Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars

Notes

BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 169 / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [169], (1) Lines: 0 to 40 ——— 12.97299pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [169], (1) Notes Introduction 1. Werner Sollors suggests that we use the conceptual tool of “ethnic modernism”as a period concept as well. He marks the temporal boundaries as between 1910 and 1950 (see “Ethnic Modernism, 1910–1950” 70–77). Another critic, Thomas J. Ferraro, also quotes Sollors, though somewhat differently, when explaining his inspiration for exploring the connections “between ethnicity and modernism” (“Avant-Garde Ethnics” 1). 2.When I use the term“ethnic,”I mean nonAnglo-Saxon and nonAnglo-centric texts and identities, which often also name “racialized” or nonwhite texts and identities. I am aware of the slippage between “race” and “ethnicity” here, but my goal is to make visible the pseudo-science of early-twentieth-century race theory so often called upon during the modernist era. By using the terms of race, culture, and ethnicity interchangeably, I wish to retain the signification of “otherness” or “difference” involved in all three terms. 3. For example, for an overview of the use of modernism and modernity in the field of history, see the review by Robert Wohl, “Heart of Darkness: Modernism and Its Historians.” 4. According to the Census Bureau’s “Census 2000” survey: California, Hawaii, and New Mexico have no racial majorities, thus making the demographic as well as economic , political, and/or social terms of racial “majority” or “minority” highly problematic (see Ritter,“California Racial Data Shifts”). 5. In his article Hassan gives a working definition in order to distinguish postmodernism from postmodernity:“For the moment, let me simply say that I mean postmodernism to refer to the cultural sphere, especially literature, philosophy, and the various arts, including architecture, while postmodernity refers to the geopolitical scheme, less order than disorder, which has emerged in the last decades. The latter, sometimes called postcolonialism,features globalization and localization,conjoined in erratic,often lethal, ways” (3). For a more detailed description of the terms, see the rest of Hassan’s article. 6. Jameson’s latest book on the subject, A Singular Modernity, comes to a conclusion about postmodernism’s persistent dependence on “what remain essentially modernist BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 170 / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [170], (2) Lines: 40 to 59 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [170], (2) categories of the new” (5) and about the unshakable hold of modernism (and for that matter, capitalism) as an ideology upon our present. 7. In response to Hugh Kenner’s desire to center Ezra Pound in the modernist canon (see Kenner, The Pound Era), Marjorie Perloff addresses the question of legacies in her article (see “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?”). 8. In another article, Marjorie Perloff voices a similar concern in her response to Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America.When discussing Michaels’s choice of“modernists” she faults him for the nonliterary criteria directing his agenda to equate modernism with racist homegrown“nativism”:“No matter that no one outside the American Studies classroom would so much as read the many minor ethnic novels that provide Michaels with his exempla” (“Modernism without the Modernists” 102). She then goes on to call Michaels an “anti-aestheticist” (103) whose brand of cultural studies would like to save literature, to preserve it as a field of study. But it will not do. For why do we need to study literature in order to learn about the identity politics of the 1920s? Surely there are more informative and efficient ways than to read dozens of what are largely undistinguished novels. What, in other words, can“literature”teach us that the study of American history, culture, and politics can’t? Indeed, I would posit that if literature has no other function than to be the privileged “carrier of cultural heritage,” its study will soon be anachronism. If we can offer our students nothing better than the moral imperative to read the...