STUDIES IN AMERICAN POPULAR
HlSTORY AND CULTURE
Edited by
Jerome Nadelhaft
University of Maine
A ROUTLEDGE SERIES
STUDIES IN AMERICAN POPULAR HISTORY
AND CULTURE
JEROME NADELHAFT, General Editor
THE FACTORY GIRL AND
THE SEAMSTRESS
Imagining Gender and Class in
Nineteenth Century American
Fiction
Amal Amireh
WRITING JAZZ
Race, Nationalism, and Modern
Culture in the 1920s
Nicholas M.Evans
AUTOMOBILITY
Social Changes in the American
South, 1909±1939
Corey T.Lesseig
ACTORS AND ACTIVISTS
Politics, Performance, and
Exchange Among Social Worlds
David A.Schlossman
STUDIES IN THE LAND
The Northeast Corner
David C.Smith
FIRST Do No HARM
Empathy and the Writing of
Medical Journal Articles
Mary E.Knatterud
PIETY AND POWER
Gender and Religious Culture in
the American Colonies, 1630±
1700
Leslie Lindenauer
RACE-ING MASCULINITY
Identity in Contemporary
U.S. Men's Writing
John Christopher Cunningham
CRIME AND THE NATION
Prison Reform and Popular
Fiction in Philadelphia, 1786±
1800
Peter Okun
FOOD IN FILM
A Culinary Performance of
Communication
Jane Ferry
DECONSTRUCTING POSTWWII NEW YORK CITY
The Literature, Art, Jazz and
Architecture of an Emerging
Global Capital
Robert Bennett
RETHINKING THE RED
SCARE
The Lusk Committee and New
York's Crusade against
Radicalism, 1919±1923
Todd J.Pfannestiel
HOLLYWOOD AND THE RISE
OF PHYSICAL CULTURE
Heather Addison
HOMELESSNESS IN
AMERICAN LITERATURE
Romaticism, Realism, and
Testimony
iii
John Allen
No WAY OF KNOWING
Crime, Urban Legends, and the
Internet
Pamela Donovan
THE MAKING OF THE
PRIMITIVE BAPTISTS
A Cultural and Intellectual
History of the Antimission
Movement, 1800±1840
James R.Mathis
WOMEN AND COMEDY IN
SOLO PERFORMANCE
Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, and
Roseanne
Suzanne Lavin
THE LITERATURE OF
IMMIGRATION AND
RACIAL FORMATION
Becoming White, Becoming
Other, Becoming American in
the Late Progressive Era
Linda Joyce Brown
ROUTLEDGE
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ISBN 0-203-32772-1 Master e-book ISBN
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, Linda Joyce, 1967The literature of immigration and racial formation : becoming white, becoming
other, becoming American in the late Progressive Era / Linda Joyce Brown.
p. cm. —(Studies in American popular history and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-94931-9 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Emigration and immigration in literature. 3. American literature—Women
authors—History and criticism. 4. Immigrants’ writings,
American—History and criticism. 5. Difference (Psychology) in
literature. 6. Passing (Identity) in literature. 7. Women immigrants
in literature. 8. Ethnicity in literature. 9. Whites in literature.
10. Race in literature. I. Title. II. Series: American popular
history and culture (Routledge (Firm))
PS228.E55B76 2004
810.9′3522′09041–dc22
2004001247
vi
For Al Cheverine
and
For my parents, Mary Dostert Brown and Paul
Asa Brown
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Preface Questioning Race, Questioning
Whiteness
xi
Chapter One
Introduction: Race, Whiteness, and Women
Immigrants
1
Chapter Two
Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin’s
Claim to Assimilation
29
Chapter Three
“Why couldn’t we have been either one
thing or the other?” Monolithic Identity
and Ethnic Construction in the Fiction and
Autobiography of Sui Sin Far
59
Chapter Four
“This hideous little pickaninny” and the
Formation of Bohemian Whiteness: Race,
Cultural Pluralism, and Willa Cather’s My
Ántonia
85
Epilogue The Legacy of Progressive Era
Racial Formation and the Re-Racialization
of Immigrant Bodies
109
Notes
117
Works Cited
127
Index
135
Acknowledgments
While completing this book, I was assisted by a Professional
Development Support Grant from the Office for Academic Affairs at
Mitchell College. I also was able to present an early version of my
epilogue with support from a Graduate Project and Travel Grant from
the University of New Mexico’s Office of Graduate Studies.
A number of people guided, challenged, assisted, and supported me
while I worked on this book. I owe a debt of gratitude to them all.
I especially wish to thank Minrose Gwin, the chair of my dissertation
committee at the University of New Mexico, for her careful reading and
thoughtful advice on my work. I am particularly grateful for her
patience and encouragement through the long writing process. I could
not ask for a better mentor.
I also wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee,
Christine Sierra, Patricia Clark Smith, Shane Phelan, and Jesse Alemán,
for their helpful suggestions throughout this project. This book is much
stronger because of them.
Thanks also to SueAnn Schatz, Ruth Salvaggio, and Carolyn Woodward who offered valuable critique on some early chapter drafts. Ruth
Higgins deserves thanks for generously assisting me with editing (and
giving up a holiday weekend to do it!). Karen Ward helped with
graphics formatting, and my editor at Routledge, Kimberly Guinta, was
always quick to respond to my many questions about the publication
process. Thanks!
My colleagues at Mitchell College Library have graciously helped me
find and acquire the sources I needed. Thanks and kudos especially to
Tara Borden Samul.
Others have helped me on this project both directly and indirectly. I
especially wish to thank my parents, Paul Asa Brown and Mary Dostert
Brown who offered material support at a crucial point in my work and
who also inspired me by believing in the value of education.
x
The kindness and welcome offered me by Amy and David Cheverine
sustain me. Thank you!
Finally, I thank Al Cheverine, a most generous reader and a constant
source of inspiration. Your support and encouragement make it all
worth-while.
REPRINT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express appreciation for permission to reprint several
lines from the following: Rina Ferrarelli, “Emigrant/Immigrant I.” First
published in Looking for Home. Ed Deborah Keenan and Roseann
Lloyd. (Milkweed Editions, 1990), 61.
A different version of this book’s epilogue was originally published
in journal form. This work originally appeared in The Centennial
Review, Vol. 41, No. 3, 1997, published by Michigan State University
Press.
Preface
Questioning Race, Questioning Whiteness
Two separate personal experiences inspired my original interest in
critical race theory and in critical whiteness studies in particular. Both
of these incidents occurred in the early 1990s while I was beginning
graduate school, and both raised questions for which I had no easy
answers. In many ways, this study has been my attempt to work through
the questions that these experiences presented.
The first incident occurred as a male friend and I were walking along
a downtown street in Eugene, Oregon. Two young men passed us,
walking in the opposite direction. As the men passed, the closest man
leaned toward me and said very quietly, loud enough for me but not my
friend to hear, “race traitor.” My friend is Japanese American; my
ancestors were primarily European. At the time, certainly, I immediately
saw the racism in the man’s remark; only later did I begin to examine the
assumptions inherent in the man’s words. I have come to connect them
with some of the ideas about racial formation that I discuss in this book.1
Here are some of the assumptions that I have imagined the man in
Oregon to hold: he assumed that my friend and I were a couple (we
were walking closely together, I remember, perhaps arm-in-arm), and
inherent in that assumption is the supposition that we were both
heterosexual. The man, I imagine, assumed that I was “white” and that
my friend was “Oriental.” Most specifically relevant to this project, I
think, are these assumptions: the man saw my companion as a racial
threat to his concept of “America,” and he saw me as a traitor because I
was reneging on my supposed promise as a white woman to be one of
what Chandra Talpade Mohanty has termed the “reproducers of the
nation” (27).
The very fact that I could make “sense” of the man’s two-word
comment suggests that essentialized racial discourse is not just familiar
to a handful of extremists. That the man bothered to address his
comment to me—rather than simply thinking it or addressing it to his
xii
companion—implies that he was fully aware that the concept of race he
expressed continues to have currency. Furthermore, he was not making
reference to some archaic racial system: the threat he perceived—of
miscegenation, of the blurring of divisions in his racially stratified
world—as well as the warning of danger that I felt viscerally were very
much of the moment. Beyond showing that essentialized racial ideology
continues to carry weight in our society, however, the experience
highlights that both my friend and myself are implicated in that
ideology. My friend, because he is part of a racially defined minority in
the United States, was already aware of this: when, after the men had
passed, I told him what had been said, he expressed anger but hardly
seemed surprised. For me, someone who has had the privilege afforded
most white people of focusing on race or ignoring it as I choose, the
experience emphasized that whether or not I have been aware of it on a
daily basis, race affects who I am in the world, how I am perceived,
what privileges I am allowed.
The second incident that inspired my work on race occurred while I
was teaching introductory expository writing. I had asked the students
to break up into small groups and to discuss their cultural backgrounds.
Specifically, I asked them to identify their cultural heritages and to
describe several examples of the values or customs that they received
from their families or their culture more broadly; in other words, what
do you believe, what do you practice, and from where do you get these
traditions? Many of the students in the class were of primarily European
descent, and, since the texts that we were reading in the class included
writings by people of diverse cultural backgrounds, I was worried by a
tendency toward generalization that I had noticed in previous classes; I
did not want European-American students to read an essay by an
African American, for example, and assume “So this is what black people
think.” In “Talkin’ That Talk,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains that
“‘racism’ exists when one generalizes about the attributes of an
individual (and treats him or her accordingly). Such generalizations are
based upon a predetermined set of causes or effects thought to be shared
by all members of a physically defined group who are assumed to share
certain ‘metaphysical’ characteristics” (403–4). Hoping to highlight the
problems inherent in racial generalization, I asked the students to
identify their specific backgrounds in order to show the diversity that
exists even within a small group.
The assignment, I thought immediately afterward, was an utter
failure. A few students came up with the kind of answers that my
agenda begged. A Vietnamese-American student spoke of her religious
xiii
beliefs; a Nez Perce student shared his ideas about family life. Most
European-American students, though, came up with very little. “I’m
just white,” was a response, as was “My family is mainstream
American.” If anything, the exercise seemed to reaffirm that white
people are white and that other people have culture.
Since this classroom experience, I have come to question why so
many European Americans claim an identity that is at the same time
indefinable and a coherent “given.” Why did so many EuropeanAmerican students have trouble getting specific about their cultural
histories? Why did a question about culture evoke the vocabulary of
race (“I’m just white”) and national identity (“mainstream American”)?
Why did many of my students see their own identities—whether
expressed in cultural, racial, or nationalist terms—as normative, while
the young man who called me a “race traitor” marked both me and the
friend with whom I walked with clearly racial identity tags?
Not all of the questions raised by these two experiences are
answerable within the scope of a single book. Instead, I mention them
not only to explain my personal investment in this project but also to
emphasize some of what is at stake in contemporary investigations into
the history of race. Both of the experiences I mention here emphasize
the need to understand how ideas of race have been formulated, to
explore how those formulations intersect with formulations of other
axes of identity such as sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and class, and
to investigate just how these formulations both feed off and form
actions, whether those actions are spontaneous racist remarks or the
formalization of government policies on immigration.
In this study, I have chosen to examine the literature of immigration
in the Progressive Era of U.S. history.2 Historians tend to disagree
about the precise dates spanned by the Progressive Era. Rogers M.
Smith has noted that, “Though scholars dispute what progressivism
was, few deny that both major parties and American politics generally
changed during the first two decades of the twentieth century in ways that
comprise a distinct Progressive Era” (410). Smith, acknowledging that
his closing date is somewhat arbitrary, puts the dates at 1898–1912.
Others have described Progressivism beginning as early as 1890 and
extending as late as the 1920s. The beginning and closing dates of the
era might be best determined dependent on one’s historical focus. If
focusing on the women’s suffrage movement during the time, for
example, one could convincingly argue that 1919 serves to mark the end
of the Progressive Era. When discussing immigration, as I do here, 1924
might better serve as a closing date, as this was the year that Congress
xiv
passed the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act), the most
restrictive immigration legislation to date. When I refer to the
Progressive Era, I am less concerned with a specific set of dates than
with contextualizing my discussion within an historical period
characterized by social and political reforms as well as, as I shall show,
extreme xenophobia and heightened debate about racial classification of
immigrants. My interest in the literature of immigration of this period
stems from my desire to better understand how racial categories have
been formed and transformed. The first two decades of the twentieth
century are an especially fruitful period for such an examination, as this
period abounded with debate over racial definitions and over who was
“fit” to become an American, as I shall show in the following chapter.
While the formations of race during the Progressive Era that I examine
in this study are not the same as formations of race at the turn into the
twenty-first century, I work under the assumption that those earlier
formations have influenced the latter and that they still have resonance.
This book investigates how the seemingly separate categorical systems
of race, ethnicity, gender, and national identity intersect in the formation
of “whiteness” in the United States. More specifically, I examine how
texts by and/or about women immigrants construct racial, ethnic, and
national subjectivities, how these subjectivities infuse the changing
definition of whiteness in the early twentieth century, and how these texts
reify and resist hegemonic racial ideology. Throughout, my project has
been strongly influenced by critical race theory, feminist theories of
difference, and recent endeavors to better understand the social
construction of whiteness.
In my first chapter, “Race, Whiteness, and Women Immigrants,” I
survey some of these recent developments in critical race theory,
especially regarding the construction of whiteness. I also survey
historical iterations of race in the United States, looking particularly at
the range of racial discourse in the Progressive Era. I then explain my
focus on women writers, arguing that understanding how women have
been constructed racially is crucial to understanding processes of racial
formation. I close this chapter by discussing how literary texts may be
read as “racial projects” and how this kind of reading can increase our
knowledge both of the literature and of the historical production of race.
My second chapter, “Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin’s Claim to
Assimilation,” examines Mary Antin’s autobiography The Promised
Land (1912). Overtly, as a number of critics have noted, Antin’s
autobiography is a celebration of immigrant assimilability crafted to
counter the xenophobic ideology that was prevalent during the
xv
Progressive Era. What few critics have recognized, however, is how
Antin subverts her own celebratory narrative to question both the
possibility and desirability of full assimilation. She accomplishes this
primarily by creating an autobiographical immigrant subject that reveals
more complexity than most critics have acknowledged. Antin shows
herself as becoming an unmarked “American” subject—a participant in
the socially constructed category of “whiteness”—at the same time that
she marks her autobiographical self in terms of gender and cultural
affiliations. As I argue, however, Antin undermines the equation
between becoming white and becoming American when she questions
the possibility of complete assimilation and subverts the white
American autobiographical pattern.
In “‘Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other?’:
Monolithic Identity and Ethnic Construction in the Fiction and
Autobiography of Sui Sin Far,” I argue that Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude
Eaton) creates a dialogue between a racialized Chinese identity and the
invention of an ethnic identity, Chinese American, as she negotiates
between narrative layers in her writing. My reading focuses on several
of Sui Sin Far’s short stories from Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) as
well as her autobiographical essay “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of
an Eurasian” (1909) in order to show how Sui Sin Far’s fiction and
autobiography fully engage in the processes of constructing ethnicity
and questioning the racial essentialism of her time. Because systems of
racial categorization at the time she was writing were much less
malleable for Asian immigrants than for European immigrants, Sui Sin
Far cannot claim, as Mary Antin did for eastern Europeans, that Chinese
immigrants could be accepted as white. Instead, she de-essentializes
racial categories, in particular the supposedly dichotomous categories of
Oriental and white, at the same time that she emphasizes ethnic
difference by creating a Chinese-American identity.
In my fourth chapter, “This hideous little pickaninny’ and the
Formation of Bohemian Whiteness: Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Willa
Cather’s My Ántonia,” I argue that Cather constructs the character of
Ántonia both as an ethnically-marked Bohemian and as a white
American. By creating Án-tonia this way, Cather affirms an American
identity that, for all of its ethnic markers, becomes racially solidified as
white and, hence, normative. When Cather constructs European
Americans as ethnically diverse but racially unified she sidesteps
eugenicists’ claims of Nordic superiority, claims that were gaining in
popularity during the 1910s. In doing so, Cather presents an optimistic
but problematic cultural pluralism similar to that advocated by other
xvi
progressive thinkers of the time. Cather, however, can only disrupt
one construct of racial difference by reaffirming another. Ántonia’s
Bohemian whiteness is made possible, I argue, by an important yet
often overlooked scene in the middle of the novel. In this scene, “the
Negro pianist” Blind d’Arnault entertains the young men and women of
the town of Black Hawk. It is only because black Otherness is reified
through the character of Blind d’Arnault that the Bohemian Ántonia can
enter into whiteness. Thus, while Cather presents a novel that is
optimistic about the contribution of the “new immigrants,” she cannot
escape the racial binaries of colonialist discourse.3
I close this study with an epilogue that addresses some of the changes
in racial formation during the past two decades. In this chapter I
contrast the recent developments in critical understanding of race and
whiteness with less promising representations of race in popular media.
I look specifically at an issue of Time magazine from the early 1990s in
which biological racial categories, similar to those I locate in the
Progressive Era, are reified through a computer-generated, “hyperreal”
immigrant image on the magazine’s cover. This image reveals both how
racial essentialism continues to have popular salience and how the
textual strategies of racial formation have changed since the
Progressive Era.
At the heart of this study lies the assumption that whiteness is not a
stable, unified category of human classification. Instead, whiteness, like
other racially-defined groupings, is an ever-shifting terrain, one that has
changed markedly since the nineteenth century and continues to evolve
as we move into the twenty-first. Furthermore, I work under the
assumption that the history of immigration is crucial to understanding
shifts in the terrain of whiteness, and to understanding processes of
racial formation more generally. Upon arrival in the United States,
immigrants enter into the racial fabric of the country and change that
fabric. While processes of racial formation are always in-progress for
U.S.-born citizens as well as for immigrants, focusing on immigrants
allows us to look at a crucial moment in the racial formation process, a
moment when racial assignment occurs and when individuals negotiate
for a specific racial assignment and/or try to construct an identity in
relationship to that assignment. As the chapters in this book make clear,
texts by and about new immigrants to the United States can reveal how
these processes occur. In focusing on immigrants’ relationships to
whiteness, I am not attempting to assert an overarching theory of the
formation of whiteness. Indeed, the differing approaches to theorizing
whiteness offered by theorists in recent years reveal that the formation
xvii
of whiteness is complex, multifold, and often fragmentary. My approach
is necessarily selective; I do not attempt to address all, or even most, of
the ways that whiteness has formed. Instead, I view my analysis as
one part of a larger project of better understanding racial formation and,
more specifically, the construction of whiteness. Examining cultural
production by and about immigrants during the late Progressive Era
allows us to better understand constructions of racial difference and
their relationship to subjectivity during a critical period in the formation
of whiteness and consequently to better understand some of the
processes by which race, more generally, is formed.
xviii
Chapter One
Introduction: Race, Whiteness, and
Women Immigrants
Farm by farm, township by township, the displacement of
the American goes on—a quiet conquest, without spear or
trumpet, a conquest made by child-bearing women.
Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New
The term race, used in reference to human categorization, has existed in
the English language since at least the sixteenth century.1 The
connotations and cultural meanings of race, however, have hardly
remained stable since its first usages. While this study cannot attempt to
cover all of the changes in the definitions of the words race and
whiteness since their earliest uses in English, it is important to note
some significant changes in European and American conceptions of
race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1735, Swedish
botanist Carl von Linnaeus divided humans into four subspecies in his
famous Systema Naturae (Tucker 9). Linnaeus’s system of classification
relies on the identifying qualities of skin color, kind of civilization, and
place of origin. Thus, Linnaeus’s notion of race is not solely a
biologically-based one. Influenced by Linnaeus, both biologists and
anthropologists in the nineteenth century attempted to develop a more
“scientific” system of racial categorization. In doing so, they frequently
shunned qualitative criteria such as a person’s system of beliefs in favor
of what was supposed to be more easily quantifiable data such as skin
color, stature, and cranial shape.
These pseudo-scientific methods of classification were used to justify
assumptions about moral and intellectual differences between races2
But while the moral connotations of certain racial categories—most
notably the assumed binary of “white” and “black”—remain similar in
different systems of racial categorization, the systems themselves vary
greatly. I innaeus posited four racial categories; Arthur Comte de
2 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
Gobineau focused on three, with a dominant Aryan sub-race (1855);
other writers have proposed at least forty-five distinct races (Reports of
the Immigration Commission 5: 3); in nineteenth-century America,
legal codes often recognized only “white,” “Negro,” and “Indian” (Omi
and Winant 82). In some of these systems, the term white applies to
anyone of European origin as well as people from certain regions of
Asia. In other classificatory systems, white refers only to people of
European descent. In still other systems, people from different parts of
Europe are separately classified, and only those from north-western
Europe are considered fully “white.”3
While scientists and anthropologists continued to debate how to
racially classify humans, few doubted that humans could be classified
based on observable, biological criteria,4 and by the end of the
nineteenth century, the debate about racial classification became central
to issues of American immigration. In the middle of the nineteenth
century, increased immigration from Ireland caused significant public
backlash, prompting restrictionist groups such as the Know Nothings to
form and inflaming discussions of Irish racial inferiority. While this
discourse of Irish racial inferiority continued through the nineteenth
century, during the second half of the century, debates over the racial
categorization of people of European descent often seem to be eclipsed
following abolition and the increased immigration of laborers from
Asia, particularly from China. Although the definition of who was
“white”—and therefore considered desirable as an immigrant—was
nebulous during this time, the definition of who was racially Other
became ever more solidified. While citizenship in the United States has
been racially based almost since the nation’s inception (Mohanty 24),
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first law banning
immigration of a specific racially-defined group.5 Thus, during the
second half of the nineteenth century, we can see the codification of
racially-based immigration policy.
The increase in emigration from eastern and southern Europe at the
end of the nineteenth century prompted a renewal of debate over the
racial status of these immigrants and their consequent fitness for
assimilation. Many minority groups such as African Americans,
Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, Asian immigrants and
their descendants, and American Indians were routinely classified by
their racial “Otherness”; however, the status of the “new” immigrants
from eastern and southern Europe remained a question in scientific and
legal venues as well as in popular thought.6 This debate over the racial
status of Europeans emerged in numerous forms of cultural production.
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 3
The “increasing fragmentation and hierarchical ordering of distinct
white races (now in the plural),” Matthew Frye Jacobson explains, “was
theorized in the rarified discourses of science, but it was also reflected
in literature, visual arts, caricature, political oratory, penny journalism,
and myriad other venues of popular culture” (41).
To better understand the shifting terrains of race and whiteness in
U.S. history, it should prove useful at this point to turn to recent
developments in critical race theory that have focused on this history. I
will then return to a discussion of how race, and whiteness specifically,
was theorized during the late Progressive Era.
CONTEMPORARY THEORIES OF RACE
The critical study of whiteness and white privilege is a relatively new
phenomenon, stemming largely from the emergence and development
of critical race theory. While scientists have known for some time that
race is useless as a biological concept, race continues to form and
organize lives, even while the practices of our lives form and organize
race itself. Put another way, race, while signifying nothing concrete or
scientifically meaningful, continues to both signify and have cultural
significance. As Gates puts it, “When we speak of ‘the white race’ or
‘the black race,’ ‘the Jewish race’ or ‘the Aryan race,’ we speak in
biological misnomers and, more generally, in metaphors. Nevertheless,
our conversations are replete with usages of race which have their
sources in the dubious pseudoscience of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries” (“Writing ‘Race5” 4). This passage comes from Gates’s
introduction to “Race,” Writing, and Difference, a collection of essays
originally published in a 1985 volume of Critical Inquiry and edited by
Gates into a book that has had significant influence in the field of
critical race theory, particularly in its applications to the study of racial
representation and language. Gates’s introduction to the collection along
with his concluding essay “Talkin’ That Talk” worked to contextualize
and foreground the issues that have become central to critical race
theory and its application to language and literature—“the complex
interplay among race, writing, and difference” (“Writing ‘Race’” 15)—
and led to further studies of this interplay. Most significant to this
study, Gates’s writing, as well as the essays collected in the volume,
shift the examination of race onto the terrain where it belongs, and in
doing so raise a number of questions: Given that race is a social
construction, how and why is it constructed and maintained? By and for
whom? What roles do language and literature play in that construction?
4 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
And what possibilities do they offer us for resisting hegemonic racial
constructions?
Other writers who place the construction, or in their own words the
for mation, of race at the center of concern are Michael Omi and
Howard Winant. Similar to Gates’s earlier study, Omi and Winant
question notions of race as an “objective term of classification,”
concluding that
Attempts to discern the scientific meaning of race…seek to
remove the concept of race from the historical context in which it
arose and developed. They employ an essentialist approach which
suggests instead that the truth of race is a matter of innate
characteristics, of which skin color and other physical attributes
provide only the most obvious, and in some respects most
superficial, indicators. (64; emphasis in original)
Rather than employ such an essentialist idea of race, these authors
suggest, we need to analyze race precisely in relation to “the historical
context in which it arose and developed.”
