Editor’s Introduction: Gender, Transnationalism, and Ethnic Identity

Working against fixed and universalized notions of identity and borders—via critics and theorists such as Hortense J. Spillers, Renya Ramirez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Hazel Carby, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Werner Sollors, and others—the articles in this issue demonstrate the important scholarly work that results when definitions and parameters that are assumed to be stable become subject to interrogation and reconstruction. The title, “Gender, Transnationalism, and Ethnic Identity,” refers to the themes with which the authors engage as they examine the multiple and mobile nature of identities. Describing the complications of black female identity, Spillers refers to herself as

a locus of confounded identities. … so loaded with mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean… . In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, … assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.

(65)

Spillers calls attention to the cultural and historical sediment weighing down her identity and the need to exert her own “inventiveness” to construct a “truer word” about that identity. Beyond simply engaging in a deconstructive exercise to unsettle conventional thinking about the fixed and stable grounds on which identity supposedly rests, the articles in this issue offer productive approaches to interrogate this thinking and inventive models for how we might speak a truer—that is, a more nuanced and contingent—word about identity. Similar to Gerald Vizenor’s project in Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (1994), the authors here dismantle dominant notions of identity in order to reconstruct it “with imagination and the performance of new stories” (17) in more politically and culturally empowering ways.

Kristen Lillvis demonstrates the cultural empowerment that results from reconstructing gender categories. Utilizing Spillers’s arguments about the power of African American maternal inheritance to challenge conventional hierarchies, Lillvis examines how acts of motherly love empower an oppressed race in Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction story, “Bloodchild” (1984). According to Lillvis, Butler, unlike Spillers, “positions the father as an equal progenitor of maternal power” by extending the possibility of maternity to the males of a racially ambiguous colony of humans, or Terrans, who have been enslaved on the planet of the insect-like Tlic. Lillvis argues that Butler’s granting of maternal power to the father allows her story to contribute to larger scholarly conversations about the convergence of psychoanalytic, critical race, and postcolonial theories. Specifically, because both male and female Terrans have access to the mother’s nonphallic authority, the entire community can utilize this maternal power to destroy hierarchies and create a future free from oppression. The liberatory politics of Butler’s fictional world and the empowering relationships and new cultural identities that result are products of reimagined sexual and gender boundaries.

Keith Michael Green and Tuire Valkeakari also explore the complex boundaries of gender in relation to black masculinity and manhood. Green discusses Henry Bibb’s fascinating manipulation of his status as a husband and father, as well as his use of sympathetic models of white masculinity from the genres of the prison and Indian captivity narrative, to appeal to readers and represent himself as a “free” subject in his 1849 narrative. Green demonstrates how Bibb’s reclamation of his identities as a husband and father, in particular, are complicated by the heteropatariachal, racist, and imperialist context in which he writes. Indeed, in order to construct an idealized black masculinity and align himself with white men, he misrepresents Southern white prisoners and Southeastern Native Americans, emphasizes his heterosexuality, and appeals to middle-class and settler sympathies. Green examines how Bibb’s problematic project of validating black male identity by marginalizing that of others calls attention to the literary and historical contexts of the various forms of bondage influencing the slave narrative. In order to better comprehend the “full complexity and sophistication” of the slave narrative, Green argues, a multi-generic approach is required.

Valkeakari also discusses models of black manhood in Guy Johnson’s Standing at the Scratch Line (1998), a novel seemingly dominated...