Editor’s Introduction: Rescripting Ethnic Bodies and Subjectivities

After a blog I wrote about the Trayvon Martin case was posted, I received a piece of hate mail that ended with a rant about my own racial status, religion, and body. The contents of the e-mail are too obscene to reproduce here, yet what fascinated me was how quickly my (Jewish) body itself became a source of anxiety in this racist rant. For ethnic subjects of any sort, it seems that the body is always a highly overdetermined entity. The dominant society writes scripts of subjectivity onto this space, often involving hypersexuality or its opposite, violence or warmth, rage or joy, and other affective states. Ethnic subjects themselves are often supposed to perform in a certain manner. Watching a minstrel show in Copenhagen in which the bodies cavort on stage, Helga Crane in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) is both appalled and enthralled. This issue of MELUS takes up the vexed subject of the ways that the ethnic body becomes a kind of text. It also considers how ethnic authors struggle to rescript the performative space of the body and engender alternative modes of subjectivity.

One mode for the rescripting of subjectivity lies in a reconsideration of the figure of the ethnic mother. Enslaved African American mothers were defined as breeders and denied all legal rights; post-slavery, they were still characterized as “mammies” or “jezebels” and thus further denied subjectivity by stereotypical imaging. Toni Morrison’s fiction often works to revise this cultural legacy regarding the body/subjectivity of the mother and to demarcate an alternative way of thinking through maternal identities. As Naomi Morgernstern notes in “Maternal Love/Maternal Violence: Inventing Ethics in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy,” Morrison has presented numerous provocative examples of the bonds that exist between enslaved women and their children. Morrison’s work also repeatedly takes up what Morgenstern terms a primal scene of traumatic separation between the enslaved mother and the child in order to examine the relationship between violence and the demands of maternal love. Morgenstern focuses on two features of Morrison’s maternal ethics: her preoccupation “with subjects on the threshold of being—emerging, protolinguistic subjects” and with “women who have little or no legal protection, characters who are always already located in the space of ‘wilderness’ (Morrison’s term) or in the space of ethics.” Arguing that “wilderness and ethics” are nearly interchangeable in Morrison’s fiction “because ethics emerges, as many thinkers have reminded us, precisely when and where established legal and moral codes fail to comprehend and protect,” Morgenstern focuses on Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) to explore what she terms a distinctly maternal gift that the mother can give the child—a message (even if not fully received) that might become the foundation for new formations of ethics and subjectivity.

Jean Wyatt’s essay “The Economic Grotesque and the Critique of Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby” also turns to the ways bodies and subjectivities are imprinted. Wyatt’s focus, however, is how capitalism contributes to this scripting. Wyatt argues that Tar Baby (1981) uses a specific mode—satire—to attack capitalism and suggests that the novel creates an economic grotesque that saturates consciousness and distorts thinking and feeling. Wyatt’s Marxian analysis allows her to highlight an important historical dimension of Tar Baby in which the poverty of African slaves imported to work the Caribbean sugar plantations can be linked to the contemporary economic situation of African Americans and African Caribbeans who inhabit the novel’s island setting. Wyatt also foregrounds elements of playfulness and satire in the novel that have a serious purpose: “Tar Baby’s wide-ranging critique targets the ways individual engagement in capitalism deforms self-image, sexual desire, and love; and on a more global level, the novel suggests the ways that capitalism has disadvantaged black people and harmed natural ecosystems through the centuries.”

In “Disease, Disability, and the Alien Body in the Literature of Sui Sin Far,” Jennifer Barager Sibara also considers a biopolitical dimension of the scripting of ethnic bodies. More specifically, her essay focuses on how scientific and medical discourses...