Omi and Winant argue against using ethnicity-, class-, and nationbased theories alone to explain the construction of race in the United
States. Noting that “race and racial dynamics in the United States have
been theoretically understood by relying on one of three central
categories: ethnicity, class, or nation” (11–2), Omi and Winant go on to
argue that none of these paradigms has been sufficient to allow us to
understand race. In particular, they claim that ethnicity theory has
overly relied on analogies with patterns of European immigration,
consequently not accounting for “any special circumstances which
racially defined minorities encounter in the U.S.” (22). Furthermore,
Omi and Winant take issue with the ways that ethnicity theory has been
applied to blacks; “with rare exceptions,” they note, “ethnicity theory
isn’t very interested in ethnicity among blacks. The ethnicity approach
views blacks as one ethnic group among others. It does not consider
national origin, religion, language, or other cultural differences among
blacks, as it does among whites, as sources of ethnicity” (22). While
Omi and Winant also note that ethnicity theory has provided useful
insights, they ultimately claim that it does not adequately explain or
account for race. Because “ethnic group-, class-, and nation-based
perspectives all neglect the specificity of race as an autonomous field of
social conflict, political organization, and cultural/ideological meaning”
(48), Omi and Winant propose a new model for understanding race, that
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 5
of “racial formation.” Their text is devoted to studying this
“sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created,
inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (55).
I find Omi and Winant’s discussion of racial formation useful to an
examination of representations of turn-of-the-century immigration for
several reasons. First, it allows us to escape the dangerous trap of
essentializing x racial difference. But it also allows us to avoid equating
race with culture, an equation that works, as Anthony Appiah notes, to
biologize “what is culture, or ideology” (36; emphasis in original).
Furthermore, the concept of racial formation lets us examine the
sociopolitics of formations of racial difference. As Nancy Leys Stepan
and Sander L.Gilman point out in their essay “Appropriating the Idioms
of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism” (1991), racial
categories “had material weight in the lives of individuals and groups;
racial identities were embodied in political practices of discrimination
and law, and affected people’s access to education, forms of
employment, political rights, and subjective experience” (73). Referring
specifically to the scientific discourse on race, the authors add that it
“was one of the most authoritative languages through which meaning
was encoded, and as a language it had political and social, as well as
intellectual consequence” (73). Stepan and Gilman make it clear that the
effects of racial categories on people’s lives are wide ranging, but they
also emphasize that the practices of encoding difference, what Omi and
Winant would consider projects of racial formation, impact the way that
“society is organized and ruled” (Omi and Winant 56). Thus, examining
the processes of racial formation at work in the discourses of
immigration can provide a more textured picture of the relationship
between those discourses and structures of power.
While writers such as Gates, Omi and Winant, Stepan and Gilman,
and Appiah have theorized how racial difference in general has been
formed and articulated, in recent years other writers have turned their
focus to understanding the development of specific racial categories,
including whiteness. These writers largely respond to the problem of
seeing whiteness as normative or, perhaps more accurately, the problem
of not seeing whiteness at all. One of the earlier theorists to call
attention to white privilege was Peggy McIntosh. In “White Privilege
and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See
Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies” (1988), McIntosh
draws parallels between the two forms of privilege in her essay’s title as
she attempts to unpack the “invisible knapsack” of white privilege.
Grounding her discussion in her own experiences, McIntosh develops a
6 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
tentative list of some conditions of her day-to-day existence that are
determined by her race. She also begins to examine what “privilege”
itself is. Noting that “we usually think of privilege as being a favored
state, whether earned, or conferred by birth or luck,” she goes on to
distinguish between “unearned advantage” and “conferred dominance,”
both of which constitute white privilege in the United States (296–7).
Reflecting that the silence surrounding privilege is what keeps
inequitable systems of power in place, McIntosh ends her essay with a
call to end this silence and to work to “reconstruct power systems on a
broader base” (299).
One writer and researcher who seems to have heeded McIntosh’s call
is Ruth Frankenberg. Like McIntosh, Frankenberg rejects the idea that
race is a problem solely for racially-defined minorities; rather, she
begins her work with the assumption that both “white people and people
of color live racially structured lives” (1; emphasis in original).
Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of
Whiteness (1993) offers detailed accounts of what it means to be a white
woman in the United States. Frankenberg’s analysis is based on
interviews with self-identified white women on how race shapes their
lives. Frankenberg makes her project explicit from the outset: she aims
to begin “exploring, mapping, and examining the terrain of whiteness”
(1). While rejecting the idea that racism is solely a problem for raciallydefined minorities and not an issue for those who identify as “white,”
Frankenberg sets out to make whiteness visible and socially specific
instead of normative. To do so, she focuses her interviews and her
analyses of them on specific aspects of white women’s experiences,
paying special attention to the complexities of race as experienced
through childhood, in interracial relationships, and through parenting.
Frankenberg’s study is informed both by critical race theory—
particularly that of Omi and Winant—and socialist feminist theory. The
three paradigms of white race consciousness that she outlines stem
directly from her observations of twentieth-century feminism and also
reflect the views of the women she interviews. Frankenberg names these
paradigms (or mo ments or discourses, as she alternately calls them):
essentialist racism, color and power evasion, and race cognizance
(14–5). The first of these, essential ist racism, refers to what many
Americans today would consider racism: a belief in essential,
biological, and hierarchical inequality of races. Frankenberg sees the
second paradigm as characterized by claims of “color-blindness” and
evasion of power inequalities; it is epitomized by the belief that we are
all “the same under the skin” (14). Despite “the best intentions of its
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 7
adherents,” color-blindness, which Frankenberg shows intersecting with
liberal humanism, “preserves the power structure inherent in essentialist
racism” (147). The third paradigm, and the one that holds the most hope
for confronting racism, “insists once again on difference” but does not
define difference hierarchically or essentially. The terms of “race
cognizance” are articulated by people of color, and inequality refers to
social structure, not to essentialized racial difference (14–5).
Frankenberg is careful to point out that, while one can often trace these
three paradigms to specific historic and political moments, they can also
exist concurrently, and a single person can articulate multiple discourses
(143, 157, 189).7
This last idea is particularly relevant to my project. The historical
period that I examine here can be seen as an era predominated by
hegemonic, essentialist racism; however, Frankenberg’s definition of
these three paradigms can help a reader of early twentieth-century
literature see the intricacies of racial discourse during this time. Since
multiple discourses on race can exist simultaneously, a reader is
reminded to look for disruptive discourses on race, paradigms that resist
or subvert dominant ideology, operating within other repressive
discourses on race. I will return to this idea when I discuss literary texts
as racial projects later in this chapter.
Frankenberg’s specificity about what constitutes whiteness is also
particularly useful to a study of the formation of racial categories.
Frankenberg carefully defines whiteness, providing a definition that is
too often missing or left implicit in earlier discussions of race and
racism in the United States. Whiteness, Frankenberg argues, is defined
by a set of three “linked dimensions”: “First, whiteness is a location of
structural advantage, of race privilege. Second, it is a ‘standpoint,’ a
place from which white people look at ourselves, at others and at
society. Third, ‘whiteness’ refers to a set of cultural practices that are
usually unmarked and unnamed” (1). Since publishing White Women,
Race Matters, Frankenberg’s definition of whiteness has evolved,
especially regarding the extent to which whiteness is “unmarked and
unnamed.” As she notes in her later essay “The Mirage of Unmarked
Whiteness” (2001), upon scrutiny, “the notion of whiteness as
unmarked norm is revealed to be a mirage or indeed, to put it even more
strongly, a white delusion” (73). Thus, while whiteness has been formed
in such a way to make it invisible to many people who are considered
white, it can be fully visible to people who have a different relationship
to the centers of power.
8 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
Frankenberg frequently uses the term cultural practice, rather than
culture alone, to emphasize the activity involved in the formation of
culture. Culture does not refer to a bounded space, a “thing” that
individuals either possess or do not, but rather refers to a wide range of
activity that is not “separate from material life” White Women, Race
Matters (192). Frankenberg’s definition allows for understanding
whiteness as something that is always in the process of change and that
is always place-specific and time-specific. Thus, for example, when the
Russian-Jewish immigrant Mary Antin describes idolizing American
patriots, as I discuss in the following chapter, she is limning a cultural
practice that is part of her repertoire of whiteness in the early twentiethcentury United States. Worshiping dead pa triots is as much a cultural
practice as was Antin’s earlier chanting of the songs of David in the
Pale of Russia. However, composing a patriotic poem on George
Washington, as Antin did, might not be as salient as a white cultural
practice in present-day New Mexico, say, as it was in Antin’s Boston,
and it almost certainly would not be a white cultural practice in a
country other than the United States. Frankenberg’s definition of
whiteness suggests that such place-specific and time-specific cultural
practices work to structure racial identities.
While writers such as McIntosh and Frankenberg have sought to
discover what whiteness means in the lives of contemporary
Americans, other theorists of whiteness have turned their attention to
the historical development of whiteness as a racial category. One of the
most ambitious and influential of these recent works is Theodore W.
Allen’s The Invention of the White Race. Published in 1994, the first
volume of Allen’s Invention, subtitled Ra cial Oppression and Social
Control, presents a sustained comparison between race in the North
American colonies and in Ireland. Allen concludes volume one by
describing the “sea change” experienced by Irish immigrants to the
United States, as they were transformed from victims of racial
oppression to upholders of slavery. In volume two, subtitled The Origin
of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (1997), Allen focuses more
directly on the formation of whiteness in the American colonies.
Allen, a member of the “socio-economic” school of historians, begins
volume one of his two-volume treatise with a vehement argument
against the “psycho-cultural” school of thought on the origins of slavery
and racism. In the “psycho-cultural” tradition (Allen singles out
Winthrop Jordan and Carl Degler as representatives), racial slavery is
seen to stem from preexisting racially-based prejudices held by
Europeans and their American descendants. Allen considers this
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 9
psycho-cultural position not only inaccurate but also dangerous to
current conceptions of race: if racism is innate, there is little hope for
changing racist attitudes and practices. In addition, he argues against
those socio-economic historians who view racism as providing actual
benefits for European Americans; instead, Allen argues, racism offers
what he characterizes as “illusory” benefits, in the form of racial
privileges, but not concrete improvement such as an escape from
propertylessness, in the lives of the majority of European Americans.
Allen summarizes his criticism of these two views of racism: “whether
racism be ‘natural born’ in European-Americans, or whether it be the
function of actual (as against illusory) benefits for all ‘whites’ as a
result of racial oppression, the implications for ridding our society of
the curse of racism are equally unfavorable” (1:19).
Instead, Allen argues, the “invention” of whiteness and the
consequent racially-based form that oppression took in the colonies that
were to become the United States were deliberate political acts of the
ruling class. Building on Edmund S. Morgan’s argument (American
Slavery—American Free dom, 1975), Allen sees Bacon’s Rebellion
(1676–7) as a turning point in American racial history. During Bacon’s
Rebellion, bond laborers of both African and European descent joined
forces against the aristocracy. In response to this proletarian threat, the
ruling class instituted racially-based slavery in place of bond servitude,
the indentured servitude of both African and European workers. By
allowing certain proletarians, European workers and their descendants,
to share in privileges based on skin color, as Allen explores in detail in
volume two, the ruling class disrupted the possibility of proletarian
solidarity, providing the ruling class with a system of social control that
nominally included poor “whites” but that ultimately consolidated
power for the ruling class.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Allen’s work is his persuasively
argued insistence that “whiteness” did not simply emerge as a socially
salient category by chance or accident but instead was deliberately
“invented” by the ruling class. This thesis alone provokes interesting
questions. If racial difference was a conscious invention, how did it come
to be seen by so many as a “natural” phenomenon? How were different
groups of European immigrants adopted into the system of whiteness
when its benefits, as Allen shows, were illusory and did not involve, at
least for immigrant workers, material improvement in their lives? And
if whiteness were invented to preserve the power of the ruling class and
to establish the slave/ocracy, how did abolition affect the systems of
racial difference in the United States? Not all of these questions are
10 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
within the scope of this project. The last two of these questions, however,
have been addressed by other writers in the 1990s, including historian
David R. Roediger.
In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (1991), Roediger focuses primarily on the formation of
whiteness immediately preceding the American Revolution and through
abolition in the nineteenth century. Roediger’s starting point is a
premise suggested by W.E.B.Du Bois in Black Reconstruction: that
whiteness has functioned as a “psychological wage” for white workers,
a privilege to compensate for “alienating and exploitative class
relationships” (Roediger 13). This “psychological wage” fits nicely with
the “illusory” benefits of whiteness discussed by Theodore Allen. Also
like Allen, Roediger sees the proletariat as central to the development of
race in the United States. According to Roediger, the formation of the
working class is indivisible from “the systematic development of a
sense of whiteness” (8). Unlike Allen, however, Roediger, is
particularly concerned with the psychoanalytic dynamics of whiteness
and with how language functions in its construction.
Roediger focuses on the thoughts and anxieties of nineteenth-century
white workers in order to show the inextricability of whiteness and
working class identity. The American Revolution fostered a desire
among workers of European descent to view themselves as free, as
personally independent. Industrial growth and entrenched wage
dependence, however, highlighted workers’ lack of independence and
social mobility. According to Roediger, one of the laborers’ responses
was denial. Consequently, “the white working class, disciplined and
made anxious by fear of dependency, began during its formation to
construct an image of the Black population as ‘Other’” (14). White male
workers, then, psychologically distanced themselves from the institution
of slavery by distancing themselves from those who were slaves.
Working class identity subsequently became intertwined with white
racial identity.
One of the most interesting and useful aspects of The Wages of White
ness is Roediger’s careful attention to the function of cultural practices
and language in the formation of racial difference. Roediger devotes
considerable space to analyzing the role of minstrelsy in the
construction of white identity, and he also examines how the language
employed by white workers helped create and perpetuate racial
difference. Roediger provides a number of examples of this racialization
of the language of labor: for example, many workers adopted the term
boss (from the Dutch baas) in place of master with its connotations of
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 11
slavery, and domestic workers frequently rejected servant, a term also
associated with slavery, in favor of hired help. This linguistic
reconfiguration helped white workers to “define and accept their class
positions by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and ‘not Blacks’” (13).
Directly influenced by the works of Roediger and Allen, Noel
Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995) continues, in some
ways, where these other studies left off. Ignatiev explores how one
oppressed group of immigrants, the Irish, sought acceptance in the
United States by recreating themselves as white workers. Ignatiev
shows this transformation by examining relations between Irish and
African Americans from the early nineteenth century through
Reconstruction, particularly in Philadelphia. He is especially concerned
with how Irish workers achieved political viability by allying
themselves with pro-slavery Democrats. Like Roediger, Ignatiev sees
Irish workers as active participants in their own racial construction.
Ignatiev writes an unusual kind of history, aimed, in his own words,
“not so much at facsimilitude as plausibility” (178). There are
certainly some gaps in Ignatiev’s study. For example, despite the
author’s goal of showing how the Irish were “actors in their own
history” (3), the book does little to show the agency of Irish women,
perhaps because of the work’s overt concern with party politics in an
era prior to women’s suffrage. This omission is particularly striking
when the relationship between parenthood and race is considered: the
race of a child has long been considered to be determined by the race of
the mother. Thus how Irish women became white would seem to be
crucial to the question of how the Irish, in general, became white in the
United States.8 Furthermore, by focusing on the relations between Irish
immigrants and African Americans, Ignatiev might be missing some of
the subtleties of white racial formation, especially regarding the role of
populations that do not always easily fit in a black/white binary.
Despite its limitations, however, How the Irish Became White is a
useful addition to the study of the history of racial formation for a
number of reasons, not the least of which are the author’s methods.
Ignatiev’s sources are wide-ranging; he draws on historical accounts,
newspaper articles, oratories, personal letters, and fictional works. By
incorporating these diverse sources, Ignatiev emphasizes that the
discursive repertoire of race is itself wide-ranging. Implicit in Ignatiev’s
account of whiteness, as in Roediger’s, is the assumption that the
cultural production of an era can reveal how race was formed and
inhabited during that time.
12 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
Similar to Ignatiev’s study of the Irish, Karen Brodkin’s How Jews
Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America (1998)
explores racial constructions by tracing one group’s movement from
not-white to white in the United States. To develop this historical shift,
Brodkin draws on critical race theory as well as her own family’s
experiences in a methodology that she describes as “a slightly
unorthodox combination of participant observation, insider ethnography,
and grounded theory” (4). She is especially concerned with how gender
and class work to form race and how race informs constructions of
gender and class. This interrelated triad of race, class, and gender forms
the basis of her discussion of national identity and whiteness.
Most relevant to this project is Brodkin’s discussion of how racial
categories are necessarily gendered in the United States. While some
theorists of whiteness have largely ignored the role of gender in the
process of racial formation, often subsuming women under the category
of “worker,” Brodkin, like Frankenberg, brings gender to the forefront
of her discussion. Brodkin explains that in the United States, the “idea of
nation has been built around the myth that its populace consists of two
mutually exclusive kinds of people who are defined by mutually
exclusive ways of being women and men”: “white ladies and gentlemen”
and “nonwhite and savage ‘hands’” (175–6). Thus, entering into
whiteness involves adopting the “right” gendered role, and this role is
both formed by and formative of one’s class position. Brodkin uses an
example from 1920s journalist William Allen White to illustrate this
relationship: “And as the Aryans of Greece tried democracy with their
bondwomen and failed, and the Aryans of Rome tried a Republic with
slaves and failed, so they who came to America from Latin countries
failed in this new world because their new world homes were half-caste
and not free, and the liberty they sought was license and not sacrifice”
(qtd. in Brodkin 176). In this ideology, adopting the “right” gendered
role is essential to being considered fit for participation in the nation;
“the racial nature of woman-hood,” Brodkin explains,” is precisely
what distinguishes those who are fit for democracy from those who are
not” (176).9 In this sense, Brodkin’s study provides a useful complement
to Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters; while Frankenberg
focuses her investigation on how race shapes white women’s lives,
Brodkin investigates how gender shapes race. Read together, the two
works emphasize the interrelatedness of gender and race, as well as
their inseparability from matters of class, sexuality, and national
identity.
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 13
Rather than focusing on one culturally distinct immigrant group as do
Ignatiev and Brodkin, Matthew Frye Jacobson studies emigrants from
across Europe in Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants
and the Alchemy of Race (1998). Jacobson is particularly concerned
with the formation of whiteness as different immigrant groups defined
their fitness for American citizenship. Jacobson’s approach is guided by
two premises: first, that race “is absolutely central to the history of
European immigration and settlement” (8), and, second, that “race
resides not in nature but in politics and culture” (9). While Jacobson
outlines these premises at the beginning of his book, he also implicitly
argues them throughout the work, as he shows how race, and whiteness
specifically, has been politically and culturally fabricated, and how
“European” has come to be synonymous with “white.” Yet, while
Jacobson establishes that not all European immigrants were deemed
white in the past, he warns against “facile comparisons” between the
racial experiences of European immigrants and those of other non-white
groups, pointing out that “it is not just that various white immigrant
groups’ economic successes came at the expense of nonwhites, but that
they owe their now stabilized and broadly recognized whiteness itself
part to these nonwhite groups” (9).
Jacobson’s work differs from that of Allen and Roediger, as the
author himself recognizes. While Jacobson notes the significance of
these other authors’ contributions to the study of whiteness, he also
points out the limitations in their arguments. Most specifically,
Jacobson finds that Allen’s and Roediger’s focus on class limits their
abilities to illuminate the full complexities of whiteness, to set it
“against a broad historical backdrop,” and to show the formation of
whiteness “outside the economic arenas of class concern and social
control” (18–9). Jacobson, while recognizing the importance of class
and socioeconomic power dynamics, works to go beyond these issues,
particularly to show articulations of race in the areas of “national
subjectivity and national belonging” (21). One of the ways Jacobson
does this is by examining the history of how race has been used to
determine “fitness for self-government” (20). Much of his discussion is
framed by the 1790 Act of Congress that restricted “the rights of
citizenship” to “free white persons,” and he not only explores how this
restriction has affected immigration and naturalization but also its
impact on notions of manifest destiny and on national subjectivity more
generally. Between the 1840s and the 1920s, Jacobson argues,
“continual expansion and conquest pulled for a unified collectivity of
European ‘white men,’ monolithic and supreme, even while nativism
14 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
and the immigration question fractured that whiteness into its
component—‘superior’ and ‘inferior’—parts” (204). Throughout his
study, Jacobson highlights the socio-political dimensions of racial
categories and emphasizes the contingencies of race, nation, power, and
cultural production.
Of the works on whiteness that I discuss here, Jacobson’s is
especially relevant to my concerns in this project. Jacobson not only
focuses on immigrants from Europe, he also devotes considerable space
to an examination of early twentieth-century articulations of racial
difference. In doing so, his text-suggests the importance of studying
these issues in the late Progressive Era. “In general,” Jacobson remarks,
a pattern of racially based, Anglo Saxonist exclusivity dominated
the years from 1840 to the 1920s, whereas a pattern of Caucasian
unity took its place in the 1920s and after…. Between the 1920s
and the 1960s concerns of “the major [racial] divisions” would so
overwhelm the national consciousness that the “minor divisions,”
which had so pre-occupied Americans during the period of
massive European immigration, could lose their salience in
American culture and disappear altogether as racially based
differences. (91–2)
Jacobson also identifies 1924, the year that Congress passed the
restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, as a significant year in this
shift. While “residual traces of the scheme that had reigned between the
1840s and the 1920s persisted into the mid-twentieth century,”
suggesting that “nineteen twenty-four may be the high-water mark of
the regime of Anglo-Saxon or Nordic supremacy…and not its proper
closing date,” racial lines were nonetheless redrawn in the 1920s (93).
To me, the period preceding the Immigration Act of 1924 seems
especially crucial to understanding how this shift occurred. By focusing
this book on the years immediately preceding the redrawing of racial
lines, I aim to highlight some of the processes by which European
immigrants were refigured as racially normative and what that refiguration meant for Americans who were not deemed white.
EUROPEAN IMMIGRATION AND RACE IN
THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
During the Progressive Era, much of the debate surrounding
immigration centered on the racial character of the “new immigrants.”
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 15
Writers of the time noted a shift in the populations who were
immigrating to the United States. The restrictionist sociologist Henry
Pratt Fairchild summarizes in Im migration: A World Movement and Its
American Significance (1913): “Roughly speaking, the old immigration
came from the north and west of Europe, the new immigration comes
from south and east of that continent” (129). According to Fairchild, the
old immigrants “were of a racial stock very closely related to the early
settlers of the country,” and Fairchild makes it clear that “the early
settlers,” in his mind, were English (130). In contrast, “the new
immigration is made up from people of a very different racial stock,
representing the Slavic and Mediterranean branches of the Caucasian
race rather than the Teutonic” (130). While all Europeans, to Fairchild,
are “Caucasian,” the racial differences within this overarching racial
category are significant: the immigrants from southern and eastern
Europe “are by no means so closely related in physique or so similar in
mental characteristics to the people of the United States as the
immigrants of early periods” (143). Fairchild largely ignores
immigration from parts of the world other than Europe, claiming that
“immigration to the United States is as yet almost wholly a European
movement” (129). To make this claim, Fairchild must disregard
significant immigration from other parts of the globe, particularly from
Asia. As I discuss in chapter 3, Asian immigration was considered
important enough by others, especially on the west coast, that
considerable debate surrounded the issue. Fairchild does, however,
make a claim about non-European immigration that reveals his
perceived racial dividing line: “In so far as there are any immigrants
from non-European sources they would naturally be classed with the
new immigration” (129). Whether or not the mention of classification
refers directly to race, Fairchild suggests that the “new immigrants”
from Europe and all non-European immigrants are more akin to each
other than either is to the “old immigrants” from western and northern
Europe.
Fairchild, to a great extent, locates his restrictionist argument in the
belief that the racial difference of the “new immigrants” would cause
difficulties with assimilation that would consequently lead to social
problems. While Fairchild tends to blur the boundaries between race
and what we would now term ethnicity—claiming vaguely, for
example, that “with the difference in race go differences in mental
characteristics, traditions, and habits of life” (130)—other writers of this
period made clearer the primacy of biologically-based difference in
16 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
their anti-immigration arguments. Writing in 1907, political economist
John R. Commons asserts:
Race differences are established in the very blood and physical
constitution…. Races may change their religions, their forms of
government, their modes of industry, and their languages, but
underneath all these changes they may continue the physical,
mental, and moral capacities and incapacities which determine the
real character of their religion, government, industry, and
literature. (7)
Similarly, eugenicist Madison Grant—whose The Passing of the Great
Race (1916) I address more fully in chapter 4—insisted on the
biological basis of racial differences both globally and within Europe,
drew direct correlations between biological difference and difference in
mental characteristics and “spiritual and moral traits” (199), and further
emphasized the superiority of the “Nordic race” to the other races he
envisioned.
Still other writers were less consistent about the racial classification of
the “new immigrants.” In The American Scene (1907), Henry James
implies that these newcomers, noting Jewish immigrants in particular,
are racially different from the “old immigrants” without taking a direct
stance on immigration restriction. In his chapter “New York and the
Hudson: A Spring Impression,” James compares Jews living in
New York to, variously, fish, worms, ants, squirrels, and monkeys, and
in doing so calls on a Euro-American tradition of using animal
metaphors to depict the racial Other (100–02). While James avoids
overtly invoking “race,” preferring instead terms such as type and tribe,
he nonetheless reiterates racial essentialism, as when he notes that
Italians, “over the whole land, strike us, I am afraid, as, after the Negro
and the Chinaman, the human value most easily produced” (98).
James’s curious phrasing challenges interpretation. By “easily
produced,” does he refer to a presumed high birthrate? Does he imply
a simplicity about these “races” that makes “production” or
reproduction “easy?” However one interprets James’s judgement about
the “easily pro duced” nature of Italians, African Americans, and
Chinese, at the very least James suggests that essential racial differences
exist both among European immigrants and between immigrants, and the
descendants of immigrants, from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Yet other
passages in “New York and the Hudson” present a more sympathetic
view of European immigrants, and even draw into question the
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 17
essentialism of racial difference among European immigrants. His
favorable comments, for example, about the Italians he has met in Italy—
those Italians who possess “that element of the agreeable address”—
suggests that Italian “difference” might not be so innate, after all (98).
