history” (14). Hopkins’s phrasing—to make men and women—outlines a biopolitic of racialized cultural reproduction in which the African-American artist must rely on trustworthy narrative conventions such as thoughts, feelings, fire, and romance, to produce beings recognizable as humans. Nearly 90 years later, Maxine Hong Kingston has her hero Wittman Ah Sing tell his actor friends that the problem is not the roles they play but whether they are at the center of a soap opera: “Just because they let you wear a nurse’s uniform instead of a Suzie Wong dress doesn’t mean you’re getting anywhere nearer to the heart of that soap. You’re not the ones they tune in every day to weep over. We need to be part of the daily love life of the country, to be shown and loved continuously until we’re not inscrutable anymore” (310).

In her emphasis on the political significance of sentimentality and its ability to generate narrative interest—over whom will the nation weep? Whose story will they tune in to hear?—Kingston similarly posits the journey of racialized bodies into civic equality as one supported by particular kinds of narrative production. Hopkins and Kingston suggest, in short, that there is something universally compelling about narrative that transcends race, something powerful enough to make investment in the protagonist trump what we have learned to call an investment in whiteness.¹

Ethnic cultural production is, like ethnic biological reproduction, connected to state biopolitics. Indeed, Hopkins and Kingston suggest that ethnic cultural producers might willingly enter the realm of biopolitical management insofar as they attempt to produce humans who will be administered in a modern system whose focus is the generation and management of life as the state’s source of power. This is not to say that authors such as Hopkins and Kingston understand their work in these theoretical terms or are in league with the state. It is rather to point to the common belief that social inequality 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. And this belief comes with a corollary: that writing, reading, teaching about, and writing about ethnic literature is a liberatory political act because ethnic literature challenges dominant ideologies about the supposed lesser capacities of minority groups that cause them to be less socially valued. In Hopkins’s case, the question of a life’s value was complicated by the fact that African-American slaves were literally quantified by the government as two-fifths less of a human being than white citizens. They were valued only for the capacities that were not human—intelligent free labor that reproduced itself and could be kept under inhuman living conditions—and had to be revalued in terms of all the capacities that Reconstruction-era mainstream America might consider worthy of full civil and human rights. Moreover, even a casual glance at scholarship on the novel and its history will find many accounts of the novel as a political genre that has had powerful effects on people’s material conditions, not to mention that censorship or sponsorship of literature on the part of various states acknowledges that power.² Clearly, the argument for the political...