James’s representations of, and attitudes about, racial difference are far
too complex to fully analyze here, but I want to emphasize that this
complexity, this knotty and often contradictory ideology of race, exists
even within a single text by a single author.10
Numerous other texts, from diverse academic disciplines as well as
from popular media and the arts, serve to illustrate the range of racial
discourse surrounding immigration during the first two decades of the
twentieth century. I address several of these texts in the following
chapters, further discussing the works by Fairchild, Commons, and
Grant, and also examining, in chapter 3, texts that focus more
specifically on Asian immigration and race, such as those by Burton
L.French and James D.Phelan. In the following section of this chapter,
however, I focus on one group of texts, a multi-volume government
publication, as this group in itself embodies some of the extremes of
this discourse on race, especially as it relates to European immigration.
In 1911, the U.S. Congress published The Reports of the Immigration
Commission, a series of detailed reports resulting from an intensive,
government-sponsored investigation into numerous aspects of
immigration and immigrant life. The reports are notable partly for their
appearance of exhaustiveness; they were published in forty-one
volumes, most volumes contain nearly 1,000 pages, and they present
extremely detailed explorations of issues ranging from the Effect of the
Employment of Recent Immi grants upon the Establishment of New
Industries to The Tendency to Insanity among the Immigrants, by
Nationality or Race.11 The extensiveness of the Commission’s
investigation—which was completed over a period of three years and
cost about one million dollars (Curran 126)—appears indicative of the
growing anxiety about immigration in the period immediately before
World War I. The “immigration question” became the focus of
numerous magazine articles, sociological texts, autobiographies,
and fictional narratives as well as the focus of Congress’s Immigration
Commission.
When I first began to survey the Reports of the Immigration Commis
sion several years ago, I was looking especially for information
regarding the cultural assimilation of immigrants. My interest in the
idea of assimilation stems from other reading about early twentiethcentury immigration; many other authors, whether for or against
18 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
immigration restriction, presume that a successful immigrant is one who
can be assimilated into “American” culture, a culture that, although
rarely defined, is usually presumed to be fairly homogenous and
reflective of the values of an Anglo-European hegemony.12 When I
approached the Immigration Commission’s reports, however, I was
surprised by one volume in particular: Changes in Bodily Form of
Descen dants of Immigrants, a report on an anthropological study led by
Franz Boas, an immigrant himself. Here was a report about
assimilation, but not about the kind of assimilation—the change of
culture, of traditions, of values—that I had presumed to be central to
debates about immigration. Instead, the report focused on physical
change—change in head shape, stature, hair color—in descendants of
immigrants, and concluded that children of European immigrants
develop “in such a way that they differ in type essentially from their
foreign-born parents” (1:44).
The method followed in this study of “changes in bodily form” is in
keeping with empirically-based pseudo-scientific studies of race
prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Boas
attempts to situate the study by asserting that “It was suggested to the
Commission that if measurements of the bodies of European
immigrants and their descendants at different ages and under different
circumstances could be made in a careful way by pseudo-scientific
anthropometrists, valuable results might be reached” (1:44). By
situating his study in this way, Boas at first allies himself with the field
of anthropological anthropometry, a field of study that was largely
concerned with using the measurement of human bodies to establish the
biological basis and hierarchical quality of racial difference. What Boas
concluded from such measurements was that changes in “bodily form”
do indeed occur in the descendants of European immigrants. The
report’s conclusions were based on a number of different bodily
measurements of immigrants. One of the aspects on which the
researchers focused particularly was the head shape of immigrants; they
found that “the head form, which has always been considered one of the
most stable and permanent characteristics of human races, undergoes
far-reaching changes due to the transfer of the people from European to
American soil” (2:505). Boas provides a specific comparison as an
example of such a change: “the east Eu ropean Hebrew, who has a very
round head, becomes more long-headed; the south Italian, who in Italy
has an exceedingly long head, becomes more short-headed; so that in
this country both approach a uniform type, as far as the roundness of the
head is concerned” (38:5).13 To arrive at these conclusions, the
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 19
investigators relied on specific empirical data; they measured and
compared width and length of the heads of immigrants to produce a
“cephalic index” that supposedly represents the head shape of an
immigrant.14 In other parts of the study, the investigators measured
features such as stature as well. In the end, the conclusions Boas draws
from these measurements are wide-sweeping. “We are compelled to
conclude,” he writes, “that when these features of the body change, the
whole bodily and mental make-up of the immigrants may change”
(2:506).15
For Boas, the importance of the investigation into “changes in bodily
form” lies in the conclusion that change indeed occurred. Such a
conclusion would indeed be unexpected (the word Boas uses) to
someone who was convinced that race is a real, immutable, biological
category. If biologically-based racial difference was not a generally
accepted way of understanding the world, an investigation into racial
change would hardly be considered to be worthwhile. However, while
starting from this assumption about race, Boas goes on to conclude that
physical changes do indeed occur, showing the instability of
biologically-based racial categorization, at least as far as those
categories apply to European immigrants and their descendants. While
Boas’s study does focus specifically on Europeans, his conclusions have
implications for race more generally. If bodily features as well as “the
whole bodily and mental make-up” of individuals change over time,
race cannot be viewed as immutable essence.16
While Boas seems to question racial essentialism in Changes in
Bodily Form, the same cannot be said of the authors of other volumes of
the Reports of the Immigration Commission (Figure 1). In another
volume of the Reports, a Dictionary of Races or Peoples, anthropologist
Daniel Folkmar and physician Elnora C.Folkmar make clear their belief
in the natural constitution of racial categories. In this Dictionary,
different races are defined, in part through physical description, in part
through language, and in part through moral and mental characteristics.
While racial divisions are sharply drawn throughout the text, the
defining criteria of racial difference are nebulous and sometimes
contradictory. These contradictions reveal themselves in the different
categorical systems the authors employ. For example, after
acknowledging that the “number of the chief division or basic races of
mankind is more in dispute at the present time than when Linnaeus
proposed to classify them into 4,” Folkmar and Folkmar explain that
they have chosen to use a system that categorizes people as “Caucasian,
Ethiopian, Mongolian, Malay, and American, or, as familiarly called,
20 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
Figure 1. “Sketches of Head Forms” from The Reports of the Immigration Com
mission, volume 38, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants.
the white, black, yellow, brown, and red races” (1:211). But the authors
are hardly consistent with their choice of this system. They immediately
follow their description of these five races with a table that provides
statistics about twenty-eight different races in Europe alone. Under the
heading “Race or people” Folkmar and Folkmar are careful to
distinguish between such races as “Slovak,” “Hebrew,” and “English
and Scotch” (1:214). Following this, the authors offer yet another
system of racial classification that they clearly link to biological
difference, claiming that there are at least three races in western Europe:
“the Teutonic’ or ‘Nordic’ (tall, blond, and long-headed), the ‘Alpine’
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 21
(broad-headed), and the ‘Mediterranean’ (brunette and long- headed)”
(1:218).
Furthermore, the authors are inconsistent regarding their criteria for
determining precisely what constitutes a race. For example, they claim
that “race is determined by language in such phrases as ‘the races of
Europe’ but by physical qualities, such as color, hair, and shape of
head, when we speak of ‘the five great races’ or divisions of mankind”
(5:13). Matthew Frye Jacobson points out, however, that European
groups, supposedly defined by language, “are irretrievably cast as racial
groups throughout the Dictionary, so that even within the unifying
construction of a grand ‘Caucasian’ race, among European peoples
difference itself is consistently defined as both biological in nature and
extreme in degree” (79). For example, eastern Bulgarians, according to
the report, are “distinctly long-headed…predominantly brunette, with
dark hair, although it is said that 40 per cent have light eyes. The race is
rather low in stature and stockily built, but no distinctly Mongolian
feature remains, unless it be the high cheek bones and rather narrow
eyes which are common amongst them” (1:222). Folkmar and
Folkmar’s Dictionary provides similar biologically-based detail about
the other “races” of Europe: “the ‘Jewish nose,’ and to a less degree
other facial characteristics, are found well-nigh everywhere throughout
the race” (5:74). The report also links moral and mental qualities to
essential racial difference, characterizing southern Italians, for example,
as “excitable” and “impulsive” (5:82) and Slavs as careless “as to the
business virtues of punctuality and often honesty” (5:129).
The detail and confidence of these descriptions of specific races seem
to contradict the findings of the study on Changes in Bodily Form.
While the report on Changes started with the assumption that raciallybased physical difference both existed and held some significance, its
conclusions called into question the stability of racial difference. For the
authors of the Dictio nary, in contrast, racial difference continues to rely
on stable, biologically-determined essences.
Elazar Barkan has described the Reports of the Immigration Commis
sion on the whole as “the high point of political propaganda for
immigration restriction before the Immigration laws were enacted in the
twenties” (83). While the other volumes of the Reports are not as
consistently and explicitly racist as the Dictionary, they do largely
reflect, or at least do not question, the assumption that racial difference
is a factor in immigration and that race is a biologically meaningful
entity, rather than a social construction. In this sense, Changes in Bodily
Form of Descendants of Immigrants is an anomaly in the Reports, a
22 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
single volume questioning the essential nature of race, at least as it
regards Europeans. This anomaly was far from being universally
popular or influential. Indeed, William Dillingham, the senator who led
the Immigration Commission objected to the study and voted against
funding it (Lund n54). The report on Changes in Bodily Form is
important for presenting a resisting voice, one that at first seems
couched in the rhetoric of biologically-based race, but that ultimately
challenges hegemonic formulations of racial difference. The
Dictionary, in contrast, reflects eugenic attitudes of the time, attitudes
that were not universally accepted but were represented by powerful
figures in academe and politics and were at the high point of their
sociopolitical influence during the period.
It is in this sense that these two volumes, within the same series
interestingly enough, can be seen to represent two extremes of racial
thought during the late Progressive Era. As Jacobson has pointed out,
eugenic perspectives “were in ascendence” during this period, but “their
hegemony was not without ruptures” (85). Changes in Bodily Form of
Descendants of Immigrants represents one of those ruptures. To varying
extents, so do the texts I discuss in the following chapters of this book.
The rupture that Willa Cather creates in My Ántonia is perhaps the most
disturbing of those presented by the three authors on whose work I
focus. Cather rejects the idea that racial difference is meaningful among
Europeans and their descendants, but in doing so she reifies the racial
Otherness of African Americans. In The Promised Land, Mary Antin
lays claim to a monolithic white America at the same time that she
questions the boundedness of whiteness. And Sui Sin Far creates the
most radical rupture of all in her fiction and autobiography, as she deessentializes racial difference while showing the possibilities of
constructing a Chinese-American subjectivity. While none of these
writers wholly embraces eugenic ideas, each presents a different
relationship to whiteness, a different perspective on the prospect of
immigrant assimilation, and different strategies for understanding race
in relation to, and in resistance to, hegemonic racial ideology.
IMMIGRANT WOMEN AND RACE
Before continuing, I wish to explain my focus in this study on women
writers writing largely about women immigrants—whether their own
autobiographical personae or fictional characters. Writing this
explanation seems odd to me in one sense: I suspect that in many
quarters it remains possible to write a manuscript exclusively focused
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 23
on male writers without feeling required to justify that choice. My focus
on women writers was not based originally on a conscious decision;
however, as my work progressed, this focus became more and more
crucial to my understanding of how immigrant texts participate in racial
formation. As a number of feminist critics have pointed out, race is
gendered, just as gender is raced, and both race and gender are tied to
notions of nationhood. Whiteness itself, as Karen Brodkin argues, can
be read in gendered terms: white women have long been viewed as
“mothers of the nation,” while men are the nation’s citizens
(Brodkin 176).
In Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History,
Rogers M. Smith traces some historic developments of this notion of
“republican motherhood.” Smith notes that during the revolutionary
period, women “had to be both equal and not equal citizens” (112).
Drawing from the work of Linda Kerber, Smith explains that women
were still subject to feudal legal doctrines concerning their subordinate
status, but that male revolutionaries “dramatically reformulated the
rationale for those rules by ‘politicizing women’s traditional roles’ in
terms of republican ideology. Wifely functions now were not the labors
of ‘subjects’ but rather the duties of ‘republican motherhood’” (112).
To further explain the role of “republican motherhood,” Smith
summarizes the views of the Federalist legal scholar James Wilson, as
expressed in his Lectures on Law (1782):
Women should develop their unique qualities, bestowed by nature
and its Creator, so that they might “embellish” and “exalt” social
life by their “beauty,” “virtue,” and “affection.” Their proper
political role, again, was to form their daughters for similar
service, and to refine their sons’ virtues, adding to male
spiritedness the civility and concern for others that republican
citizenship required. (Smith 146–7)
Wilson’s formulation emphasizes women’s proper roles as mothers of
good citizens. Smith traces minor legal changes in this formulation
through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Certainly
by the early twentieth century there were challenges to “republican
motherhood” as women’s proper role. As Smith shows, however, this
formulation still had considerable currency, even among women
activists during the Progressive Era.17
If women are important for their ability to bring forth male children
and prepare them for republican citizenship, it follows that the
24 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
acceptability of women immigrants would lie largely in their perceived
fitness for this role. And, since race has long been a prime determinant
of fitness for citizenship, the racial assignment of immigrant women
becomes crucial to the welcome of any given immigrant group.18 In the
logic of this ideology, the racial categorization of immigrant women is
central to determining the future racial make-up of the country. As
Katrina Irving has pointed out, during the Progressive Era, “the figure
of the immigrant mother proved particularly resonant. For nativists, who
linked the alien woman’s imputed preternatural fecundity with
eugenically based theories concerning the effects of miscegenation, the
maternal function of the immigrant woman was especially productive of
racial anxiety” (Immigrant Mothers 3).
To further illustrate the function of women in the nativist racial
ideology of the Progressive Era, I turn now to a restrictionist
sociological text of the time, Edward Alsworth Ross’s The Old World in
the New: The Signifi cance of Past and Present Immigration to the
American People. Ross, whom one researcher has called “Perhaps the
leading nativist sociologist” of his time (Curran 116), published The Old
World in the New in 1913. In this book, primarily concerned with
European immigration, Ross devotes a chapter to discussing “American
Blood and Immigrant Blood,” in which he addresses subheadings such
as “Primitive types among the foreign-born” and “How immigration
will affect good looks in this country.” Ross’s treatment of race is
certainly one of the more striking examples of racially-based antiimmigration argument from the early twentieth century; yet his
assumptions about the biological basis of race and about the superiority
of specific races to others recur in many other texts, in academic
sociological books like Ross’s as well as in articles published in
journals and popular magazines.19
Ross describes a specifically threatening racialized immigrant body:
“You are struck by the fact that from ten to twenty per cent are hirsute,
low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality” (285).
Ross’s ideas of immigrants are not only biologically based but also
immediately link physiognomy with mentality. This linkage reiterates a
parallel between questions of cultural assimilation and race. Many proimmigration texts of this time proposed that, if immigrants could become
culturally assimilated, they posed little threat to “American” society. If,
however, mental, hence cultural, assimilation is necessarily connected
to race, as Ross implies, an early twentieth-century reader might
perceive a new threat grounded in socially prevalent ideas about the
immutability of race.
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 25
At the same time that Ross links the physical body with mentality, he
posits immigrant women, without initially mentioning them, as the
source of the racial threat. Ross follows his description of immigrant
bodies by asserting that employers of immigrants “overlook that [the
immigrant] man will beget children in his image—two or three times as
many as the American—and that these children will in turn beget
children” (286–7). The problem for Ross, as for other nativists, is not
only the racial difference of immigrants, but also the perceived
fecundity of immigrant women. Much anti-immigration sentiment of the
time was in response to the increase in immigration from southern and
eastern Europe, and, as in the case of Ross, re sponded to the stereotype
of prolific childbearing among Catholic and Jewish women. In another
chapter, titled “The Slavs,” Ross is more direct about women’s central
position in his perception of a racial threat. “The Slav wife in this
country,” he claims, “bears from two to two and a half times as fast as
the wife of American parentage. Her daughter born under the Stars and
Stripes is seven-eighths as prolific as her barefoot immigrant mother”
(130). Ross goes on to discuss the fecundity of Polish immigrants and
concludes that “Farm by farm, township by township, the displacement
of the American goes on—a quiet conquest, without spear or trumpet, a
conquest made by child-bearing women” (133–4). Here, Ross locates
the threat he perceives in the bodies of these presumably fecund
immigrant women. “The superfecund Slavs,” Ross writes, “may push to
the wall the Anglo-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the WelshAmericans, the German-Americans, and the rest” (140).
During the time that Ross was writing, however, the number of
women immigrating to the United States was much lower than the
number of immigrant men. Congress’s Immigration Commission itself
found that, in the period from 1899 to 1910, nearly 70 percent of
immigrants were men, while about 30 percent were women. The
disproportionate numbers prompted the Immigration Commission to
claim that
The absence of family life, which is so conspicuous among many
southern and eastern Europeans in the United States, is
undoubtedly the influence which most effectively retards
assimilation. The great majority of some of these races are
represented in the United States by single men or men whose
wives and families are in their native country. (1:42)
26 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
The report’s implication that eastern and southern European immigrants
were more likely to be men than immigrants from other places is
questionable; the Commission itself found that, between 1899 and
1910, the disproportion between men and women immigrants—the
majority being men—from France was greater than the disproportion
between “Hebrew” immigrants, who were primarily entering the
country from eastern Europe. Still, the Commission’s belief that women
function as the assimilators of immigrant children is itself significant.
When the Immigration Commission’s report suggests women as the
locus of assimilation, the authors seem to refer primarily to cultural
assimilation; children, the authors presume, are taught language and
values (two accepted indicators of assimilation) by their mothers. But
women are also the bearers of children and hence are widely thought to
be responsible for the biological constitution of their children. I read
Edward Ross’s anxiety about “superfecund” Slavic women as directly
connected to an assumption that white women, immigrants and
descendants of immigrants from north-western Europe, are, and ought
to be, the “reproducers of the nation.” If women from what Ross would
view as different and inferior races are “multiplying like rabbits” (Ross
47), then these women would appear to pose a distinct threat to his
America, an America that, for Ross, not only demands cultural
homogeneity but racial homogeneity, in the form of a very narrowly
conceived whiteness, as well. As Katrina Irving has pointed out,
nativists of the time “constructed an image of the nation as the besieged
‘broodland’ of the Anglo-Saxon race and presented the reproductive
front as the critical arena of battle” (Immigrant Mothers 37). Ross’s
assumptions, like those of the Immigration Commission, eventually fall
back on the idea that the immigrant’s responsibility is to become “like
us”; however, for Ross, as for other restrictionist writers of the time, the
race of women immigrants severely limits who can become “like us.”
The racial classification of immigrant women, then, becomes central to
the debate over who is “fit” to become an American.
LITERARY TEXTS AS RACIAL PROJECTS
Up to this point, I have been examining racial history in the United
States, both as it has been interpreted by contemporary critics and as it
impinges on the discourses of the Progressive Era, which is one of my
concerns in the following chapters. So far, I have said little about the
function of literature in this history.
INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 27
“Texts are worldly,” Edward Said wrote in 1983; “to some degree
they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are
nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the
historical moments in which they are located and interpreted” (607). At
the time, Said was reacting to a dominant tradition in the humanities of
divorcing texts from the social world in which they are produced and
consumed. Happily, since the time that Said published The World, the
Text, and the Critic, literary criticism has changed dramatically as more
and more critics have taken as their subjects both the world and the
text. While I am reading the texts I discuss in this study as socially and
historically situated in this general sense, I am also reading the
relationship between literary texts and systems of power in a more
specific way: these texts are, or are part of, projects of racial formation.
Omi and Winant define a racial project as “simultaneously an
interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an
effort to re organize and redistribute resources along particular racial
lines” (56). Racial projects form the links between social representation
of race and social structure; they do the work of racial formation. They
not only define what race means at a particular place and time but also
establish the sociopolitical consequences of that meaning.20 These
projects can be large or small in scope and can do their work anywhere
in the political spectrum, but they are always situated: “The social
structures they uphold or attack, and the representations of race they
articulate, are never invented out of the air, but exist in a definite
historical context, having descended from previous conflicts” (58). The
texts that I consider in this study are racial projects, but that is not to say
that they do the same work that other racial projects do today or that
previous racial projects did in preceding centuries. I examine them in
conjunction with other texts of the late Progressive Era in order to
interpret them as part of an array of racial projects that work to
represent, define, and create the racial social systems of the time.
Omi and Winant are careful to point out that because racism itself
must be seen as always historically situated, there is “no timeless and
absolute standard for what constitutes racism” (71). They emphasize that
not all racial projects are racist. A racial project can be defined as racist
“only if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on
essentialist catego ries of race” (71; emphasis in original). It is
important to be aware, therefore, both of racial projects that work to
establish or further oppressive ideologies and social structures, as well
as of racial projects that work to question, resist, or counteract the
28 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
dominant racial order. The texts that I discuss in the following chapters
run the gamut.
When examining literary texts as racial projects, it is much easier to
address how these texts interpret, represent, and explain racial dynamics
than how they affect sociopolitical structures of power. As Omi and
Winant’s definition of racial formation makes clear, representations of
race are only part of the process. While in some cases it is possible to
address the public reception of a literary text (based, for example, on
published reviews), and it is possible to read a text in the context of the
sociopolitics of its time of production, it is often difficult to trace the
direct linkage between the text and its consequences for racial structures
outside the text. One cannot determine how much impact a text such as
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, for example, had on popular attitudes
toward Czech immigrants and their racial assignment, just as it is
impossible to trace any kind of direct causal link between the texts I
discuss here and the Immigration Act of 1924. While it is not always
possible to know the specific effects on power structures that a particular
text may have had, it is possible to show more generally how a text
links racial representation with power structures. As Said has noted,
“The realities of power and authority—as well as the resistances offered
by men, women, and social movements to institutions, authorities, and
orthodoxies—are the realities that make texts possible, that deliver them
to their critics, that solicit the attention of critics” (607). However, as
Omi and Winant’s discussion of racial formation suggests, texts also
affect the “realities of power and authority.” They can reiterate those
realities; they can question them; they can work to change them. In the
following chapters, I examine how racial projects by three women
writers of the late Progressive Era link representations of race with the
racial power structures of the time.
Chapter Two
Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin’s
Claim to Assimilation
Surely it has happened before that one body served more
than one spiritual organization.
Mary Antin, The Promised Land
This is my home
this thin edge of
barbwire
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
“I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over,” Mary Antin
(1881–1949) begins the introduction to her autobiography The
Promised Land. Antin, a Russian Jew, was born in the shtetl of Polotzk,
Russia (now Belarus) in 1881 and immigrated to Boston in 1894.1
Published in 1912, The Promised Land tells the story of Antin’s
childhood in the Pale of the Settlement (the area of Russia, through
much of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century,
where Jews were forced to live) as well as of her first few years in the
United States. From the first sentence of her introduction, Antin signals
that hers is a story of assimilation. After claiming that she has been
“made over,” Antin proceeds by distancing her adult identity from her
childhood self: “I can analyze my subject,” she asserts, “I can reveal
everything; for she, and not I, is my real heroine. My life I have still to
live; her life ended when mine began” (xix; emphasis in original). Antin’s
emphasis on the process of her own assimilation coupled with her overt
praise of “American” traditions, liberties, and institutions have
prompted many readers to view her autobiography as a patriotic paean
to immigrant assimilation.2 In a review for The Nation, for example, one
of Antin’s contemporaries praised The Promised Land as “a tale told
with glowing enthusiasm of the transformation under the influence of
30 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
new surroundings of a benighted Russian-Jewish girl into an
enlightened and public-spirited American” (Review of The Promised
Land 517). As Steven J.Rubin notes in his essay “Style and Meaning in
Mary Antin’s The Promised Land: A Reevaluation,” more recent critics
have generally upheld this attitude, viewing the autobiography as “the
optimistic story of those who arrived in America eager to shed their
outdated customs and who willingly accepted the values and manners of
the new world. It is generally considered to be the classic story of
assimilation, of transformation, and of hope” (36).3 While Rubin and
Magdalena Zaborowska—in How We Found America: Reading Gender
through East European Immigrant Narratives, which I will discuss later
in this chapter—view Antin’s claim to assimilation as much more
complex than a superficial reading of her book would allow, none of the
contemporary criticism of The Promised Land fully accounts for how
assimilation in Antin’s work is necessarily connected to the formation
of racial categories at the beginning of the century.
Overtly, Antin’s autobiography is indeed a celebration of immigrant
assimilability, a celebration crafted to counter prevalent xenophobic
ideology. What few critics have recognized, however, is how Antin
subverts her own celebratory narrative to question both the possibility
and desirability of full assimilation. She does this primarily by creating
an autobiographical immigrant subject that is far more complex than
most critics have acknowledged. Antin constructs her autobiographical
self as an unmarked “American” subject—a participant in the socially
constructed category of “whiteness”—at the same time that she marks
her autobiographical self in terms of gender and cultural affiliations.
Before addressing how Antin both constructs and subverts a white
American subject position, I will first address how she describes her
early life in Russia, since the boundary between the Russian Jew
Maryashe Antin and the later American Mary Antin is not as distinct as
many critics would have us believe. I will then show how Antin
constructs the process of assimilation as an act of claiming a position as
a white American. As I will argue, however, this equation is
undermined by Antin’s questioning of the possibility of complete
assimilation and by her subversion of the white American
autobiographical pattern.
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 31
PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES AND BOUNDARIES
OF IDENTITY
The Promised Land is divided roughly into two halves; the first half of
the text describes Antin’s early childhood in the shtetl of Polotzk, while
the second half addresses Antin’s education and transformation after
immigrating to the United States.4 What I call the “first half” of the
autobiography consists of 162 pages. The “second half” contains 184
pages. These “halves” are joined by a single chapter of sixteen pages
that describes the journey from Russia to the United States. From the
very beginning of the autobiography, Antin reveals her awareness of
boundaries, both physical boundaries and less tangible social ones.
“When I was a little girl,” the first line of chapter 1 reads, “the world
was divided into two parts; namely, Polotzk, the place where I lived,
and a strange land called Russia” (1). Very soon, however, this
geographical opposition becomes blurred for Antin; she soon realizes
that between Polotzk and Russia an intermediate region exists, the rest
of the Pale. When Antin is still a young child, she journeys by railroad
to visit relatives in the town of Vitebsk, where she sees the River Dvina—
the same river that flows through her home town of Polotz:
All my life I had seen the Dvina. How, then, could the Dvina be in
Vitebsk?…It became clear to me that the Dvina went on and on,
like a railroad track, whereas I had always supposed that it
stopped where Polotzk stopped. I had never seen the end of
Polotzk; I meant to, when I was bigger. But how could there be an
end to Polotzk now? Polotzk was everything on both sides of the
Dvina, as all my life I had known; and the Dvina, it now turned
out, never broke off at all. It was very curious that the Dvina
should remain the same, while Polotzk changed into Vitebsk! (2)
While Antin’s description of her childhood realization is certainly a
romanticized one, its placement at the beginning of the autobiography is
significant. Antin begins a work about immigration, about crossing
borders and boundaries, by questioning whether boundaries are static.
She continues her exposition on boundaries by discussing the effect of
her realization. “The mystery of this transmutation [between Polotzk
and Vitebsk] led to much fruitful thinking,” she claims,
The boundary between Polotzk and the rest of the world was not,
as I had supposed, a physical barrier, like the fence which divided
32 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
our garden from the street. The world went like this now:
Polotzk—more Polotzk—more Polotzk—Vitebsk! And Vitebsk
was not so different, only bigger and brighter and more crowded.
And Vitebsk was not the end. The Dvina, and the railroad, went
on beyond Vitebsk,—went on to Russia. Then was Russia more
Polotzk? Was here also no dividing fence? (3)
Antin extrapolates from her realization and begins, like contemporary
post-modern theorists, to question the rigidity of other boundaries that
she had hitherto believed to be immutable. Writing about literal and
psychological borderlands in the 1980s, for example, Gloria Anzaldúa,
in Borderlands/ La Frontera, uses similar imagery when she writes that
“the skin of the earth is seamless./The sea cannot be fenced,/el mar does
not stop at borders” (3). Anzaldúa suggests that political and
geographical borders—signified by the concrete manifestations of
barbed wire, chain link fences—are politically-motivated human
creations that are constructed “to distinguish us from them” (3;
emphasis in original). For Antin, as for Anzaldúa, water provides an
image for fluidity across such borders.5 Literal borders—between
Polotzk and Vitebsk, between the Pale and the rest of Russia—yield
when Antin realizes that the threads of the river and of the railroad do
not observe such borders.
Despite this early recognition, however, Antin soon finds that some
boundaries are not as easily crossed as the physical distance between
Polotzk and Vitebsk. “Polotzk and Vitebsk were now bound together by
the continuity of the earth,” she observes, “but between them and Russia
a formidable barrier still interposed” (3). This barrier, she
acknowledges, is the Russian hatred of the Jews of the Pale:
[T]here came a time when I knew that Polotzk and Vitebsk and
Vilna and some other places were grouped together as the “Pale
of Settlement,” and within this area the Czar commanded me to
stay, with my father and mother and friends, and all other people
like us. We must not be found outside the Pale, because we were
Jews.
So there was a fence around Polotzk, after all. The world was
divided into Jews and Gentiles. This knowledge came so
gradually that it could not shock me. It trickled into my
consciousness drop by drop. By the time I fully understood that I
was a prisoner, the shackles had grown familiar to my flesh. (5)
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 33
Although a child, Antin realized that boundaries are not necessarily
static and concrete; however, they do exist, created by the Czar’s
command and enforced by those in power. Writing as an adult, Antin
acknowledges that boundaries are tenuous, that slippage between and
across borders can occur easily, perhaps necessarily, but she also shows
the rigidity of socially constructed boundaries of oppression.
Antin writes at length about the oppressive boundary between Jews
and Gentiles in Polotzk, carefully detailing what it meant to grow up a
Russian Jew in the latter nineteenth century. Very early in her life,
Antin learned to accept “ill-usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the
weather” (5). While never herself the victim of a pogrom, Antin shows
the threat of violence against the Jews of Polotzk to be omnipresent. She
also carefully notes the fear that her family and neighbors had of forced
Christian baptism and of military conscription. To avoid service in the
Czar’s army—where Jews are brutally treated and forced to relinquish
religious observance—some men “would submit to operations on their
eyes, ears, or limbs, which caused horrible sufferings” (14). Antin
explains that cowardice did not prompt such measures, emphasizing
that “the fear of an unholy life was greater than all other fears” (15).
While Antin obviously identifies and sympathizes with the other
Jews of her community, a point to which I will return, at an early age
she came to question Jewish religious and social practices. In her
writing, Antin is especially critical of the inferior position prescribed for
women in orthodox society. She describes how even a boy from the
poorest of families would be sent to heder, becoming “the hero of the
family” (32). After explaining how a boy is schooled, encouraged, and
coddled by the family, she adds, “No wonder he said, in his morning
prayer, ‘I thank Thee, Lord, for not having created me a female.’ It was
not much to be a girl, you see. Girls could not be scholars and rabbonim”
(33). Antin’s comment is short, but the gist of it is clear: she resents the
role of subjection allotted to Jewish girls and women. For a brief while,
before her family lost their mercantile business, Antin herself was sent
to school. Her later success in scholarship suggests that she
comprehended no acceptable reason for the exclusion of women from
the intellectual realm; indeed, she says as much: “There was nothing in
what the boys did in heder that I could not have done—if I had not been
a girl” (34). Antin furthers this theme by wryly describing the role that
women are expected to fill in her community: “every girl hoped to be a
wife,” writes Antin, “A girl was born for no other purpose” (34).6
While Antin explicitly criticizes patriarchal Jewish tradition and the
subordination of women within her community, she devotes even more
34 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
space to detailing other Jewish customs with care and reverence and, in
doing so, constructs her own childhood Jewish identity. After describing
the particular difficulties faced by Jews on the Sabbath and on high holy
days, Antin shows how days of religious observance transformed her
community: “On a Friday afternoon the stores and markets closed early.
The clatter of business ceased, the dust of worry was laid, and the
Sabbath peace flooded the quiet streets. No hovel so mean but what its
casement sent out its consecrated ray, so that a wayfarer passing in the
twilight saw the spirit of God brooding over the lowly roof” (30). In this
passage, Antin shows her com munity’s traditions in a far more positive
light than she does when exposing the unequal access to education of
men and women in her orthodox community. Antin not only venerates
specific Jewish cultural and religious practices but also addresses her
own implication in those structures, an implication that she certainly
does not find burdensome; rather, it is at the core of the Jewish identity
she constructs. Describing her childhood relationship to her religious
heritage, Antin writes,
My baby soul was enthralled by sad and noble cadences, as my
mother sang of my ancient home in Palestine, or mourned over
the desolation of Zion…. God needed me and I needed Him, for
we two together had a work to do, according to an ancient
covenant between Him and my forefathers.
This is the dream to which I was heir, in common with every
sad-eyed child of the Pale. This is the living seed which I found
among my heirlooms, when I learned how to strip from them the
prickly husk in which they were passed down to me. And what is
the fruit of such seed as that, and whither lead such dreams? If it
is mine to give the answer, let my words be true and brave. (40–1)
This passage is an important one, not only because it shows sympathy
with her Jewish community that was not evident in her criticism of
Jewish patriarchy, but because it suggests Antin’s belief in a continuity
between Jewish history, her childhood cultural practices, and her
present self. The first part of the passage expresses the beauty of
Antin’s religious inheritance; however, it also suggests that she chooses
which aspects of that inheritance infuse her own identity: she selectively
strips away a “prickly husk.” The passage then continues by suggesting
the effect of this inheritance. What is the fruit of such seed? I think
Antin is suggesting that her entire book, as well as the seemingly
coherent subject that it portrays, is the fruit. If by the end of her
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 35
autobiography Antin describes her subject as fully “American,” as I will
argue in the next section of this chapter, then this new subject position
is not derived at the expense of her cultural seed; it is a product of it.
The Russian Jewish identity that Antin constructs early in the text is not
entirely separable from her later “assimilated” identity. Antin reveals
this slippage across the boundaries of identity just as she earlier
questioned the rigidity of physical boundaries.
ASSIMILATION, WHITENESS, AND
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Chapter 8 signals a marked shift from earlier chapters in The Promised
Land. In this chapter—titled “The Exodus” in keeping with the
autobiography’s explicit theme of migration as a literal and spiritual
movement out of oppression to a “land of milk and honey—Antin tells
of how, having been sent tickets from her father in the United States,
she and the rest of her family migrated by steamer to Boston. The
description of their journey is brief, sketching over the details of Antin’s
previously published work From Plotzk [sic] to Boston (1899). The
remaining chapters, roughly the last half of the book, describe the Antin
family’s successive—and successively failing—attempts at business as
well as Mary Antin’s schooling in the United States. Generally, critics
have focused on this second half of the autobiography in order to show
how Antin reveals her own assimilation. Despite Antin’s overt
“American” posturing, however, the latter chapters of The Promised
Land actually reveal an immigrant subject who also subverts hegemonic
notions of the acceptable, assimilated immigrant.
As I discussed in the previous chapter, Mary Antin wrote The
Promised Land at a time during which many studies of immigration and
immigrant acceptability revolved around biologized notions of race;
indeed, many nativist writers argued that groups that were biologically
distinct from northern and western Europeans could never become truly
American. Considering the prevalence of such discussions, the lack of
overt references to race in Antin’s autobiography is striking. If we
assume that one of her central purposes in writing was to counter
xenophobia, we must question why she consistently refuses to confront
the racialized (and racist) arguments that constituted the forefront of
nativist publication. I want to argue that, although Antin rarely uses the
term race, and never uses the term white to refer to a racial category, the
second half of The Promised Land describes in detail a specific
36 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
formation of whiteness as experienced—both embraced and
subverted—by Antin’s autobiographical subject.
Recent theorists have noted how whiteness has often been
constructed as unmarked in North American discourse and cultural
practice, as I discussed earlier in this study. In the United States in
particular, whiteness as a category of identity has long been considered
the norm from which other racialized groups differ. White people have
generally been deemed racially neutral in hegemonic ideology, while
other people are marked by race, a point to which I will return. As
contemporary theorists have argued, however, processes of racial
signification have never been neutral; instead, they are always socially
and historically grounded. Social and discursive con structedness is as
much a feature of whiteness as it is of any other racialized grouping.
Thus, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant point out in Racial
Formation in the United States, while “the categories employed to
differentiate among human groups along racial lines reveal themselves…
to be at best imprecise, and at worst completely arbitrary” (55), the
formation of those categories is anything but arbitrary. From the
beginnings of modern racial consciousness, racial formation has been
intricately connected to European domination and hegemony.
Describing the European conquest of the Americas, Omi and Winant
note that “the seizure of territory and goods, the introduction of slavery
through the encomienda and other forms of coerced native labor, and
then through the organization of the African slave trade—not to mention
the practice of outright extermination—all presupposed a worldview
which distinguished Europeans, as children of God, full-fledged human
beings, etc., from ‘Others’” (62). More specifically relevant to this
study, we can see the increasing popularity of biological concepts of
race during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a crucial part of
systems of domination; “claims of species distinctiveness among
humans,” assert Omi and Winant, “justified the inequitable allocation of
political and social rights, while still upholding the doctrine of ‘the
rights of man’” (64). Thus, any formation of race—whether articulated
in a scientific, overtly political, popular, or artistic arena—is necessarily
tied to political and social agendas.
Without explicitly using the terminology of race, Mary Antin
presents a very specific account of a formation of whiteness in the early
twentieth century. She does this, in part, by working within the
definition of whiteness as an unmarked, “given” category; the essence
of being “American,” in The Promised Land, is to participate in a
hegemonically-defined, Anglo-Protes-tant-centered definition of
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 37
whiteness. Basically, being American and being white are coterminous.
In “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness,” Ruth Frankenberg revises
and expands her earlier definition of whiteness to offer a working
definition that is useful in examining Mary Antin’s autobiography.
Among the dimensions of whiteness that Frankenberg notes, I find these
three especially relevant here:
1. Whiteness is a location of structural advantage in societies
structured in racial dominance.
2. Whiteness is a “standpoint,” a location from which to see selves,
others, and national and global orders.
3. Whiteness is a site of elaboration of a range of cultural practices
and identities, often unmarked and unnamed, or named as national
or ‘normative’ rather than specifiably racial. (76; numbered list
in original)
The second of these dimensions suggests that whiteness is a subject
position that necessarily structures an individual’s relationships with
other humans. In her third point, Frankenberg acknowledges that
whiteness has been constructed in such a way that its cultural practices
and identities are unmarked; consequently, their racially-specific
existence becomes hidden from some of those who practice them.7 Omi
and Winant make a similar claim when they discuss the consequences
of centuries of racial dictatorship in the United States. One consequence,
they argue, is that these centuries “defined ‘American’ identity as
white, as the negation of racialized ‘otherness’—at first largely African
and indigenous, later Latin American and Asian as well. This negation
took shape in both law and custom, in public institutions and in forms
of cultural representation” (66). Like Frankenberg, Omi and Winant
acknowledge that race is “a concept which signifies and symbolizes
social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human
bodies” (55). But if the history of racial dictatorship in the United States
has caused “American” identity to be defined as white, as Omi and
Winant claim (66), Mary Antin’s claims of assimilation are necessarily
linked to processes of racial formation. Antin describes her assimilation
in terms of changing beliefs and cultural practices; for her, these changes
constitute her “Americanness.” Frankenberg’s and Omi and Winant’s
theories of whiteness, however, allow a reader to understand Antin’s
assimilation—even when defined as a process of cultural transformation
or as a process of claiming a position in the nation-state—as an
implicitly racialized project. Antin’s movement into Americanness
38 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
cannot be divorced from her movement into, and definition of,
whiteness.
I wish to turn now to the ways that Antin defines what it means to be
American in The Promised Land. Because Americanness and whiteness
are necessarily linked for Antin, understanding her notion of American
identity is crucial to understanding how she claims a specific white
subject position. Antin devotes a great portion of the second half of her
book to describing her education in Boston’s public schools. This focus
on schooling is explicitly connected to the process of Americanization.
Many social reformers, educational theorists, and writers in the popular
media of Antin’s time considered assimilation a central goal of schools
in areas with immigrant populations. Jane Addams, for example, viewed
public schools as venues for Americanizing not only schoolchildren but
entire families (through the students’ influences on their parents and
siblings) and asserted in Twenty Years at Hull House (1910) that “The
public schools in the immigrant colonies deserve all the praise as
Americanizing agencies which can be bestowed upon them” (183).
Mary Antin makes a similar claim in The Promised Land: “The public
school has done its best for us foreigners, and for the country, when it
has made us into good Americans” (222). Antin leaves the definition of
“good American” ambiguous; however, patriotism seems to play a large
role. For example, Antin describes learning about and coming to idolize
traditionally revered Anglo-American heroes. Studying about George
Washington in school had a profound effect on Antin: “When the class
read [about Washington], and it came my turn, my voice shook and the
book trembled in my hands. I could not pronounce the name George
Washington without a pause. Never had I prayed, never had I called
upon the Most Holy, in such utter reverence and worship as I repeated
the simple sentences of my child’s story of the patriot” (223). Antin’s
use of religious vocabulary and comparison is important here. Antin’s
admiration for Washington takes the form of religious worship, and she
insures that the reader will not miss this point by drawing an overt
comparison with the practices of Judaism.
But because Antin portrays her patriotism in religious terms, we
cannot view the process she describes as solely an adoption of new
cultural values. She mentions Judaic worship as a contrast, emphasizing
that her new “religion” of worshiping the Anglo-Protestant patriot has
eclipsed her former devotions. At times, she even uses the word
conversion to describe the process of assimilation (249). Antin, then,
plays on the idea that a person cannot be of two faiths at once. Her new
faith/ideology is not pluralistic; instead, she describes leaving behind her
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 39
position as a Jew, marked as Other, to enter the unmarked fold of
Americanness.8 Furthermore, Antin is careful to explain her reasons for
“converting” to Anglo-Protestant values with such enthusiasm. After
describing her studies of the Revolutionary War and her consequent
patriotism, Antin contrasts life in the United States with her life in
the Pale:
Where had been my country until now? What had I loved? What
heroes had I worshipped? The very names of these things had
been unknown to me. Well I knew that Polotzk was not my
country. It was goluth—exile…not a child among us was too
young to feel in his own flesh the lash of the oppressor…only a
lifelong dreamer here and there hoped to die in Palestine…. So a
little Jewish girl in Polotzk was apt to grow up hungry-minded
and empty-hearted; and if, still in her outreaching youth, she was
set down in a land of outspoken patriotism, she was likely to love
her new country with a great love, and to embrace its heroes in a
great worship. (226–8)
In this passage, Antin clarifies specific reasons that she so easily came
to worship participants in the Revolutionary War: her heroes literally
represented to her a form of freedom from oppression that she was unable
to experience as a child, and by worshiping them she created for herself
a sense of belonging in the form of national identity. Antin describes
this national identity as a direct result of her schooling. Indeed, her formal
education is at the core of the second half of The Promised Land, the
half of the text that critics read as evidence of Antin’s assimilation.
Political theorist Antonio Gramsci’s explanation of hegemonic rule is
useful to understanding how education functions in The Promised Land.
According to Gramsci, hegemony relies on a combination of coercion
and consent. It is not enough for a ruling group to have military and
economic power; in order to maintain power, the group must also have
the consent of those they subordinate. Gramsci claims that education
effects a “domination by consent”; by legitimizing and perpetuating
specific systems of beliefs and practices, formal education works to gain
and maintain the consent of the governed (Selections from the Prison
Notebooks). If a primary function of schools is to effect assimilation, as
writers such as Antin and Jane Addams assert, then the schools must
essentially seduce immigrant students into consenting to the rule of the
hegemony. The process by which schools brought about this consent
during the Progressive Era is complex. In Civic Ideals, Rogers M. Smith
40 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
describes a wide range of political positions regarding the proper role of
civic education during the period. Smith notes that it was in the field of
education that “Americans tried to shape who and what future American
citizens would be”; however, he also shows that how that shaping
should take place was in dispute (463).9 According to Smith, centrists
largely maintained that “the new immigrants from southern and eastern
Europe could not be equipped for either citizenship or the franchise
until and unless they had mastered an Americanizing civic education in
‘Anglo-Saxon conceptions of righteousness, liberty, law, order, public
decency, and government’” (465). While this educational agenda is
implicit in The Promised Land, the explicit Americanizing program that
Antin describes is even narrower. In Antin’s autobiography, the systems
of beliefs and practices perpetuated by the public schools are very
specific ones, geared toward encouraging patriotism and a consequent
sense of national identity.
It is significant, then, that Antin not only presents her patriotism as
evidence of her own cultural assimilation, but also uses her experience
to generalize about all immigrant children. She begins a chapter titled
“Initiation” by claiming:
It is not worth while to refer to voluminous school statistics to see
just how many “green” pupils entered school last September, not
knowing the days of the week in English, who next February will
be declaiming patriotic verses in honor of George Washington and
Abraham Lincoln, with a foreign accent, indeed, but with plenty of
enthusiasm. It is enough to know that this hundred-fold miracle is
common to the schools in every part of the United States where
immigrants are received. (206)
In this passage, Antin allies herself with those who believe that
assimilation is a necessary precondition of immigrant acceptability. She
refutes those nativists who would claim that immigrants such as Antin—
in other words, the “inferior” immigrants of eastern and southern
Europe—are unable to assimilate. To make this argument in favor of
immigration, however, Antin must rely on a narrow definition of what it
means to become “American”: one must learn English and express
patriotic adulation for the “Founding Fathers.” By using this narrow
definition, Antin is able to make a case in favor of immigration without
investigating the complexities of “Americanness”: she not only ignores
a wide range of cultural articulations that might entwine in the
formation of “Americanness,” but even disregards a range of
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 41
Anglo-Protestant cultural beliefs and practices that extend far beyond
patriotism and use of the English language. Antin, then, positions
herself within a narrow, static “American” identity and consequently is
able to present a convincing pro-immigrant argument to her U.S.-born
readers.
While Antin never overtly acknowledges this American identity as
racialized, she does mark it, as Valerie Babb has pointed out, as
implicitly a white identity. In Whiteness Visible: the Meaning of
Whiteness in American Literature and Culture, Babb notes that
instances of the racialized character of Americanness
are evident in descriptions characterizing exemplary American
identity as [Antin] found it personified in the weekly program
offered by the local mission, her public education, the literature
she read, and her contact with “genuine” Americans. In reflecting
on each, she reveals the degree to which white, Protestant, affluent,
and American were blurred in her mind. (121)
Regarding each of these depictions of “exemplary American identity,”
Babb looks at how that identity is racialized. For example, she points to
Antin’s literary models of Americanness, by authors ranging from
Louisa May Alcott to Horatio Alger, and shows that they “created an
America that was a constellation of white images, including a white,
female New England childhood…and the adventures of young, often
upwardly mobile, white males” (124). Babb also notes that the
racialized character of American identity reveals itself in Antin’s
description of the white, Protestant entertainers at the weekly mission
program. Antin remarks on “the beautiful ladies,” “the miraculously
clean gentlemen,” and the “ravishing little girls who stood up in a glory
of golden curls” (Antin 267). These “idealized images of white
identity,” Babb claims, reveal Antin’s belief that “beyond her Jewish
American world lies a better American one” that the entertainers at the
mission show represent (120).
As Babb’s discussion makes clear, American identity is racially
marked as white in The Promised Land. It is important to note, however,
that Antin’s generally positive portrayal of white American identity has
some cracks. A significant one occurs immediately following Antin’s
idealized description of the performers at the mission show. Here Antin
describes Brother Hotchkins, the coordinator of the mission shows,
whom she does not like: “He was too slim, too pale, too fair” (268).
Antin’s emphasis on Brother Hotchkins’s complexion establishes both
42 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
his literal whiteness and also an image of white American identity that
contrasts with the preceding idealized ones. Antin denies that her dislike
for Brother Hotchkins is racially-based—“I considered myself freed
from racial prejudices”—and she emphasizes that she dislikes him
because he is a missionary (268). Nevertheless, it is Antin’s antipathy
toward Brother Hotchkins’s literal whiteness that frames the passage:
she ends her discussion of her dislike for him by mentioning that he
remained “happily unconscious of my disapproval of his complexion”
(268).10 Antin makes clear that American identity is white, but her
attitude toward that identity, both its literal embodiment in the form of
Brother Hotchkins, as well as its more subtly presented cultural
representation, is sometimes ambiguous.
This ambiguity also reveals itself in Antin’s continuing depiction of
assimilation. While Antin claims her own assimilation, as I discussed
above, she also calls into question the possibility and desirability of
complete assimilation, especially for adult immigrants. While Antin’s
father quickly eschewed orthodox customs “in his ambition to make
Americans” (244) of the family, Antin’s mother, called Hannah Hayye
in the text, encountered difficulty adjusting to “American” practices.
Antin contrasts her parents’ processes of assimilation: “My mother, as
we know, had not the initial impulse to depart from ancient usages that
my father had in his habitual skepticism. He had always been a
nonconformist in his heart; she bore lovingly the yoke of prescribed
conduct” (247). In the end, the process is a painful one for Hannah
Hayye: “My mother, therefore, gradually divested herself, at my
father’s bidding, of the mantle of orthodox observance; but the process
cost her many a pang, because the fabric of that venerable garment was
interwoven with the fabric of her soul” (247). The difficulties of
assimilation are not only experienced by Hannah Hayye, but also by the
rest of the Antin family. In brief passages that interrupt her paean to life
in America, Antin describes her family life as chaotic due to the shift
away from a familiar organized system of cultural values and practices.
“Chaos,” Antin claims, “took the place of system; uncertainty,
inconsistency undermined discipline. My parents knew only that they
desired us to be like American children” (271). Regarding this change in
family life, Antin again generalizes from her experience:
The price that all of us paid for this disorganization of our family
life has been levied on every immigrant Jewish household where
the first generation clings to the traditions of the Old World, while
the second generation leads the life of the New. Nothing more
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 43
pitiful could be written in the annals of the Jews; nothing more
inevitable, nothing more hopeful. Hopeful, yes; alike for the Jew
and for the country that has given him shelter. For Israel is not the
only party that has put up a forfeit in this contest. (248)
Antin’s attitude toward assimilation in this passage is ambiguous. The
process is painful and “pitiful,” but it is also hopeful. Instead of
proceeding to explain why assimilation is “hopeful,” however, she
asserts that “Israel is not the only party that has put up a forfeit in this
contest.” Who else “has put up a forfeit?” Antin may refer to other, nonJewish groups of immigrants. The passage also suggests that U.S.-born
citizens, those born in “the country that has given [Jews] shelter,” lose
something in the process of immigrant assimilation.
After describing her parents’ difficult processes of assimilation, Antin
claims that she thinks it “doubtful if the conversion of the Jew to an
alien belief or disbelief is ever thoroughly accomplished” (249). She
uses the example of her father—whom she had described earlier as one
who assimilated relatively easily—to support her assertion. “My
father,” Antin imagines, “might speak and tell how, in time, he
discovered that in his first violent rejection of everything old and
established he cast from him much that he afterwards missed. He might
tell to what extent he later retraced his steps, seeking to recover what he
had learned to value anew” (248). Significantly, Antin tells of her
father’s re-embracement of “old and established” values as an aside
rather than as a central part of her, or her family’s, history. In order to
maintain the veneer of her paean to assimilation, she refuses to delve
too deeply into the possible drawbacks of assimilation, suggesting
only that, “perhaps [her grandchildren] may have to testify that the faith
of Israel is a heritage that no heir in the direct line has the power to
alienate from his successors” (249).
Patriotism and religious conversion are not the only terms in which
Antin presents the process of assimilation. Since she is writing an
autobiography, Antin necessarily creates a work that is situated within a
very “American” literary genre, one whose defining characteristics have
been largely articulated by white men. At least since the time of Benjamin
Franklin, American autobiographies frequently have followed a linear
narrative of the self-made individual overcoming adversity, working
through a process of (usually self-) education, and ultimately arriving at
some sort of social/monetary success. This dominant narrative pattern
has worked to reify “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps” as a
defining, if clichéd, “American” value. Many readers of The Promised
44 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
Land have identified this narrative pattern in the autobiography. In
“Charles Reznikoff’s Family Chronicle: Saying Thank You and I’m
Sorry,” for example, Eric Homberger claims that immigrant memoirs of
the turn of the century, including The Promised Land, “had the simple
force of homilies: how I came, struggled, learned and finally succeeded.
The immigrants’ story was a glowing tribute to the promise of America”
(327). Similarly, in the essay “Identities Within Identity,” June Sochen,
while specifically addressing fiction rather than autobiography, writes
of the connotations of adopting such a narrative pattern:
When a Jewish American woman writer…writes a rags-to-riches
novel…she is operating within a tried and true genre. She is
identifying with a literary tradition in America and in so doing
allying herself with a whole set of American cultural beliefs. She
is accepting the view that progress is a real phenomenon for
newly arriving immigrants, that all of them must struggle, and
that many will succeed if they observe the Protestant values of
hard work, self-reliance, and patience. (9)
Both Homberger and Sochen focus primarily on economic
achievement, a subject that plays little role in The Promised Land.11 The
pattern of struggle and success, however, could easily be used to
describe Antin’s educational process in the United States, suggesting
that she has allied herself with the American cultural beliefs that Sochen
describes. And yet, while The Prom ised Land’s narrative does, in some
ways, resemble the dominant American autobiographical pattern, Antin
also subverts this pattern.
The American autobiographical pattern of self-made success is part
of a larger Western tradition of constructing the subject of
autobiography. In their introduction to De/Colonizing the Subject: The
Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia
Watson explain that “‘autobiography’ has been implicated in a specific
notion of ‘selfhood.’ This Enlightenment ‘self,’ ontologically identical
to other “I”s, sees its destiny in a teleological narrative enshrining the
‘individual’ and ‘his’ uniqueness” (xvii). This individual, the “selfmade man” of American autobiography, is “rational, agentive, unitary”
(Smith and Watson xvii). Recent critics and narrative theorists have
noted how the autobiographies of male minorities and women
frequently differ from white male autobiographies, especially in terms of
the narrative subject’s construction of the self and the relationship
between the subject and her or his community and/or society. In 1992,
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 45
for example, Albert E. Stone added a postscript to his earlier (1978)
analysis of the two “polar modes of self-representation” (187)—the
historically-grounded memoir and the fictionalized private confession—
of African-American autobiography. In this postscript to “After Black
Boy and Dusk of Dawn: Patterns in Recent Black Autobiography,”
Stone notes that for African-American autobiographers, “truth to self
seldom means embracing white male models of autonomous identity, a
persona typified in mainstream American autobiography by Benjamin
Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, or Lee Iacocca” (188). Making a similar
claim about women autobiographers, Germaine Bree, following critic
Susan Friedman, asserts that “the important unit is never for [the woman
autobiographer] the isolated human being but the presence and
recognition of another consciousness” (174).12 Stone, Bree, and
Friedman find that texts by autobiographers other than white males
rarely focus on isolated, autonomous individuals, and this is precisely
the case in The Promised Land.
Perhaps the most obvious way that Antin constructs an interdependent,
communal subject is through her description of her education in Boston.
Whereas Benjamin Franklin details how, on his own initiative, he would
stay up long into the night studying, Antin is careful to show how others
participated in, and contributed to, the process of her education. Soon
after her arrival in the United States, Antin entered the public school
with the full support of her family. Her father not only promoted her
education, but saw it as a form of salvation: “That subject [education] my
father had written about repeatedly, as comprising his chief hope for us
children, the essence of American opportunity, the treasure that no thief
could touch, not even misfortune or poverty. It was the one thing that he
was able to promise us when he sent for us; surer, safer than bread or
shelter” (186). At the same time that Antin, her younger brother Joseph,
and her younger sister Dora (Deborah), enrolled in school, however, her
older sister Frieda (Fetchke) was sent to work as a dressmaker’s
apprentice.13 When describing with pride her first day at school, Antin
also notes her older sister’s absence:
Frieda’s heart did throb that day, but not with my emotions. My
heart pulsed with joy and pride and ambition; in her heart longing
fought with abnegation. For I was led to the schoolroom, with its
sunshine and its singing and the teacher’s cheery smile; while she
was led to the workshop, with its foul air, care-lined faces, and the
foreman’s stern command. Our going to school was the fulfilment
of my father’s best promises to us, and Frieda’s share in it was to
46 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
fashion and fit the calico frocks in which baby sister and I made
our first appearance in a public schoolroom. (199)
Antin clearly shows that the reason for Frieda’s different fate is financial
when she explains that had her father “been able to support his family
unaided, it would have been the culmination of his best hopes to see all
his children at school” (201). Antin’s education, then, is partly a
product of her father’s encouragement and her sister’s sacrifice.
Antin quickly succeeded in the public school, especially in learning
English, earning praise from her teachers and from her family alike.
Again, however, Antin is careful to note that, unlike a more traditional
American autobiographer, she cannot take sole credit for her success.
With the help of her teacher, Miss Nixon, she learned English quickly
and was soon advanced to the second grade. Describing her success,
Antin at first seems to give herself much of the credit. After praising
Miss Nixon, Antin continues, “I do not mean to give my dear teacher all
the credit for my rapid progress, nor even half the credit” (206). This
statement suggests that Antin indeed sees her educational success as
self-made. However, she quickly qualifies her proud assertion: “I shall
divide [the credit] with her on behalf of my race and my family. I was
Jew enough to have an aptitude for language in general, and to bend my
mind earnestly to my task; I was Antin enough to read each lesson with
my heart, which gave me an inkling of what was coming next, and so
carried me along by leaps and bounds” (206–7). By crediting her ‘race’
and her family, Antin in one sense seems to be acknowledging innate,
hereditary abilities. At the same time, one could read this passage as an
acknowledgment of how members of her Jewish community and of her
family helped her. In other words, Antin’s diligence and her tendency to
read each lesson with her heart are, in part, learned qualities, qualities
that her family and her community have taught her. In this sense, Antin
is not the self-educated hero of American autobiography; even her
personal qualities that help her succeed can be read as the product of her
environment.
Antin similarly relinquishes any claim to being self-educated when
she describes her teachers. She writes of her third-grade teacher, Miss
Dillingham, with reverence: “I can hardly name her with the rest,
though I mention none of them lightly” (208). Miss Dillingham, the
autobiography chronicles, is largely responsible for Antin’s first
publication, a poem titled “Snow.” The poem was published in the
journal “Primary Education,” prefaced by a letter from Miss Dillingham
to the journal’s editor explaining that the poem was “the uncorrected
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 47
paper of a Russian child twelve years old, who had studied English only
four months” (211). Antin includes the entire text of Miss Dillingham’s
letter and of the poem, and she introduces them by stating that “a
tattered copy [of the publication] lies in my lap as I write—treasured for
fifteen years, you see, by my vanity” (211). Although Antin notes her
own vanity and mentions that she is proud of her poem, she soon
criticizes her own pride. After providing the text of the poem, she
immediately asserts that “now that it stands there, with her [Miss
Dillingham’s] name over it, I am ashamed of my flippant talk about
vanity” (212; emphasis in original). She continues by praising Miss
Dillingham, concluding that “I ought to go back and strike out all that talk
about vanity. What reason have I to be vain, when I reflect how at every
step I was petted, nursed, and encouraged?…I never heard of any one who
was so watched and coaxed, so passed along from hand to helping
hand, as was I” (214). Antin makes it very clear that she has not pulled
herself up by her own bootstraps; indeed, her careful construction of the
preceding passages suggests that she wishes to emphasize the point.
Instead of striking out “all that talk about vanity” as she claims she should,
Antin is careful to retain it, perhaps to emphasize how her narrative
differs from the traditional autobiographical pattern of self-education.
Unlike the success of a self-made white American man, any success
that Antin can claim must be seen, in part, as the product of her
teachers, family and community.
By writing in the form of autobiography, Mary Antin asserts her
American self; by refusing the white male autobiographical tradition of
pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, she also calls that self into
question and consequently calls into question the possibility of
assimilation.14 Perhaps even more striking, however, is the way that
Antin subverts the traditional linear narrative pattern of autobiography.
Autobiographies, like Bildung sromans, often present seamless, linear,
chronological narrative structures. Instead, Antin’s autobiography is
bifurcated; the first half of the text contains reminiscences of life in
Russia, while the second half is a more traditional, chiefly
chronological account of her experiences after immigration. As I
previously noted, it is this second half of the autobiography that
critics examine as evidence of Antin’s successful assimilation. To get a
full picture of the autobiographical subject that Antin creates, however,
we certainly must examine the text as a whole.
The bifurcated structure of The Promised Land might be read as a
representation of assimilation. Because Antin focuses on life in Russia
in the first half of the book and on “becoming American” in the second
48 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
half, one could argue that she substitutes one culture for another, a
reading that is substantiated by Antin’s own claims of “conversion.”
Such an argument, however, relies on a linear reading of the text; we
must assume a priori that Antin is indeed creating a rags-to-riches
narrative of progress and transformation. By instead reading the two
halves of the autobiography side by side, the reader can unfold a very
different story of assimilation. If, as Sochen argues, the form of Antin’s
work implies complicity with American cultural beliefs, then this
alliance is complicated by the first half of the autobiography. In this
part of the text, Antin not only frequently describes her Jewish
community in Russia with reverence and sympathy, but she also marks
herself as a Jew and as a female. She does this by carefully describing
the differences between Jews and Gentiles in Russia and by describing
how differently boys and girls are treated within her community,
especially in terms of access to education, as I noted earlier. While
Antin attempts to construct herself as American in the second half of the
autobiography, her emphasis on her gender and on her religious and
cultural ties in the first half prohibit the reader from reading the
autobiographical subject Mary Antin as unmarked.15
The Promised Land, then, contains two versions of Mary Antin’s
story of assimilation. In the more overt version, Antin becomes an
unmarked American; she participates in a hegemonically-defined,
Anglo-Protes-tant-centered definition of whiteness. In the other story of
assimilation, Antin becomes a Russian-Jewish-American woman. She
does not substitute one identity for another but instead crafts a multiple,
syncretic subject. Furthermore, Antin makes it clear that even her
apparently unified American subject is one that is in-process, one that
may have more to do with practice than with essence. Describing the
ease with which she adjusted to attending Boston’s Latin School,
populated by “aristocratic” students, as a teenager, Antin explains that
to “make myself at home in an alien world was also within my talents; I
had been practising it day and night for the past four years” (294).
Antin’s use of the word practising is significant, suggesting that her
American self is not as static or unified as it may appear. However, she
does not fully reject the idea that an “authentic” American identity
exists. This becomes disturbingly apparent when she describes her
reaction to the birth of her niece, her sister Frieda’s first child: “She was
born an American, and it was something to me to have one genuine
American relative” (314). Antin’s niece is a “genuine American”
because she was born in the United States, implying that an immigrant
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 49
may assimilate but can never be a “genuine American,” an identity that,
at this moment in the text, is based on essence, not practice.
While most critics of The Promised Land, in their focus on
Americanization, fail to acknowledge the multiple subject positions that
Antin claims, critic Magdalena J.Zaborowska recognizes that there is
more than one level to Antin’s narrative. In How We Found America:
Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives,
Zaborowska does not read Antin’s work in terms of racial formation, as
I do in this chapter, but instead chooses to read the work through a
gendered lens to uncover how “the politics of female authorship in
general and of autobiography in particular are interrogated” in Antin’s
autobiography (51). Despite this different focus, however, Zaborowska
also finds that the work presents a subtext “which questions and
debunks the superficial tale of an immigrant girl’s successful
Americanization” (53). Most relevant to this study, by examining
Antin’s relationship to the prescribed narratives of her time,
Zaborowska offers possible reasons for the multiple narratives in the
autobiography. Zaborowska claims that the “sense of fragmentation and
alienation from herself” that surfaces in Antin’s narrative
should not be read as a happy affirmation of rebirth in America. It
indicates instead the inevitable loss of the immigrant woman’s
identity amid the Americanization narrative prescribed for her by
the dominant culture—the Promised Land, which is not interested
in listening to her other story—in which she nevertheless remains
Jewish and female, ‘a princess, in memory of my forefathers who
had ruled a nation,’ in which she goes ‘in the disguise of an
outcast’ although she feels ‘a halo resting on [her] brow.’ (67)
I disagree with Zaborowska’s claim that The Promised Land reveals
“the inevitable loss of the immigrant woman’s identity”; the idea of loss
implies that identity is something static, missing the complexities of the
formation of identity. Nevertheless, Zaborowska’s analysis is useful for
its acknowledgment of the role Antin’s audience plays in shaping her
narrative. Zaborowska clearly suggests that the “official” version of
Antin’s story—the one in which Antin claims an already-inscribed
white, American subject position—is created to appeal to Antin’s
audience. If we assume that Antin’s purpose in writing was, in part, to
counter the rampant xenophobia of her time, especially as that
xenophobia was directed at the “inferior” immigrants from southern and
eastern Europe, then her embracement of whiteness can be read as a
50 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
direct response to her social agenda.16 As Zaborowska explains, “Antin
did not have any other choice but to participate in some of the ‘paeans’
if she wanted a chance to speak for the immigrant cause, if she wanted
to see her text in print at all” (60). She must, at least from her
perspective as a Russian-Jewish immigrant woman, a potential
“outsider,” adopt a white subject position, and she must largely define
white identity as a stable, coherent entity if she is to have a voice and an
audience.
Having this audience, and having this audience accept her claim to
whiteness, is central to the process of racial redefinition for immigrant
Jews. Describing the process of how Irish workers became white in the
nineteenth century, in How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev
implies that claiming whiteness was only part of the process; this claim
had to be accepted by those in power. To claim whiteness for Jewish
immigrants, Mary Antin is faced with a similar situation: she must
position her claim in such a way that it will be recognized by those
whose whiteness is already established. In How Jews Became White
Folks, Karen Brodkin locates the acceptance of Jews as white in postWorld War II America; however, she also notes that “Jews advanced a
variety of cultural claims to Americanness long before these were
granted. For the most part, these were efforts to assimilate the values of
mainstream America” (155). The Promised Land presents one such
early claim.
If one of Antin’s purposes was to define herself as white and
consequently fit for citizenship, however, we must ask why her
autobiography largely ignores an often-used method of defining
whiteness by opposing it to blackness. As the studies outlined in chapter
one suggest, whiteness has long been defined in opposition to blackness,
both relying on and reifying a bifurcated racial system in the United
States. While this bifurcated system has not been the only conception of
race historically—both whiteness and blackness also have been defined
in relation and opposition to redness, for example—the opposition of
black and white became crucial to defining immigrant “fitness” during
the reign of Jim Crow. As Rogers M. Smith points out, “the fact that
most Northern states did not pass Jim Crow laws did not make them
just a regional phenomenon” (449). Not only the spirit of the laws but
also their legal ramifications held sway throughout the country, and they
had specific influence on immigration policy and on the public
perception of immigrants.
Matthew Frye Jacobson provides an excellent investigation of some
of the ways that Jim Crow directly impacted immigration policy.
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 51
Jacobson discusses at length one legal case that exemplifies the degree
to which the binarism of Jim Crow influenced the definition of
whiteness: the Massachusetts circuit course case In re Halladjian
(1909). In this case, the court ruled in favor of four Armenians who had
been denied naturalization on the grounds that they were not “free white
persons.” In reaching the decision, the court relied not only on colonial
racial definitions but also on more recent segregation statutes from
states such as Florida, Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.
The court cited an Arkansan statute, for example, that specified that
“persons not visibly African ‘shall be deemed to belong to the white
race’” (In re Halladjian). Such statutes helped the court to affirm that
anyone who was not black was, by default, white.
While the Massachusetts court’s reification of a bifurcated racial
system did not end debate over how to define whiteness, the ruling does
show how segregative logic worked to further monolithic whiteness,
allowing formerly racially indeterminate immigrants to become white, at
least legally. As Jacobson puts it, “for certain groups, at certain
moments, under certain conditions, Jim Crow whitened, and whitened
decisively” (110).
The one point where Antin comes closest to invoking the binary racial
logic of Jim Crow is in an incident described by Werner Sollors as
perhaps “the most troubling, though little-noticed episode in The
Promised Land” (xxx-xxxi). In this scene, Antin tells of a “great hulky
colored boy,” “the torment of the neighborhood,” who bullied her on the
street. Antin’s father has the boy arrested and tried, and she describes
the courtroom scene as pitting “bearded Arlington Street against
woolheaded Arlington Street” (260). Rather than seeing racial
significance in the scene, however, Antin instead uses this episode to
celebrate the U.S. justice system: “We were all free, and all treated
equally, just as it said in the Constitution! The evil-doer was actually
punished, and not the victim, as might very easily happen in a similar
case in Russia. ‘Liberty and justice for all.’ Three cheers for the Red,
White, and Blue!” (260).
Sollors notes that “It is remarkable that Antin did not stop here to
imagine any possible analogies between the roles of Jews in the Pale
and of blacks in turn-of-the-century America” (xxxi). I would add that it
is equally remarkable that Antin does not push the racial binary further
here. She suggests such a binary, not only through her description of the
“great hulky colored boy,” but also through the literally antagonistic
courtroom groupings of “bearded Arlington Street” and “woolheaded
Arlington Street.” However, Antin quickly elides this racialized scheme
52 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
by extolling the sup posedly “blind” justice system; as in the rest of the
autobiography, race is no longer an overt issue.
There are a number of (not necessarily mutually exclusive) possible
explanations for Antin’s elision of racial binarism. One potential reason
might be that she opposed that construction of racial difference. If the
historical Antin did indeed see parallels between the positions of blacks
in Jim Crow America and of Jews in the Russian Pale, as Sollors
suggests she might have done, opposition to racial binarism and
segregation becomes an even more likely cause for not relying on them,
and consequently reifying them, to establish her autobiographical
whiteness. A less optimistic explanation might be that, given the
prevalence of belief in a black/white binary during the Progressive Era,
Antin’s brief reference to that binary in the episode noted above was
sufficient to establish it as a subtext to the rest of her autobiography. In
other words, she would not need to further emphasize that schema of
racial difference because her audience would already have been well
acquainted with it. This explanation is certainly in keeping with how the
racial status of Jews was legally defined during the time: Jewish
immigrants were generally accepted legally as “free, white persons”
eligible for naturalization. Thus Antin’s brief invocation of the black/
white binary would serve as a reminder of Jews’ “official” status on the
white side of the racial line.
Jews were generally defined as white in legal arenas; however, their
racial status in popular thought was much more ambiguous. Whereas
some gentile European Americans contended that Jews, despite their
legal racial status, were biologically different from and inferior to other
European-American “races,” the more common attitude toward the
racial classification of Jews might best be described, to use Brodkin’s
words, as “not-quite-white” (60), or in Jacobson’s phrasing,
“inconclusively white” (65). Their position in the racial framework of
the Progressive Era was more ambiguous than naturalization law would
suggest. Antin’s brief bow to the logic of Jim Crow in the incident
pitting “bearded Arlington Street against woolheaded Arlington Street,”
then, is hardly sufficient to put the issue of Jewish racial ambiguity
to rest.
This ambiguity, however, can help us to better understand Antin’s
elision of the racial binary throughout most of the autobiography. The
binary logic of Jim Crow was predicated on the assumption of biological
and hierarchical difference between races. While this assumption also
pervades much anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic discourse of the time,
the social aspects of immigrant racial difference—aspects that were
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 53
viewed as consequent to biological difference but that were frequently
addressed sep arately—often took center stage in these arguments. By
eliding the racial binary of Jim Crow through much of the text, Antin
also avoids directly addressing the issue of Jewish biological difference.
I do not wish to imply that the writer Antin consciously invoked then
evaded the black/white binary of racial discourse. But whatever her
intentions or personal views on the “color line,” her brief opposition of
Jews and blacks as well as the text’s general lack of reference to racial
binaries directly affect how Jews are constructed racially in the
autobiography. Given her anti-xenophobic agenda, Antin’s focus on the
cultural dimensions of race allows her to, for the most part, sidestep
questions of biological racial difference and instead make the claim that
her own experiences better allow her to make: that immigrant Jews are
able to culturally assimilate into whiteness. When she does briefly
invoke the biologically-based racial binary, that binary only furthers the
case for Jewish whiteness.
CONCLUSION: BOUNDARIES AND “I”S
As I have shown, the story of Antin’s fitness for participation in
whiteness is only one of the stories told in the autobiography. I wish to
conclude this chapter by returning to the introduction of Antin’s
autobiography in order to examine the relationship between the white
subject and the marked Other subject of The Promised Land. Many
critics have remarked on Antin’s introduction, but none have examined
fully the contradictions inherent in it and how those contradictions
reflect on the author’s multiple autobiographical subject positions. Most
critics who do examine the introduction focus on Antin’s discussion of
her reasons for writing the autobiography. In a much-cited passage,
Antin asserts that “It is because I understand my history, in its larger
outlines, to be typical of many, that I consider it worth recording. My
life is a concrete illustration of a multitude of statistical facts. Although
I have written a genuine personal memoir, I believe that its chief
interest lies in the fact that it is illustrative of scores of unwritten lives”
(xxi). This passage foregrounds Antin’s desire to link her own history
with that of other immigrants, a linkage that is essential to her proimmigration argument. As Steven J. Rubin claims, autobiography
“provided a vehicle for linking personal history with that of the group—
with an entire social process” (36). Antin goes so far as to switch from
the first person singular pronoun to the first person plural, further
emphasizing her identification with a larger group of immigrants: “I am
54 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
only one of many whose fate it has been to live a page of modern
history. We are the strands of the cable that binds the Old World to the
New” (xxi; my emphasis).
I wish to suggest that this “typical” Mary Antin of the introduction,
whose story is “illustrative of scores of unwritten lives,” is a correlative
of the white Americanized subject that Antin the author has constructed
in the autobiography itself. I began this chapter by noting how Antin
distances her writing self from the subject of the autobiography. “I am
just as much out of the way as if I were dead,” she claims toward the
beginning of the introduction, “for I am absolutely other than the person
whose story I have to tell” (xx). The “I” who is distanced from the
autobiographical “person whose story I have to tell” is presumably the
Americanized Antin. As in the body of the autobiography, the “I” of the
introduction can be compared to the persona of white male
autobiography. Similar to many white male autobiographers, Antin
describes herself as going through a transformation to emerge as an
individual:
[D]id [my parents] set me down in a sheltered garden, where the
sun should warm me, and no winter should hurt, while they fed
me from their hands? No; they early let me run in the fields—
perhaps because I would not be held—and eat of the wild fruits
and drink of the dew. Did they teach me from books, and tell me
what to believe? I soon chose my own books, and built me a
world of my own. In these discriminations I emerged, a new
being, something that had not been before. (xx; emphasis in
original)
The “I” of this passage seems to be a full-fledged American
autonomous individual, a female Horatio Alger-type character who has
risen beyond past adversities to craft her own identity.17 Antin does not
resolve the conflict between this strikingly individualistic subject and
the subject who claims herself to be representative of scores of other
immigrants; however, the presence of both is provocative. Antin at once
acknowledges the collectivity, the “unwritten lives” of which her story
is “typical,” and also asserts herself as the unique, individual subject. In
doing so, she emphasizes not only her personal transformation, but also
the potential transformation of other Jewish immigrants. These “others,”
too, can assimilate, can become individuals, can lay claim to whiteness.
The inclusion of this supposed transformation is essential to Antin’s
anti-xenophobic argument.
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 55
Rather than resolving the individualistic “I” and the representative
subject that she presents, however, Antin creates yet another facet to her
autobiographical identity. In the introduction, as in the text of the
autobiography, this “representative” subject and the Americanized
individualistic subject are in tension with another “I,” a Mary Antin who
remembers herself to be a Russian Jew and who has trouble articulating
the boundaries of her identity. After distancing her autobiographical
subject from her writing self, Antin immediately proceeds to undermine
that distinction: “Now I am the spiritual offspring of the marriage within
my conscious experience of the Past and the Present. My second birth was
no less a birth because there was no distinct incarnation. Surely it has
happened before that one body served more than one spiritual
organization” (xix). While still maintaining that she was “reborn,” she
also acknowledges in this passage that her autobiographical subject is a
multiple one with multiple allegiances.
Antin further subverts her own claim of distance between her past
and her present—a distance that is central to her claim to assimilation—
in the last paragraph of the introduction. Here, she returns to an
explanation of her reasons for writing and suggests that an additional
motivation for the autobiography is her need to exorcise her past; the
autobiography is “a charm that should release me from the folds of my
clinging past” (xxii). Discussing the process of migration, Antin
claims that
All the processes of uprooting, transportation, replanting,
acclimatization, and development took place in my own soul. I
felt the pang, the fear, the wonder, and the joy of it. I can never
forget, for I bear the scars. But I want to forget—sometimes I long
to forget. I think I have thoroughly assimilated my past—I have
done its bidding—I want now to be of to-day [sic]. It is painful to
be consciously of two worlds. (xxii)
The subject of this passage obviously desires distance from her past self
but suggests that she has not yet achieved that distance and never can;
she remains “of two worlds.” In this passage, Antin uses the term
assimilated in an interesting way: rather than claim that she has been
assimilated into white America as she might, she instead asserts that she
has assimilated her own past, presumably her earlier experiences as a
Russian-Jewish girl and as an immigrant Other in her adopted country.
Antin’s “two worlds” evoke the “double-consciousness” of AfricanAmerican selfhood that W.E. B. Du Bois articulated nearly a decade
56 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
before Antin published her autobiography. In The Souls of Black Folk
(1903), Du Bois asserts that
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the
Teuton and the Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son,
born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American
world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but
only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of
always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of
measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in
amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (2)
Whether or not Antin had read Du Bois’s work (and if she had, the debt
was not acknowledged), the similarities between their descriptions of
dual consciousness are worth noting. Both experience a conflict
between an American consciousness (implicitly white for both of them)
and another consciousness: that of a Russian-Jewish woman in Antin’s
case and of a Negro man in Du Bois’s. Both express a desire to reach a
new, single consciousness—“a better and truer self” in Du Bois’s terms
(2), “to be of to-day” in Antin’s. But there are also significant
differences in how they perceive dual consciousness. Du Bois describes
the new consciousness as merging the double selves without privileging
either aspect: “He would not Africanize America, for America has too
much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro
soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood
has a message for the world” (3). Antin’s attitude toward her doubleness
is more conflicted: she claims that she wants to be rid of her “clinging
past,” her Russian Jewish self, suggesting at this moment that she
desires for herself assimilated whiteness. And yet she also claims
herself “the spiritual offspring of the marriage within my conscious
experience of the Past and the Present.” In doing so she suggests that,
like Du Bois, she does not privilege one part of her identity over
another but also that, unlike Du Bois, she has already achieved a new
consciousness, the “offspring of the marriage” of her dual selves.
The differences between Du Bois’s and Antin’s attitudes toward their
double consciousnesses can be explained in part by the different
experiences of African Americans and of Russian-Jewish Americans.
COMING INTO WHITENESS: MARY ANTIN’S CLAIM TO ASSIMILATION 57
While both Du Bois and Antin experienced oppression and both heard
promise in the “greater ideals of the American Republic” (Du Bois 7),
the nature of that oppression obviously differed, as did the degree to
which they were allowed access to, and the protection of, those greater
ideals that during the Progressive Era were largely reserved for white
men. For Du Bois, the merged African-American “better and truer self”
remains an aspiration. Antin, “inconclusively white,” presents herself
both as a white, individualized, assimilated American and as a RussianJewish-American woman who has merged the different aspects of her
identity just as she has merged the different parts of her story into a single
autobiography.
Early in this chapter I examined how, quite early in The Promised
Land, Antin acknowledges the tenuous nature of the borders of
geography and politics. Antin’s discussion of these borders provides a
useful metaphor for looking at the layers and boundaries of identity that
she constructs in the introduction and in the body of her autobiography.
In a chapter titled “Initiation,” Antin describes the problems she
encountered as a student when trying to understand geography. While
she was able to satisfy her teacher’s expectations by memorizing a
geography text, she confesses that she was never able to apply her
abstract knowledge to the world around her:
If I looked at the map, I was utterly bewildered; I could find no
correspondence between the picture and the verbal explanations….
Chelsea, I read, was bounded on all sides—“bounded” appealed to
my imagination—by various things that I had never identified,
much as I had roamed about the town. I immediately pictured
these remote boundaries as a six-foot fence in a good state of
preservation, with the Mystic River, the towns of Everett and
Revere, and East Boston Creek, rejoicing, on the south, west,
north, and east of it, respectively, that they had got inside; while
the rest of the world peeped in enviously through a knot hole.
(219–20)
This vision of her town, bounded and contained, resembles the white
American subject position that Antin constructs. Like the imagined
Chelsea, the Americanized Mary Antin is presented as static and selfcontained; she is an “I”who has separated herself from Russia and from
her Jewish heritage. By also creating a marked subject, one who resists
complicity with the American autobiographical tradition and who
58 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
retains a “clinging past,” however, Antin allows the reader to question
the veracity of her claim to assimilation, and consequently the stability
of these supposed boundaries of identity. She is, at the same time,
looking at white America through the knot hole and claiming to be
inside the fence.
Chapter Three
“Why Couldn’t We Have Been Either
One Thing or the Other?” Monolithic
Identity and Ethnic Construction in the
Fiction and Autobiography of Sui Sin Far
There is occasionally to be seen a half Chinese child with
bright complexion and fair hair, and these combined with a
straight nose, small mouth and wide eyes might easily
deceive a stranger, but a person who has been informed of
the child’s parentage, notices at once a peculiar cast about
the face. This cast is over the face of every child who has a
drop of Chinese blood in its veins. It is indescribable—but
it is there.
Sui Sin Far, “Half-Chinese Children”
Not white, certainly, but not really Asian, I straddle the two
worlds and try to blaze your trails for you.
Siu Wai Anderson, “A Letter to My Daughter”
Literary criticism of Sui Sin Far’s (1865–1914) writing is notably
marked by contradiction around the issues of race and ethnicity.
Addressing Sui Sin Far’s fictional characters and their relationships to
cultural and racial conflict, for example, Lorraine Dong and Marlon K.
Hom conclude,
One might expect that with her compassion and understanding of
both the Chinese and white American cultures, Sui Sin Far would
create either complex characters that challenge the conflicts
between the two cultures or supreme composite characters that
exhibit the grandeur and virtues of both cultures. However, Sui
Sin Far has not done so, not because of the anti-Chinese racism of
the period but because of her personal belief in the mutual
exclusiveness of both cultures. (165)
60 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
In sharp contrast, critic William F.Wu claims that Sui Sin Far “writes
with well-defined characters and a clear understanding of bicultural
pressures” (131), an assessment that does not confirm that Sui Sin Far
believed the two cultures to be mutually exclusive. Contradictory
evaluations of Sui Sin Far’s work are even more notable when literary
critics address the attitude toward assimilation expressed in her stories.
According to Dong and Hom, “she shows that Chinese culture is foreign
and should be left to exist on its own…. Sui Sin Far’s stories clearly
indicate that the Chinese will forever be Chinese and it is not possible to
‘Americanize’ them” (164). Again in contrast to Dong and Hom’s
position, Amy Ling, in her landmark book Be tween Worlds: Women
Writers of Chinese Ancestry, claims that Sui Sin Far “in her writing
asserted [that] the Chinese are human and assimilable” (39). These
contradictory readings prove even more surprising when we consider
that these critics approach the author’s work from similar historical and
theoretical perspectives: all of the evaluations quoted above were
published within the past twenty-five years, and while Dong and Hom,
unlike most critics, have an overall negative assessment of Sui Sin Far’s
work, all of these critics approach Sui Sin Far’s writing with concerns
about how she represents race, ethnicity, and gender in her short fiction.
Why, then, are their conclusions so vastly different?
Without directly addressing this question, Annette White-Parks offers a
potential explanation in her essay “‘We Wear the Mask’: Sui Sin Far as
One Example of Trickster Authorship.” In this essay, White-Parks
argues that Sui Sin Far adopts the role of the “trickster” in her writing
both to accommodate the racist views held by much of her audience and
“write against the dominant racial and cultural ideologies of her time”
(1–2). Adopting this “trickster” position, Sui Sin Far “teases us by
presenting situations and characters that appear to fit stereotypes, then
does a flip that we miss if we are not reading closely” (11–2). WhiteParks’s argument suggests that the contradictions in critical evaluation
of Sui Sin Far’s work might be caused by certain critics missing the
“flip” and consequently reading only one of the many layers of meaning
that the author presents.
It is the relationship between these different layers that I will examine
in this chapter. I will argue that, when negotiating between narrative
layers, Sui Sin Far is also creating a dialogue between a racialized
Chinese Otherness, which had considerable popular currency during the
time that she was writing, and the invention of an ethnic identity,
Chinese American. I will attempt to unravel these two elements as Sui Sin
Far presents them in several of her short stories from Mrs. Spring
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 61
Fragrance as well as her autobiographical essay “Leaves from the
Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” My aim is to show how Sui Sin Far’s
fiction and autobiography are largely about the constructions of race and
ethnicity. Because systems of racial categorization were much less
malleable for Asian immigrants than for European immigrants, Sui Sin
Far could not claim, as Mary Antin did for eastern Europeans, that
Chinese immigrants could be accepted as white. Instead, her fiction and
autobiography de-essentialize racial categories, in particular the
supposedly dichotomous categories of Oriental and white, at the same
time that she emphasizes ethnic difference by creating a ChineseAmerican identity.
Before turning to an analysis of Sui Sin Far’s written work, I shall
first survey the discursive attitudes surrounding Chinese immigrants and
their descendants during the late nineteenth- and early-twentiethcenturies, since Sui Sin Far writes directly against the grain of this
discourse. In 1882, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion
Act, an act that prohibited Chinese men and women—except for
diplomats, students, teachers, merchants, and tourists—from entering
the United States. While ostensibly a temporary, ten-year, measure
(President Chester Alan Arthur had earlier vetoed a twenty-year
exclusion act on the grounds that it effectively meant prohibition rather
than suspension), the law was extended for an additional ten years by
the Geary Act in 1892 and extended indefinitely in 1902. The laws were
not repealed until 1943. The indefinite extension of Chinese exclusion
in 1902, however, did not end debate about Chinese, and more generally
Asian, immigration to the United States. Through the first few decades
of the twentieth century, especially on the west coast, public discussions
continued about the status of Asians and Asian Americans already
residing in the United States and about whether Chinese exclusion
should be permanent, whether the exclusionary law should be made
more restrictive, and whether similar laws should be instituted to prevent
people from other Asian countries from entering the United States.1
The arguments against Asian immigration were multifold; many
arguments emphasized negative social aspects of Asian immigration
(Asian immigrants lower the standard of living and introduce moral
standards incompatible with those of European Americans) and
economic aspects (immigrants lower wages and displace EuropeanAmerican workers).2 Intrinsic to these social, economic, and political
arguments against immigration, however, were explicitly racist antiAsian arguments. The racist roots of these other arguments were
acknowledged by some writers early in the century. In a criticism of
62 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
anti-Japanese sentiment in California, one writer, in a 1921 issue of The
Nation, claims that most Californians “will tell you that the conflict
between the races is primarily economic, and not social…. While it is
far from my intention to deny that there is an economic conflict between
the races in California, I am convinced that this factor is of less
importance than most Californians will admit, and that the antipathy of
the white man for the yellow, skillfully engendered by politicians and
by part of the press is a principal element” (Bliven 171).
James D.Phelan, a noted restrictionist politician, shows the conflation
of these anti-Asian arguments in “Japanese Question from a Californian
Standpoint” (1913), an article published in The Independent, a weekly
New York-based magazine with a national audience.3 In this article,
directed at arguing for Japanese exclusion but also containing significant
generalizations about “Orientals,” Phelan asserts that
the naturalization laws were addrest [sic] to Europeans and did
not contemplate Orientals, who, even in the earliest days, were
regarded in the American sense, as indigestible. The men who
originally opposed the introduction of negro laborers took the same
ground, that being essentially foreign and inassimilable, the negro
would create a race classification, which would be repugnant to
American institutions and would destroy the idea of equality. It is,
therefore, a question of preserving California as a white man’s
country, upholding American standards and civilization, or
abandoning it to an alien people capable, in this fierce
competition, of either exterminating the whites or of reducing
them to a hopelessly lower economic, social and political
plane. (1438)
Phelan makes it clear that the racial division that he perceives is welldefined and immutable. Whereas the racial categorization of many
Europeans was in flux during this time, the line between “white”
American and “Oriental” was not only drawn but impermeable:
“Orientals” are “indigestible” and “inassimilable.” Furthermore, Phelan
compares Asian immigrants to African Americans, whose degree of
Otherness has long been explicitly based on racial criteria; by doing so
and by expressing a wish to preserve California as “a white man’s
country,” Phelan makes it clear that his concerns about immigration are
concerns about race.
This emphasis on Asian immigrants as “inassimilable” as well as the
conflation of racist arguments with other arguments against immigration
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 63
recur in numerous other nativist texts of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. While many of these arguments group all Asian
immigrants together as “Orientals,” as does Phelan in the passage above,
some arguments and literary depictions distinguish between the different
nationalities of immigrants, deeming some Asian immigrants preferable
to others. S.E. Solberg notes that at the time Sui Sin Far began writing
the Chinese were largely viewed as “mysterious, evil, nearby, and
threatening, while the Japanese were exotic, quaint, delicate (or manly,
as the samurai), and distant” (31). This issue of distance seems key to
the differing views. While the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 severely
limited the number of new immigrants arriving from China, the overall
Chinese immigrant population in the United States remained
significantly higher than that of any other Asian immigrant group.
Thus, the number of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the
United States made their presence more visible and immediate, likely
contributing to their different reception. Through the end of the
nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants were generally perceived as the
Yellow Peril.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, however, the stereotypes
used to argue for Chinese exclusion were transferred to other Asian
immigrant groups, particularly the Japanese. The Japanese population in
the United States increased from 2,039 in 1890 to 24,326 in 1900, and
to 77, 157 in 1910 (Osumi 9). Because of European-American anxiety
prompted by these increases, much of the anti-Asian literature of the
first part of the century focuses on excluding Japanese immigrants.
While overtly concerned with Japanese exclusion, this literature makes
clear that differences among Asian immigrants mean little to
xenophobic writers; instead, these writers reiterate stereotypes that work
to establish a monolithic Oriental Other. In a 1907 article in The
Independent, one writer begins by asserting “Now any one who is at all
familiar with the two races, realizes fully, and will state unhesitantly,
that Occidental and Oriental civilizations will never mix” (Kahn 26).
Another writer, whose essay arguing for exclusion was included in a
1908 issue of the Congressional Record, makes it even clearer that his
position is racially motivated: “every year that goes by without positive
legislation looking to the checking of Oriental immigration means the
introduction into our midst of a people of a strange blood who
throughout the centuries to come will retain their individuality” (French
279). While some writers distinguish between Chinese and Japanese
immigrants, usually claiming one nationality “preferable” to the other,
64 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
most restrictionist writers express antipathy toward “the Oriental” in
general.
It was in the context of these views of race and Asian immigration
that Sui Sin Far published fiction about Chinese immigrants and
Chinese Americans from the 1880s to the 1910s. Sui Sin Far was born
Edith Maude Eaton to a Chinese mother, Lotus Blossom, and an English
merchant father, Edward Eaton, in Macclesfield, England in 1865.4 The
family permanently immigrated to North America in 1872, first living in
New York then settling in eastern Canada. The reason for the move from
England to North America is unclear. Amy Ling speculates that Sui Sin
Far’s English grandparents disapproved of their son’s marriage, thus
prompting the family to move (26). Annette White-Parks acknowledges
that the decision to emigrate was probably due to multiple factors:
“Perhaps North America’s size and heterogeneous populations made it
seem easier for a family that had violated social taboos to hide there
than in a small English village. Perhaps the depression in the silk trade
between England and China in the 1870s caused a slump in family
business, adding a financial incentive. Or perhaps Edward’s family
asked them to leave” (Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton 17). Whatever
the initial motivation for migrating, the family’s financial situation did
not improve in North America. While in England, the Eaton’s were of
the merchant class, and Edward Eaton had artistic aspirations,
suggesting some degree of leisure. In the United States and Canada,
however, the family grew larger and apparently struggled financially:
Sui Sin Far describes her eleven-year-old autobiographical self selling
hand-made lace and her father’s paintings in the streets (“Leaves” 128).
By her late teens, she was working as a typesetter and stenographer, and
by the late 1880s she had published essays and stories in both Canadian
and U.S. periodicals. While her family lived in Montreal while she was
a child, as an adult, Sui Sin Far spent many of her years in the United
States; after working briefly in Jamaica in 1897, she lived in San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Boston. She returned to Montreal
shortly before her death in 1914.
Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far’s only published book-length
work, appeared in 1912. Consisting largely of stories previously
published in magazines, the work is structured into two sections: the
first, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, contains seventeen stories and covers 241
pages; the second, Tales of Chinese Children, contains twenty stories
and covers 102 pages.5 The original context of publication of many of
the stories gives the reader a clue about Sui Sin Far’s intended
audience; the stories were published in a range of popular and regional
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 65
magazines, including The Century, The Indepen dent, Good
Housekeeping, and Hampton’s. It seems likely that Sui Sin Far’s
periodical audience was predominantly European American and that her
collected stories were geared toward the same audience. The format of
Mrs. Spring Fragrance is overtly Orientalized: bound in an embossed
red cover, the pages of the text are decorated with a pastel design that
suggests water colors. In addition to a bird and branches of blossoms
and bamboo, the design includes Chinese characters that Ling translates
as happiness, prosper ity, and longevity (41). For a European-American
reader of the early twentieth century, the material reality of the book, in
addition to the author’s name, testifies that this is a text about the
exoticized Other. Throughout the book, however, Sui Sin Far refuses to
present her characters as Oriental Others. Not only does she present
sympathetic and carefully developed Chinese and Chinese-American
characters, but through these characters she subtly questions the
dichotomous racial identities upon which anti-Chinese attitudes relied.
AMERICANNESS AND RACIALIZED BODIES
IN “MRS. SPRING FRAGRANCE”
Set in Seattle, the title story of Mrs. Spring Fragrance tells of an
“Americanized” Chinese immigrant woman and her attempts to help a
young friend, Mai Gwi Far or Laura, marry Kai Tzu, the man she loves,
instead of the man to whom her parents have betrothed her. In addition
to this plot line, the story also follows how Mr. Spring Fragrance, who
is unaware of his wife’s matchmaking attempts, grows to doubt Mrs.
Spring Fragrance’s fidelity to him and how he is eventually reassured of
her love and fidelity.
One of the most interesting aspects of this story—and one of the
most revealing in terms of how Sui Sin Far negotiates between race,
nationality and ethnicity in her work—lies in the definitions of
American that the story offers. While Sui Sin Far ultimately raises the
question of whether a Chinese American is indeed “American,” much
of the story seems to suggest that American actually denotes a
descendent of European immigrants and the values and traditions
associated with European heritage. One such definition occurs early in
the story when Mrs. Spring Fragrance attempts to console her friend
Laura by quoting poetry to her: “Is there not a beautiful American poem,”
Mrs. Spring Fragrance asks, “written by a noble American named
Tennyson, which says:
66 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
“Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all?’” (5)
As Elizabeth Ammons notes in Conflicting Stories: American Women
Writ ers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, because Mrs. Spring
Fragrance does not recognize that Tennyson is English rather than
American, “the literary joke lands on the Spring Fragrances…. We find
ourselves in the presence of a familiar cliché—ignorant, laughable
foreigners struggling to understand what is completely obvious to ‘us,’
the enlightened insiders” (110). But, as the story progresses, Ammons
points out,
the butt of the joke starts to shift. The laugh begins to fall not on
them but on the lines of poetry and the very idea of separate
national traditions on which the joke is based. As we repeatedly
hear Tennyson iden tified as American, we must begin to wonder
what the English/American distinction means anyway. What
makes Tennyson “English” and not “American,” really? The
poetry actually is…all in the same tradition: Distinctions essential
to separating British and mainstream white American literary
lines are miniscule when looked at globally. (110)
As Ammons’s analysis suggests, Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s conflation of
American and English reinforces how tightly the two descriptors are
connected. This notion of Americanness is one in which Mrs. Spring
Fragrance, as a Chinese American, cannot participate.
While Ammons restricts her discussion to the definition of literary
traditions, Sui Sin Far actually plays with the term American in even
broader ways. This is shown dramatically in a scene that occurs later in
the story. Mr. Spring Fragrance, sitting on his doorstep, engages his
European-Amer-ican neighbor, Will Carman, in conversation. Will
characterizes a “smoking party” that Mr. Spring Fragrance intends to host
as “high class,” to which Mr. Spring Fragrance responds, “Everything is
‘high-class’ in America.” Will agrees:
“Haven’t you ever heard that all Americans are princes and
princesses, and just as soon as a foreigner puts his foot upon our
shores, he also becomes of the nobility—I mean, the royal
family.”
“What about my brother in the Detention Pen?” dryly inquired
Mr. Spring Fragrance.
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 67
“Now, you’ve got me,” said the young man, rubbing his head.
“Well, that is a shame—‘a beastly shame,’ as the Englishman
says. But understand, old fellow, we that are real Americans are
up against that—even more than you. It is against our principles.”
“I offer the real Americans my consolations that they should be
compelled to do that which is against their principles.” (12–3)
The contrast between the two characters’ views of America, and more
specifically citizens’ complicity with American penal bureaucracy, is
certainly striking if not surprising to a modern reader. Even more
interesting, I think, are the different ways that Will Carman and Mr.
Spring Fragrance define what it means to be American. Will
distinguishes between different kinds of Americans: those responsible
for detaining Mr. Spring Fragrance’s brother—the abstract and official
Americans—and “we that are real Americans,” those who oppose
injustice “even more than” would a Chinese immigrant like Mr. Spring
Fragrance. Mr. Spring Fragrance, however, refuses to ac knowledge
such a distinction. By ironically saying, “I offer the real Americans my
consolations that they should be compelled to do that which is against
their principles,” he creates a single group of Americans by collapsing
the two groups; the “real Americans” are the very ones who are doing
“that which is against their principles,” detaining Chinese immigrants.
For Mr. Spring Fragrance, as for his wife, “American” apparently
denotes any U.S. citizen of European descent; not only does he exclude
himself from the category, but he also reaffirms that Americanness is a
matter of descent rather than of ideology.
This division between European Americans and Chinese
Americans— European Americans as Americans, Chinese Americans as
Chinese—is consistently reiterated in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” From the
beginning of the story, Mrs. Spring Fragrance is described as
“Americanized,” and later in the story, Mr. Spring Fragrance recalls
how a business acquaintance, upon meeting Mrs. Spring Fragrance,
remarked, “She is just like an American woman” (14; my emphasis).
Similarly, when he begins to question his wife’s fidelity, Mr. Spring
Fragrance himself wonders, “If his wife was becoming as an American
woman, would it not be possible for her to love as an American
woman—a man to whom she was not married?” (14; my emphasis).
Significant, here, is Sui Sin Far’s use of the words like and as: Mrs.
Spring Fragrance is not becoming an American woman; she is
becoming as an American woman. While suggesting that Mrs. Spring
Fragrance can adopt some of the qualities of an American (in this case,
68 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
specific mannerisms, social values, the English language, and, most
importantly for Mr. Spring Fragrance, the capacity for infidelity that he
apparently views as antithetical to Chinese traditions), racial difference
and country of origin bar her from claiming an American identity. In
this sense, the story would seem to be in keeping with the notions of
Chinese racial inassimilability held by many of Sui Sin Far’s EuropeanAmerican contemporaries.
The character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance seems to reify the national,
racial, and cultural boundaries between “American” and “Chinese”;
however, the story also works to question these boundaries by insisting
on the possibility of assimilation and by undermining the idea of static
racial categories. On the first page of the story, the reader encounters a
curious passage. Kai Tzu, the man whom Laura loves, never enters the
story as a developed character; however, he is briefly described: “Kai
Tzu, who was American-born, and as ruddy and stalwart as any young
Westerner, was noted amongst baseball players as one of the finest
pitchers on the Coast. He could also sing, ‘Drink to me only with thine
eyes,’ to Laura’s piano accompaniment” (2). The last sentence of this
passage suggests that Kai Tzu is culturally as similated: in a move
similar to Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s conflation of “American” and
“English” when she quotes Tennyson, Sui Sin Far offers Kai Tzu’s
familiarity with the traditional English song as sign of his
Americanization. Furthermore, that Kai Tzu successfully plays baseball
suggests that he is structurally assimilated as well, for he participates in
the organized, institutionalized “American pastime.”
Perhaps most significant, however, is the narrator’s description of
Kai Tzu’s appearance. In order to examine how Sui Sin Far uses
physical appearance in the story, I wish to return to the Reports of the
Immigration Com mission (1911), the series of detailed reports resulting
from an extensive, government-sponsored investigation into numerous
aspects of immigration and immigrant life that I discussed in
chapter one. In volume 38 of these reports, an investigation devoted to
Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, the authors
attempt to situate their study by asserting that “It was suggested to the
Commission that if measurements of the bodies of European
immigrants and their descendants at different ages and under different
circumstances could be made in a careful way by scientific
anthropometrists, valuable results might be reached” (1:44). After
measuring and comparing “stature, weight, length of head, width of
head, width of face, and color of hair” (2:525), the report concluded that
changes in “bodily form” do indeed occur in the descendants of
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 69
European immigrants. Regarding head shape, for example, the
researchers found that “the east European Hebrew, who has a very
round head, becomes more long-headed; the south Italian, who in Italy
has an exceedingly long head, becomes more short-headed; so that in
this country both approach a uniform type, as far as the roundness of the
head is concerned” (38:5). One of the ironies of this study is that, while
in their generalizations about the head shapes of different European
“races” the researchers necessarily rely on biologically-based racial
categories, they do so in order to undermine the very notion of distinct
races in Europe: if descendants of immigrants approach each other in
appearance, racial categories that rely on physical difference tend to
disappear.
Since the Reports of the Immigration Commission was published in
1911, one year after “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” was originally published
in Hampton’s magazine, Sui Sin Far would certainly have been unaware
of the study of “Changes in Bodily Form,” but she would have been
quite familiar with the discourse that generated it. Interestingly, her
brief description of Kai Tzu presents a philosophy of race and
assimilability that is similar to, but more radical than, that of the
Commission. Instead of conforming to racial stereotypes of Chinese
men as yellow-skinned and effeminate, Kai Tzu is “as ruddy and
stalwart as any young Westerner.” While this description reifies and
privileges European-American notions of beauty and strength, it also
suggests that, like the descendants of European immigrants studied by
the Immigration Commission, the American-born descendants of
Chinese immigrants would challenge the racial constructions of the
period. At a time when restrictionists argued that inassimilability due to
racial difference was grounds for the exclusion of immigrants, Sui Sin
Far subtly questioned the very idea of static racial categories upon
which the nativist argument relied.
“THE WISDOM OF THE NEW” AND
ASSIMILATION
Whereas the character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance suggests the possibility
of assimilation for Chinese Americans, some of Sui Sin Far’s stories
actually question what it means to assimilate, whether assimilation is
desirable, and whether there might be identities in between the
possibilities of maintaining one’s original cultural practices and ties and
relinquishing those ties in order to adopt new ones. The third story in
70 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
Mrs. Spring Fragrance does precisely this: in “The Wisdom of the New,”
Sui Sin Far shows the dangers of static, monolithic identity.
While “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” offers humor and romance and
produces a happy ending, “The Wisdom of the New” is very different in
theme and tone. In this story, Wou Pau Lin journeys from China to the
United States with her six-year-old son in order to join her husband
Wou Sankwei, whom she has not seen since he left China seven years
previous. With the help of his European-American patron, Mrs. Dean,
and her niece, Adah Charlton, Wou Sankwei has become assimilated;
he is, Mrs. Dean remarks to her niece, “as up to date as any young
American” (53). Pau Lin, in contrast, retains her linguistic and cultural
ties to China. The central conflict in the story arises when Wou
Sankwei attempts to Americanize their son, Yen. On the eve of Yen’s
first day in “American” school, Pau Lin poisons Yen rather than see him
ruined by “the Wisdom of the New” (84).
Pau Lin’s resistance to assimilation seems to be caused, in part, by her
interpretation of her husband’s relationship to Adah Charlton. Sankwei
obviously admires Adah immensely, and this provokes Pau Lin’s
jealousy and suspicion. However, it is not simply Sankwei’s attachment
to another woman that causes Pau Lin to be jealous:
That a man should take to himself two wives, or even three…
seemed natural and right in the eyes of Wou Pau Lin. She herself
had come from a home where there were two [wives], In that home
there had not always been peace; but each woman, at least, had
the satisfaction of knowing that her man did not regard or treat the
other woman as her superior…. But oh! the humiliation and
shame of bearing children to a man who looked up to another
woman—and a woman of another race—as a being above the
common uses of women. (65)
This passage shows that Pau Lin’s jealousy is prompted by husband’s
treatment of Adah as superior to herself. But Pau Lin’s jealousy also is
inspired, or at least intensified, by the racial difference between the two
women. Thus, it is unclear whether Pau Lin’s resistance to assimilation
is prompted by her jealousy or whether her jealousy stems from
antipathy toward “whites,” personified by Adah. Perhaps it is safest to
say that Pau Lin’s feelings toward Americanization are intensified by
the association between her husband’s painful treatment of her and
“American” Adah. Ultimately, Pau Lin’s attitude toward assimilation,
an attitude that is necessarily connected to racial difference, brings about
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 71
the tragedy at the end of the story; she would rather see her son dead
than attending “American” school. Wou Sankwei’s own assimilation,
however, is equally a part of Yen’s death. At last recognizing Pau Lin’s
jealousy—and blaming Sankwei for it without fully acknowledging her
own role—Adah Charlton tells Sankwei that he is “becoming too
Americanized” (78). Because of his attachment to Mrs. Dean and Adah
and because of his drive to assimilate, Sankwei is unable to recognize
for himself that his behavior would necessarily cause his wife pain.
Within this context, his insistence on Yen’s assimilation drives Pau Lin
to kill her child.
Discussing Sui Sin Far’s journalistic sketches, White-Parks claims
that “however much Sui Sin Far aligned herself with a ‘new’ and more
westernized order for Chinese and Chinese American cultures, she
never suggests that the old ways should be rejected or condemned out
of hand. Those she admires most manage to occupy a ‘both/and’
position between the old and the new, not an ‘either/or’ stance” (Sui Sin
Far/Edith Maude Eaton 163). This seems to be equally true of Sui Sin
Far’s fictional work; it is the “either/ or”stance of the characters that
prompts the tragedy of “The Wisdom of the New.” Martha J.Cutter’s
examination of racial passing in the fiction of Nella Larsen can further
illuminate the problem of dichotomous identities in Sui Sin Far’s fiction.
Cutter argues that it is not the act of adopting a false identity itself that
causes Larsen’s protagonists to experience psychological suicide.
Instead, Cutter asserts, “the assumption of only one guise or one form
of passing causes Larsen’s characters to become stable, static, fixed in
their meaning, entrapped within social definitions. To assume a single
identity in a world in which identity itself is often a performance—a
mask, a public persona—is to ensure psychological suicide” (“Sliding
Significations” 76). While assimilation is not completely equatable to
passing, Cutter’s remarks about the adoption of a single identity are
equally relevant to Sui Sin Far’s story. Wou Sankwei is fixed within—
and fixated on—an “American” identity. Pau Lin, in resistance to her
husband’s behavior, is statically “Chinese.” Caught between these
inflexible identities, Yen must die. While Larsen’s characters commit
“psychological suicide,” Sui Sin Far envisions murder as the result of
creating monolithic identities.
In “The Wisdom of the New,” then, Sui Sin Far is neither promoting
nor condemning assimilation for Chinese Americans. Instead, the story
criticizes those who would see identity only in racialized terms—in
other words, as static and bounded. The story leaves us with an
unanswerable but tantalizing question. Could Yen, had he not been
72 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
caught between such rigid notions of identity, have created for himself a
Chinese-American identity that allowed for multiple cultural values and
practices? While Sui Sin Far does not allow such a possibility for the
character of Yen, she does raise that possibility in some of her other
writing.
ESSENTIALISM IN “ITS WAVERING IMAGE”
In “Its Wavering Image,” Sui Sin Far continues to investigate the
problem of monolithic identity and offers perhaps her strongest
indictment of essentialized notions of race and ethnicity. In this story, we
are introduced to Pan, who is described in the story’s first sentence as “a
half white, half Chinese girl” (85). Pan’s white mother is dead, and she
lives with her merchant father in San Francisco’s Chinatown.6 In her
father’s “Oriental Bazaar,” Pan meets Mark Carson, a white reporter.
The two soon begin to spend time together—Pan “led him about
Chinatown, initiating him into the simple mystery and history of many
things”—and they become romantically involved (87). However, Mark
Carson publishes an article that reveals many of Chinatown’s
“mysteries,” that are “sacred and secret” to Pan’s family and friends (92).
Feeling betrayed, Pan rejects Mark Carson at the end of the story.
Woven throughout this story of betrayal is another story about ethnic
and racial identities. The importance of identity and classification is
revealed quite early in the story. Upon first meeting Pan, Carson
immediately feels the need to classify her racially. He returns to his
newspaper office and asks his colleagues, “What was she? Chinese or
white?” (86). Although he is told of her mixed parentage, he continues
to express a need to use essentialized, either/or labels. In an important
scene between Pan and Carson, worth quoting at length, Sui Sin Far
describes them on a balcony, admiring the moon and looking over Pan’s
neighborhood in Chinatown:
“How beautiful above! How unbeautiful below!” exclaimed Mark
Carson involuntarily.
He and Pan had been gazing down from their open retreat into the
lantern-lighted, motley thronged street beneath them.
“Perhaps it isn’t very beautiful,” replied Pan, “but it is here I live.
It is my home.” Her voice quivered a little.
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 73
He leaned towards her suddenly and grasped her hands.
“Pan,” he cried, “you do not belong here. You are white—white.”
“No! no!” protested Pan.
“You are,” he asserted. “You have no right to be here.”
“I was born here,” she answered, “and the Chinese people look
upon me as their own.”
“But they do not understand you,” he went on. “Your real self is
alien to them. What interest have they in the books you read—the
thoughts you think?”
“They have an interest in me,” answered faithful Pan. “Oh, do not
speak in that way any more.”
“But I must,” the young man persisted. “Pan, don’t you see that
you have got to decide what you will be—Chinese or white? You
cannot be both.” (89–90)
Mark Carson’s insistence that Pan choose is complex and manylayered. Most apparent is his rejection of the possibility of multiple
identities; Pan “cannot be both” Chinese and white. At this point, Mark
Carson seems to be talking about racial categories. If racial categories
are bounded and mutually exclusive, Pan must indeed be one or the
other, and, to his mind, that one must be white. Interestingly, however,
he inverts the way that biracial people are usually classified. In the
United States, as in other racist societies, the children of parents from
different races are usually classified by the more socially stigmatized
race, a concept that finds its strongest expression in the notion that “one
drop of African blood” makes a person black.
Presumably, Mark Carson’s racism and his romantic interest in Pan,
which are at odds with each other, prompt him to invert popular notions
of racial classification so that he can assure himself that Pan is white.
His insistence on her whiteness is further illuminated by an early
passage in the story.
The narrator tells us that “with delicate tact and subtlety [Mark
Carson] taught [Pan] that, all unconscious until his coming, she had
lived her life alone. So well did she learn this lesson that it seemed at
74 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
times as if her white self must entirely dominate and trample under foot
her Chinese” (87). In this passage, Sui Sin Far offers a subtle and
ambiguous explanation for Mark Carson’s view of Pan as white. He
teaches Pan that she had been alone before they met; is the reader to
assume that her whiteness is evidenced by her willingness to give a
white man center stage in her life? Is she white because she accepts that
white men are so all-important that women are “alone” or incomplete
without them? Is she white simply because Mark Carson says she is? If
this is the case, then Carson’s idea of what constitutes whiteness
includes cultural and ideological factors as well as biologically-based
racial factors. Ultimately, Carson’s attempt to identify Pan as white
conforms to the long tradition of identity conception that contemporary
theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha describes in “Not You/Like You: PostColonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and
Difference.” “Identity as understood in the context of a certain ideology
of dominance,” Trinh writes, “has long been a notion that relies on the
concept of an essential, authentic core that remains hidden to one’s
consciousness and that requires the elimination of all that is considered
foreign or not true to the self, that is to say, not-I, other”(371). In “Its
Wavering Image,” Mark Carson believes that it is he who can see that
essential core in Pan, and that essential core is white. In his view, Pan
must eliminate all that is Other, Chinese, so that her authentic white
core might emerge.
Unlike Mark Carson, Pan does not at first divorce her white and
Chinese identities, nor does she attempt to privilege one over the other.
When Mark Carson, at the end of the long passage quoted above, claims
that Pan cannot be both Chinese and white, she tells him to “Hush!” and
says, “‘I do not love you when you talk to me like that’” (90). Not only
does Pan resist Carson’s insistence that she choose between the aspects
of her identity, but she appears uncomfortable with the idea that these
different aspects must be at odds. Pan almost seems to be on the verge of
developing a new kind of consciousness, one that would anticipate the
mestiza consciousness that Gloria Anzaldúa describes in Borderlands/
La Frontera: The New Mestiza: from “racial, ideological, cultural and
biological cross-pollinization, an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in
the making—a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer….
Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it
depends on the straddling of two or more cultures” (77, 80).
But this new consciousness never emerges in Sui Sin Far’s story. The
turning point of Pan’s self-identity, and of the story itself, occurs in the
passage where Pan reads the newspaper article in which Mark Carson
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 75
has revealed the “secrets” of Chinatown that Pan has shown him. The
reader does not see the text of the article, but Sui Sin Far makes it clear
that the article ridicules the religious and social customs of Pan’s
community. Pan reacts to the article with anguish: “‘Betrayed! Betrayed!
Betrayed to be a betrayer!’ It burnt red hot; agony unrelieved by words,
unassuaged by tears” (91). Pan’s words make it clear that she sees her
own culpability—she has betrayed her community by introducing Mark
Carson into it—but she knows that the ultimate blame is his. Pan tries to
make sense of the betrayal:
Was it unconsciously dealt—that cruel blow? Ah, well did he
know that the sword which pierced her through others, would
carry with it to her own heart, the pain of all those others. None
knew better than he that she, whom he had called “a white girl, a
white woman,” would rather that her own naked body and soul
had been exposed, than that things, sacred and secret to those who
loved her, should be cruelly unveiled and ruthlessly spread before
the ridiculing and uncomprehending foreigner. And knowing all
this so well, so well, he had carelessly sung her heart away, and with
her kiss upon his lips, had smilingly turned and stabbed her. She,
who was of the race that remembers. (92)
There is much more going on in this passage than simply an evaluation
of Mark Carson’s act of betrayal. The voice of the third-person narrator
gives over to Pan’s thoughts, and the reader is reminded that Mark
Carson considers Pan “‘a white girl, a white woman’.” But immediately
after this reminder we are shown the distance that Pan sees between
herself and the white reading public of Carson’s newspaper: a white
reader is a “foreigner” to Pan. The final line of the passage further
emphasizes that she no longer has a multiple identity; instead, the “race
that remembers” through which she identifies herself is obviously
Chinese.
In the concluding section of the story, Sui Sin Far shows even more
dramatically that Mark Carson’s betrayal has caused Pan to reject a
multiple identity in favor of one that is Chinese alone. Carson, who has
been away from the city for two months, returns to Pan’s home
assuming that she “would have forgotten that article by now” and that
they will be reconciled (93). Instead, Pan, who is dressed in “Chinese
costume,” responds coldly to his advances. Finally, he asks her why she
is dressed as she is:
76 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
“Because I am a Chinese woman,” she answered. “You are not,”
cried Mark Carson, fiercely. “You cannot say that now, Pan. You
are a white woman—white. Did your kiss not promise me that?”
“A white woman!” echoed Pan her voice rising high and clear
to the stars above them. “I would not be a white woman for all the
world. You are a white man. And what is a promise to a white
man!” (94–5; emphasis in original)
Because, for Pan, being white means being a betrayer, she has chosen to
identify herself as Chinese. As White-Parks has pointed out, in “Its
Wavering Image” as well as in many other stories, Sui Sin Far reverses
the concept of “Other-ness” so that white characters take on the
characteristics, such as duplicity, usually associated with the Other,
while Chinese-American characters move to the normative center of the
narrative (“A Reversal”). This reversal is a particularly daring move; it
seems likely that this new definition of what it means to be white would
cause discomfort, even anger, in some members of Sui Sin Far’s largely
European-American audience. And, significantly, Sui Sin Far has
constructed her narrative and her characters too carefully to allow her
readers to rationalize Mark Carson’s behavior or to criticize Pan’s: Pan
is undeniably the sympathetic character of the story, as Carson is the
betraying cad. But Sui Sin Far challenges her audience in even more
daring ways. She goes beyond simply reversing the qualities associated
with racialized groups, for she also calls into question what it means to
be long to such a group. In “Its Wavering Image,” racial identity is not
an essence, determined by biology; instead, it is something malleable,
wavering. Pan claims her own racial identity and acts out that identity
by adopting the ethnic associations of it, represented by her “Chinese
costume.” As in “The Wisdom of the New,” Sui Sin Far ultimately
creates a single identity for her character, as opposed to the plural
identity that Pan articulated earlier in the story; however, in doing so,
she shows that this identity is a choice and not an essence. It is in Sui
Sin Far’s autobiographical work, which I will discuss next, that she
fully examines what it means to choose an identity and whether it is
possible to simultaneously occupy more than one subject position.
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 77
ETHNICITY, RACE, AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN “LEAVES
FROM THE MENTAL PORTFOLIO OF
AN EURASIAN”
In 1909, The Independent published Sui Sin Far’s autobiographical
work “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” While many
recent crit ics pay attention to the text, most of these critics use it to
establish the details of the author’s life. Some of these critics, however,
do consider some of the literary strategies that Sui Sin Far adopts in the
work. White-Parks, for example, examines it in terms of the authors’
“shifting roles, her irony, and her playfulness” (Sui Sin Far/Edith
Maude Eaton 154). Because “Leaves” is a complex literary creation of
an autobiographical subject, its textual constructions of ethnicity and
race merit close attention.
The title of “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” echoes
nineteenth-century author Fanny Fern’s Fern Leaves from Fanny’s
Portfolio, but while the “leaves” of Fanny Fern’s work are longer
essays, those of Sui Sin Far’s are short, chronologically-ordered
episodes.7 Significantly, although the text opens with the words, “When
I look back over the years” (125), locating the subject of the text in the
past, the entire work is written in the present tense. Xiao-Huang Yin, the
only critic to write of Sui Sin Far’s use of the present tense in “Leaves,”
notes that “her use of the present tense in describing past occurrences
strengthens the impression of her recollections of childhood experiences
and fortifies the flashback effect” (59). The use of present tense,
however, is more complicated, also representing a very deliberate
literary strategy. Sui Sin Far is not simply revealing her experiences;
instead, she constructs an autobiographical subject through whom she
can explore the intricacies of negotiating identity in the terrain of race,
ethnicity, and nationality.
One significant way that she negotiates identity is through her
autobiographical subject’s ways of naming herself. The centrality of
naming and difference is made clear from the opening episode of the
work. In this, Sui Sin Far describes her four-year-old subject hearing
her nurse tell another nurse that “Sui”’s mother is Chinese: “Tho the word
‘Chinese’ conveys very little meaning to my mind, I feel that they are
talking about my father and mother and my heart swells with
indignation…. Many a long year has past over my head since that day—
the day on which I first learned that I was something different and apart
78 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
from other children” (125).8 In this passage, Sui tells us that the word
Chinese carried little meaning for her; however, shortly afterward she
informs us that her mother certainly did not hide her Chinese ancestry
from her: “She tells us tales of China. Tho a child when she left her
native land she remembers it well, and I am never tired of listening to
the story of how she was stolen from her home” (128). Surely Sui
would have heard these tales by the time she was four; why then does
she state that Chi nese had little meaning for her? An explanation might
lie in Sui’s recognition that her nurse uses Chinese derogatorily to refer
to that which is “Other.” It is this label of Otherness that is unfamiliar to
four-year-old Sui.
Still, as a child, Sui is not completely aware of what it means to be
Chinese. She describes another occasion after her family has
immigrated to Hudson City, New York. With her brother Charlie, she
passes a Chinese store: “The two men within the store are uncouth
specimens of their race, drest [sic] in working blouses and pantaloons
with queues hanging down their backs. I recoil with a sense of shock.
‘Oh, Charlie,’ I cry, ‘Are we like that?’” (126). Sui’s shock suggests that
she has internalized the equation of Chinese with subaltern Other, but
she has not yet learned to apply that name to herself. However, this
same incident soon prompts her to do so. Sui and Charlie are chased
down the street by neighborhood children yelling, “‘Chinky, Chinky,
Chinaman, yellow-face, pig-tail, rat-eater’,” and Sui defiantly responds,
“‘I’d rather be Chinese than anything else in the world’” (126). Finding
herself the object of oppression, Sui subverts the definition of Chinese at
which she had arrived only moments before.
But while Sui can briefly embrace a Chinese identity when faced with
the taunts of other children, the question of who she is continues to
haunt her. Following continued abuse by other children after the family
moves to Canada, Sui wonders,
Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters. Why
did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English,
mamma is Chinese. Why couldn’t we have been either one thing
or the other? Why is my mother’s race despised? I look into the
faces of my father and mother. Is she not every bit as dear and
good as he? Why? Why?…I do not confide in my father and
mother. They would not understand. How could they? He is
English, she is Chinese. I am different to both of them—a
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 79
stranger, tho their own child. ‘What are we?’ I ask my brother. ‘It
doesn’t matter, sissy,’ he responds. But it does. (127–8)
This passage makes it clear that it is not only the stigma of being
Chinese that plagues Sui. Equally important is her status in-between
races: she is nei ther Chinese nor English, and yet she is both Chinese
and English. This apparent contradiction makes it difficult for her to
name herself, but, as her final remark shows, she feels the need to do
so. Sui’s expression of her need to name herself destabilizes the notion
of racial identity as essence. As a child, she cannot name her own
identity; she cannot answer the question “What are we?” for there is no
racial essence for her to claim.
“Leaves” most powerfully interrogates essentialized notions of
identity in an often-cited section in which Sui, as an adult, refuses to
pass as white. In this section of the text, Sui Sin Far describes her
autobiographical self living “in a little town away off on the north shore
of a big lake” (129). She is dining with her employer and several
acquaintances when her dinner com panions begin to discuss “the cars
full of Chinamen” that passed that day on the transcontinental railway
that runs through the town (129). Sui’s companions offer explicitly
racist comments about the Chinese workers: her employer muses that “I
cannot reconcile myself to the thought that the Chinese are humans like
ourselves,” and a young woman at the table comments, “They always
give me such a creepy feeling” (129). The discussion pains Sui, whom
her companions assume to be white: “A miserable, cowardly feeling
keeps me silent. I am in a Middle West town. If I declare what I am,
every person in the place will hear about it the next day. The population
is in the main made up of working folks with strong prejudices against
my mother’s countrymen. The prospect before me is not an enviable
one—if I speak” (129). Thus far, Sui has been passing as white, and she
makes it clear that “outing” herself could have painful, even dangerous,
consequences. Nevertheless, she does so, telling her employer, “the
Chinese people may have no souls, no expression on their faces, be
altogether beyond the pale of civilization, but whatever they are, I want
you to understand that I am—I am Chinese” (129).
Unlike Sui’s earlier inability to name herself, the adult Sui in this
passage is able to claim straightforwardly “I am Chinese.” It should not
be surprising that by this point in the narrative Sui is better able to
identify herself as Chinese. Earlier in “Leaves,” she describes herself
making an effort to become familiar with China, Chinese immigrants,
and Chinese Americans, first through library books and later through
80 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
associating with Chinese Americans both professionally and socially.
Nor should it be surprising that, up until this moment of “outing”
herself, Sui has passed as white. The social and economic rewards for
passing as a member of the dominant group in a racist society are great,
and presumably Sui did not have to suffer one of the most important
penalties of passing: severing ties with family and community.9 But the
entire conception of the “Chinese” Sui passing as “white” in this section
of “Leaves” is problematic. In her introduction to Passing and the
Fictions of Identity, Elaine K. Ginsberg writes that “both the process
and the discourse of passing interrogate the ontology of identity
categories and their construction…. [They] challenge the essentialism
that is often the foundation of identity politics, a challenge that may be
seen as either threatening or liberating but in either instance discloses
the truth that identities are not singularly true or false but multiple and
contingent” (4). When Sui claims to be Chinese instead of white, she is
claiming power for herself to defend a group with whom she identifies,
but she also seems to be working within a true/false, either/or notion of
identity. However, the very act of passing, as Ginsberg suggests, refutes
this notion. The child of both Chinese and English parents, Sui is able to
move between two identities and in doing so breaks down the
boundaries between them. As Martha J. Cutter suggests in “Smuggling
Across the Borders of Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” “Sui Sin Far’s
construction of her identity encourages a movement back and forth
between categories that are supposed to remain separate, an inhabiting
of several categories simultaneously that is meant to undo these
categories” (143). The essentialized racial identities constructed by
Sui’s dinner companions reveal themselves as illusions.
Implicit within the act of passing lies a certain powerlessness: on one
level, passing involves capitulating to dominant power structures and, in
doing so, avoiding conflict or danger. However, passing can also call
into question essentialized categories of identity. In doing so, Ginsberg
claims, “passing has the potential to create a space for creative selfdetermination and agency: the opportunity to construct new identities, to
experiment with multiple subject positions, and to cross social and
economic boundaries that exclude or oppress” (16). In another section
of “Leaves,” Sui Sin Far shows the possibilities of this kind of boundary
transgression. In this section, Sui is in the West Indies, presumably a
reference to Sui Sin Far’s experience working in Jamaica. She begins
the section by describing herself surrounded by “persons who are
almost as high up in the world as birth, education and money can set
them,” and then continues:
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 81
I am also surrounded by a race of people, the reputed descendants
of Ham, the son of Noah, whose offspring, it was prophesied,
should be the servants of the sons of Shem and Japheth. As I am a
descendant, according to the Bible, of both Shem and Japheth, I
have a perfect right to set my heel upon the Ham people; but tho I
see others around me following out the Bible suggestion, it is not
in my nature to be arrogant to any but those who seek to impress
me with their superiority, which the poor black maid who has
been assigned to me by the hotel certainly does not. (130)
The biblical justification for white supremacy that Sui Sin Far notes
here was wide-spread at the turn of the twentieth century; it
conveniently added moral and religious backing to eugenic theories as
well as to the concept of manifest destiny. But Sui refuses to participate
in the oppression allowed by this interpretation of the Bible. While she
claims that acting arrogantly is not in her nature, a reader might wonder
if this “nature” is the product of Sui’s multiple subject positions. She
makes it clear that in the West Indies, as in the Midwest, she is passing,
noting that “Occasionally an Englishman will warn me against the
‘brown boys’ of the island, little dreaming that I too am of the ‘brown
people’ of the earth” (130). Sui Sin Far suggests that the act of passing,
the process of occupying multiple subject positions, and the
transgression of boundaries that accompanies these processes help her
auto-biographical subject to reject the racism that the English wield
against the black residents of the island. Sui may believe herself to be of
different biblical lineage than the black maid, but she instead
emphasizes their commonalities, paralleling the island’s “brown boys”
with her own “brown people.” In “Leaves,” then, the act of passing not
only calls into question essentialized categories of racial identity, but Sui
Sin Far also suggests that recognizing multiple subject positions might
lead to the dismantlement of racially-based oppression.
Toward the end of “Leaves,” Sui mocks acquaintances who
encourage her to Orientalize herself in order to succeed in her literary
career. These acquaintances, Sui explains, encourage her to “dress in
Chinese costume, carry a fan in my hand, wear a pair of scarlet beaded
slippers, live in New York, and come of high birth” (132). She should
baffle editors with quotations “both illuminating and obscuring”:
“‘Confucius, Confucius, how great is Confucius, Before Confucius,
there never was Confucius, After Confucius, there never came
Confucius,’ etc., etc., etc.,” (132). Sui immediately criticizes those who
encourage her to market herself as Oriental, stating that such people
82 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
“forget, or perhaps they are not aware that the old Chinese sage taught
The way of sincerity is the way of heaven’” (132). In this section of
“Leaves,” Sui moves adeptly from racial stereotypes to a more complex
concept of ethnic identity. Presumably, her acquaintances do not see her
as Chinese enough; as a Chinese American trying to create her own
identity, she fails to meet their expectations of an Oriental writer.10 But
immediately after Sui mocks their advice to babble about Confucius in
order to seem versed in Chinese philosophy, she quotes Confucius in
order to illuminate her own views on identity. In doing so, she not only
expresses her belief in being sincere, in being true to her own
conception of herself, but she also establishes a sympathetic link
between herself and Confucian philosophy. Thus Sui connects herself to
China, but suggests that her Chinese-American ethnic identity is much
more complex than her acquaintances’ concept of racialized Oriental
identity.11
Sui once again quotes Confucius in the final paragraph of “Leaves”:
“I have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any. Individuality is
more than nationality. ‘You are you and I am I,’ says Confucius. I give
my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping
that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant
‘connecting link.’” (132). “Nationality,” for Sui, does not only imply
citizenship or identification with a specific nation-state, but also cultural
identification. Thus, by emphasizing individuality in this passage, she
seems to be distancing herself from any kind of communal or ethnic
identity. But she immediately counters this by connecting herself to
both China and Europe-America. If forced to choose between the two, if
forced to view the world through mutually exclusive racialized
categories, Sui cannot claim a “nationality,” for she is neither white nor
Oriental. Ultimately, though, unlike the fictional character Pan, Sui
claims ties to both countries; by allowing herself to be a “connecting
link,” she rejects the dichotomies of racial rhetoric and instead creates
her own individual Chinese-American ethnic identity.
At the beginning of this chapter, I noted how Elizabeth Ammons has
described the different levels of meaning in Sui Sin Far’s work. Because
Sui Sin Far rarely uses explicitly racialized language when presenting
characters that adhere to essentialized notions of identity, uncovering
these layers involves decoding, and distinguishing between, race and
ethnicity in her writing, while acknowledging how the two play off each
other. The contradictory critical assessments of her work may be caused
in large part by the complexity of her presentation of race and ethnicity.
Rather than being racial or ethnic monoliths, Sui Sin Far’s characters
MONOLITHIC IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CONSTRUCTION IN THE FICTION 83
are frequently “hybridized,” not in the racialized sense of being mixed
bloods, but rather in the sense that they have multiethnic identities or
are caught between identities: Mrs. Spring Fragrance can become “just
like an American” at the same time that she is consistently labeled
Chinese; the boy Yen is pulled between his father’s attraction to the
American “new” and his mother’s ties to the Chinese “old”; Pan is
content not choosing between her white self and her Chinese self until a
white man betrays her; and Sui Sin Far’s own autobiographical subject
cautiously but hopefully gives her “right hand to the Occidentals and
[her] left to the Orientals.” In the end, Sui Sin Far uses her fictional
characters and her autobiographical subject to interrogate the
essentialized racial categories of white and Oriental and to suggest that
a more fluidly constructed ethnic identification offers a freedom and a
hope for social change that a rigid racial identification does not. At a
time when popular literature about Chinese immigrants and their
descendants was dominated by images of the monolithic Oriental Other,
Sui Sin Far was able to see, and dared to publicly express, an alternative
to being only “one thing or the other.”
84
Chapter Four
“This Hideous Little Pickaninny” and the
Formation of Bohemian Whiteness:
Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Willa
Cather’s My Ántonia
Physically they were almost a race apart….
Jim Burden, of the “hired girls”
Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Neither color, nor shape or size,
nor the face you were born with
can you take for granted anymore.
Rina Ferrarelli, “Emigrant/Immigrant I”
Recent critics have begun to investigate the complex, and often
disturbing, racial terrain of Willa Cather’s (1873–1947) writing. In
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992),
Toni Morrison examines Cather’s novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl
(1940) and claims that the “problem” with the novel, and the reason it
so often has been dismissed by literary critics, lies in “trying to come to
terms critically and artistically with the novel’s concerns: the power and
license of a white slave mistress over her female slaves” (18). While
Morrison laments the lack of critical examination of race in Cather’s
work—claiming that “the urgency and anxiety in Willa Cather’s
rendering of black characters are liable to be missed entirely; no
mention is made of the problem that race causes in the technique and
the credibility of her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl” (14)—
Minrose Gwin has indeed noted a “problem” in Sapphira, brought on by
inconsisten cies in characterization and narrative technique. According
to Gwin, “The troublesome aspect of Sapphira is that as it suggests the
mixed nature of human motivation and conduct, it also implies that…
slavery usually had no grave and irrevocable psychological effects upon
the enslaved” (138).
86 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
Morrison and Gwin place racial representation in the center of their
analyses of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and other critics have begun to
explore the racial terrain of Cather’s other novels and short stories.
Paying particular attention to The Professor’s House and Death Comes
for the Archbishop, Walter Benn Michaels, for example, uses the term
nativist mod ernism to describe the racialized constructions of American
identity that surface in Cather’s fiction. Other critics have begun to
examine racialized portrayals of Pueblo Indians and Chicana/os that
occur in Cather’s southwestern novels, and still others have called
attention to the anti-Semitism that surfaces is several of Cather’s works.
Katrina Irving looks specifically at My Ántonia (1918) in Immigrant
Mothers: Narratives of Race and Maternity, 1890–1925, arguing that
the novel’s cultural pluralism works to establish the racialized
immigrant woman’s place within the stratified and exploitative labor
market. Irving’s work, however, is a rarity among critical analyses of
Cather’s Midwestern novels and stories about European immigrants; in
most such analyses, discussions of ethnicity, considered separately from
race, tend to come to the forefront.1 The attention given to ethnicity in
Cather’s immigrant-focused works is understandable, especially
because of the time-worn equation of “immigrant” and “ethnic” in the
United States. Because whiteness has long been constructed as an
unmarked racial category, frameworks of ethnicity do not seem to be
applied to Cather’s works that focus on American-born white characters.
Given the prevalence of discussions of ethnicity in Cather’s immigrantfocused works, however, the dearth of full discussions of race is
striking. One likely explanation for this lack is that the emigrants in
Cather’s work are from Europe and are therefore characters whom, from
a perspective at the beginning of the twenty-first century, most readers
would deem “white.” Therefore, regarding a text such as My Ántonia, in
which most of the characters are apparently “white” and consequently
unmarked for many readers, there has been little extended discussion of
race. Such a discussion, however, is actually crucial to gaining a fuller
view of the novel and of constructions of race in the early twentieth
century.
Notions of race during the 1910s, when Cather wrote My Ántonia, were
not only in flux but were also intertwined with notions of what we now
call ethnicity. At least as early as the first decade of the century, the
instability of the term race reveals itself in texts from the social sciences
as well as in more traditionally literary texts. In Races and Immigrants
(1907), political econ omist John Commons acknowledges that “We
[the author] use the term ‘race’ in a rather loose and elastic sense; and
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 87
indeed we are not culpable in so doing, for the ethnographers are not
agreed upon it” (12). Commons notes that race has been defined in terms
of color, language, place of origin, and skull shape, and then attempts to
clarify his own use of the term:
Mankind in general has been divided into three and again into five
great racial stocks, and one of these stocks, the Aryan or IndoGermanic is represented among us by ten or more subdivisions
which we also term races. It need not cause confusion if we use
the term “race” not only to designate these grand divisions which
are so far removed by nature one from another as to render
successful amalgamation an open question, but also to designate
those peoples or nationalities which we recognize as distinct yet
related within one of the large divisions. (13)
This pliability of race reveals itself in numerous other texts. In
Immigration: A World Movement and Its American Significance (1913),
for example, sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild warns that “the new
immigration is made up from people of a very different racial stock
[from earlier settlers], representing the Slavic and Mediterranean
branches of the Caucasian race rather than the Teutonic. With the
difference in race go differences in mental characteristics, traditions,
and habits of life” (130). Like Commons, Fairchild uses race to refer to
“grand divisions” but also to difference within each division.
Furthermore, Fairchild does not specify the relationship between race
and “traditions, and habits of life,” only that they are associated,
suggesting the interrelationship between race and what we would now
term eth nicity.
It is therefore not only important to examine the relationship between
race and ethnicity in My Ántonia, but also to consider that many of
Cather’s contemporaries, unlike readers of today, would not have
necessarily considered Ántonia, an emigrant from central Europe, to be
racially comparable to immigrants from northwestern Europe or their
descendants. While the whiteness of the Virginia-born, alreadyAmerican narrator Jim Burden, with his “fresh color and sandy hair and
quick-changing blue eyes,” is never in question, the same cannot be said
for the “foreign” Ántonia (xii, 7). In this chapter I will argue that, by the
end of the novel, Cather constructs the character of Ántonia both as an
ethnically-marked Bohemian and as a white American. In constructing
Ántonia this way, Cather affirms an American identity that, for all of its
ethnic markers, becomes racially unmarked as white and, hence,
88 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
normative. As I will show, constructing European Americans as
ethnically diverse but racially unified allows Cather to sidestep
the eugenicists’ claims of Nordic superiority, claims that were gaining
in popularity during the 1910s. In doing so, Cather presents an
optimistic (but, as I shall show, problematic) cultural pluralism similar
to that advocated by progressive thinkers such as Horace Kallen and
Randolph Bourne as early as the 1910s. Cather, however, can only
disrupt one construct of racial difference by reaffirming another.
Ántonia’s Bohemian whiteness is made possible, I argue, by a crucial
yet often overlooked scene in the middle of the novel. In this scene, “the
Negro pianist” Blind d’Arnault entertains the young men and women of
Black Hawk (206). It is only because black Otherness is reified through
the character of Blind d’Arnault that the Bohemian Ántonia can enter
into whiteness.
Earlier critics of My Ántonia have seen the episode with Blind
d’Arnault as significant to the fabric of, and the musicality of, Cather’s
text. Richard Giannone, in Music in Willa Cather’s Fiction (1968),
claims the episode is “the pulsating center” of the novel (120).
Giannone, however, is discussing how the scene sets a musical and,
consequently, an emotional key for the rest of the novel. More recently,
Ann Moseley, focusing specifically on cultural pluralism in Cather’s
text, notes Giannone’s claim, then asserts that “perhaps the true
significance of the Blind d’Arnault episode is that for Jim, and for
Cather,…this scene also reflects the feelings of a ‘new soul in a new
world’” (10). Quoting Toni Morrison, Moseley concludes that Cather
“undertook ‘the journey’ to face the ‘void of racism’” (10). However, a
full analysis of the episode is not within the scope of Moseley’s article,
and Moseley’s implication that Cather is actively confronting racism
remains unconvincing. In contrast to Moseley’s position, Elizabeth
Ammons asserts that the episode with Blind d’Arnault reveals Cather’s
own internalized racism, rather than her attempt to confront racism
(“My Ántonia and African American Art”). Furthermore, Ammons
persuasively argues that the scene reveals Cather’s artistic indebtedness
to African-American music, a debt that Cather will not own overtly but
that erupts nonetheless in her text. Ammons is concerned with how an
African-American cultural presence reveals itself and also remains
concealed in My Ántonia. In this chapter, I am concerned with the
implications of that presence and what its inclusion suggests about racial
formation in the second decade of the twentieth century. As I will show,
the scene with Blind d’Arnault reveals some of the intricacies of racial
formation and its connection to a specific version of cultural pluralism
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 89
that I outline in this chapter. More specifically, Ántonia can only
represent an ideal of white Americanness at the end of the novel
because Blind d’Arnault is assigned the role of Other.
EUGENICS, EUROPEAN RACES, AND
CATHER’S IMMIGRANT BODIES
In order to examine the constructions of race in My Ántonia, I will look
at the novel in conjunction with the ideology of the eugenics
movement, specifically the racially-based tenets of eugenics, of the
early part of the century. In particular, I will read the novel against The
Passing of the Great Race (1916), an important eugenic text by
Madison Grant. Madison Grant received a degree in law from Columbia
University, but, rather than practicing, he became an amateur naturalist.
He was a member of a number of different eugenics societies and actively
campaigned for immigration restriction. Grant affiliated himself with
many eminent scientists of his time and was respected and viewed as a
peer by many of these scientists, despite his lack of formal scientific
training (Tucker 88).
By invoking The Passing of the Great Race, I do not mean to imply
that Cather was consciously responding to Grant’s ideas, nor even that
she had read his work. Instead, I view Grant’s work as representative
of, perhaps even the apex of, a specific discourse of whiteness and
racial hierarchy that I outline here. Whether or not Cather was familiar
with Grant’s writing, she certainly would have been familiar with the
racial ideology that produced it. Eugenic theories steadily gained
popularity among physical and social scientists from the late nineteenth
century past the time that The Passing of the Great Race was published
in 1916, and during the first decades of this century, they also gained
popularity among a more general, largely educated, audience. Between
1906 and 1911, while Cather was a staff writer and managing editor for
McClure’s, a widely popular magazine, the magazine published several
articles addressing eugenic theories, further emphasizing not only a
general interest in these theories but also Cather’s certain familiarity
with them.3
The Passing of the Great Race further helped to popularize eugenics
among a more general audience. Grant’s text was a best seller (Tucker
90) and went through several printings. Reviews of the book were
mixed: reviewers such as Franz Boas (writing for The New Republic)
and Horace Kallen (writing for The Dial) strongly criticized Grant’s
work; however most critics were less severe, sometimes finding fault
90 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
with Grant’s research methods while generally agreeing with his
findings. Several reviewers highly praised the text; one reviewer
claimed it “a book to be read and considered by thinking men among
us,” suggesting something of its audience (Boston Transcript 7). I
choose Grant’s text to represent eugenic racial ideology because of its
widespread influence and because it is to some extent the culmination
of eugenic thought about the race(s) of Europeans in the first decades of
the twentieth century.
In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant’s stated purpose is not to
examine the superiority of whites to other peoples of the world
(although he does so occasionally, anyway) but rather to examine the
racial differences among the people of Europe and their colonial
descendants. According to Grant, all the people of Europe are white, but
there exist three “subspecies,” to which Grant refers as “races”: the
Nordic subspecies, the Mediterranean, and the Alpine (17–8). Grant is
careful to emphasize that the differences between these European
peoples are not linguistic or national but are specifically due to racial
heredity. Following the traditional criteria of anthropometry, Grant
asserts that the central hereditary characteristics that distinguish these
racial subspecies are skull shape (specifically the “cephalic index” or
ratio between the length and width of the skull), face shape, eye color, hair
color, skin color, and stature (16–26). According to Grant,
Mediterraneans are short, have long skulls, narrow faces, black or dark
brown eyes, black or dark brown hair, and dark skin color. Alpines are
stocky, have round skulls, broad faces, black or dark brown eyes
(“sometimes hazel or gray in western Europe”), black or dark brown
hair, and dark skin color. Nordics are tall (“distinguished by great
stature”), have long skulls, narrow faces, blue, gray, or green eyes, light
skin, and light hair (Grant’s list reads, “Flaxen. Fair. Red. Light brown
to chestnut. Never black.”) (26). Grant also shows that there is some
correspondence between European geography and racial subspecies. Not
surprisingly, Mediterraneans surround the sea of the same name but also
comprise some of the population of France, England, Scotland, Ireland,
and Wales. Most of eastern and central Europe, Grant claims, is
inhabited by Alpines, as is south-central France and northern Italy
(Figure 2). All the inhabitants of Scandinavia are Nordic, as are the
majority in England, Scotland, North and East Ireland, Germany,
Northern France, and the Baltics—essentially all of northern,
particularly northwestern, Europe. The settlers of the thirteen colonies
that were to become the United States, what Grant calls “native
Americans,” were Nordic.
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 91
Throughout the book, Grant works to establish the superiority of the
Nordic “subspecies.” “The Nordics are, all over the world,” according
to Grant, “a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but
above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the
essentially peasant character of the Alpines” (198). The Nordic, he
claims, is “the white man par excellence” (150). Grant’s aim is to argue
against unrestricted immigration, which he feels is “sweeping the nation
toward a racial abyss” at the expense of Nordic Americans: “If the
Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control, and we continue to
follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all
‘distinctions of race, creed, or color,’ the type of native American of
Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of
Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo” (228).
If one were to examine My Ántonia through the lens of Grantian
eugenics, the central characters of the novel should represent two races:
the Nordic American-born and Norwegian immigrant characters (Jim
Burden, his grandparents, the Harlings, Lena Lingard), and the Alpine
Czech immigrant characters (the Shimerdas, Krajiek, Cuzak).4 Yet, the
characters that Cather creates do not easily conform to eugenic racial
categories (Figure 2).
Like many of Cather’s narrators, Jim Burden pays careful attention to
the physical appearance of the novel’s characters. When a new
character is introduced, Jim almost invariably provides a physical
description, and he often focuses on coloring: hair color, skin color, eye
color. This attention to detail is not unique to My Ántonia among
Cather’s fiction; indeed, her work is replete with visual detail, especially
regarding the physical appearance of characters. In “The Bohemian
Girl,” for example, the reader learns of Nils Ericson’s “heavy reddish
eyebrows,” of the cut of his trousers, and of his razor-stubble before
even learning his name (97). This kind of detail is equally common in My
Ántonia: nearly every character in the novel is introduced with a
detailed physical description. This level of detail is certainly not unique
to Cather as a writer; when read in the context of the eugenics
movement, however, Cather’s descriptions of her characters take on a
new resonance.
As I have shown in my summary of Madison Grant’s ideas,
eugenicists believed specific physical attributes to be determined by
race: cranial index (or skull shape), eye color, hair color, skin color, and
stature are the most “telling” features for Grant. These are also the
physical features most often noted in My Ántonia. Cather’s physical
descriptions of characters, however, contrast sharply with the racial
Figure 2. “Present Distribution of European Races” from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race
92
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 93
categories of eugenic thought. Cather’s apparent rejection of these
racial categories becomes most noticeable in descriptions of the different
members of immigrant families.5 The Norwegian immigrant Harling
family, for example, hardly conforms to Grant’s Nordic ideal. While
young Sally Harling has “yellow hair” (169), the oldest daughter
Frances Harling is “dark, like her father” (170). Mrs. Harling’s body,
“short and square and sturdy-looking” (168), contrasts with the Nordic
“great stature” (Grant 26). For a family who would be, according to
Grant, from all-Nordic Norway, the Harlings certainly show a range of
contrasting physical features.
Cather’s rejection of eugenic constructs of European racial differences
is equally noticeable when the members of Ántonia’s family, the
Shimerdas, are described. Grant portrays Bohemia as an almost
exclusively Alpine- populated region; consequently, if Cather were to
rely on a eugenic scheme, one should expect the Shimerdas to conform
to Alpine characteristics: stocky or heavy statures, brown or black hair,
brown or black eyes, round heads, and wide faces. Instead, the
Shimerdas show a range of dissimilar physical features. The Shimerda’s
son, Ambroz, is short and has a wide face, but he also has hazel eyes
(25). Mr. Shimerda is “tall and slender,” and has a pale face and hands
that Jim describes as “white and well-shaped” (27). Ántonia herself has
brown eyes and hair, whereas her younger sister Yulka is simply
described as “fair” (26). Jim’s own “native American” family shows
similar physical diversity. Jim himself has blue eyes and “sandy” hair
(xii), and his blue-eyed grandfather’s white beard had once been red (13).
In contrast, Jim’s grandmother has “brown skin and black hair” (9),
characteristics that Grant would deem impossible in a Nordic.
Thus, Cather draws characters who refute eugenic notions of
physically separate races among Europeans and their descendants. But
this is not to say that race is absent from the novel. While Cather rejects
one model of racial difference, that of the eugenicists, she represents
another one, a model of monolithic whiteness and black Otherness that
is undoubtedly more familiar to readers today. In Whiteness of a
Different Color, Matthew Frye Jacobson examines the “fracturing of
whiteness into a hierarchy of plural and scientifically determined white
races” between the 1840s and 1924 (7). Beginning in the 1920s,
Jacobson claims, these previously racially differentiated European
immigrant groups became “reconsolidated” as a unitary white race (8).
In My Ántonia, we can see a movement toward this consolidation prior
to the 1920s. Cather’s novel serves as a bridge between these different
constructions of racial difference. Before explicitly addressing
94 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
representations of racial difference in My Ántonia, however, I first need
to outline the vision of cultural pluralism that Cather presents in the novel,
as this vision of cultural pluralism is intricately connected to racial
formation.
CULTURAL PLURALISM, RACE, AND BLIND
D’ARNAULT
In his important study Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire
(1996), Guy Reynolds examines attitudes toward Americanization
present in My Ántonia. Noting that Cather’s “fictions of race and
multiculturalism can often seem strikingly receptive to difference,”
Reynolds argues that My Ántonia is “a major instance of this attentive
sympathy” (81). Yet, despite such observations, Reynolds pays little
attention to race in his chapter on My Ántonia. Reynolds admits that
“Cather’s heterogeneous, pluralistic immigrant culture is, nonetheless,
essentially white” (80), but because he chooses to focus on “Cather’s
commitment to biculturalism” (98), he does not examine how race is
constructed in the “multicultural” world of My Án- tonia.6 In the
following pages, I will show that the cultural pluralism articulated by
Cather and advocated by a number of her contemporaries is part of a
process of racial construction despite the fact that it often seems to
ignore questions of race.7
To establish his argument, Reynolds compares Cather’s vision of
multi culturalism (Reynolds’s term) to that of Randolph Bourne, a
progressive intellectual who wrote for periodicals such as The Dial and
The Atlantic Monthly. The comparison between Cather’s and Bourne’s
ideas about ethnicity and nationality is apt, in part because Bourne
publicly approved of Cather’s vision, giving My Ántonia a glowing
review in The Dial (“Morals” 557), but also because of the similarities
between their ideas. Like Reynolds, I use Bourne to explicate notions of
cultural pluralism during the Great War era.8 While I agree with
Reynolds about the similarities between Bourne’s and Cather’s visions
of cultural pluralism, I should point out that Reynolds views their
visions much more positively than I do here. Bourne’s essay “TransNational America” (1916) provides a succinct, articulate example of
pluralist thought of the time. It is important to note that there were
differences between the cultural pluralists. However, the main tenets of
Bourne’s “Trans-National America,” particularly the rejection of the
melting pot metaphor, were shared by a number of them.
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 95
Rejection of the melting pot metaphor of assimilation is central to
cultural pluralism. Rather than idealize a single culture into which
immigrants “melted,” cultural pluralists called for a recognition and
appreciation of multiple cultures in the United States. In “TransNational America,” Bourne argues directly against melting pot
assimilation: “What we emphatically do not want is that these
distinctive qualities [of different cultures] should be washed out into a
tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity” (253–254). Instead of the
melting pot, Bourne invokes a metaphor of weaving to present a vision
of a pluralistic culture: “America is coming to be, not a nationality but a
trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of
many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to
thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle
the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision” (262).
Thus Bourne indicts as parochial anyone who would advocate
“melting.”
In contrast to other views of immigration of the time, specifically
exclusionism and hegemonic assimilationism, Bourne’s ideas at first
might seem liberatory. Indeed, Bourne’s works were republished in the
1960s and his ideas advocated by a number of civil rights activists, and
more recently his discussions of cultural pluralism have been
recuperated by political theorists looking for a new interpretation of
nationalism. As Andrew Walzer points out, however, Bourne’s vision
of cultural pluralism is problematic. In “The Cultural Criticism of
Randolph Bourne: A Usable Past for Multicultural America?” Walzer
shows that “although Bourne’s concept of the ‘Transna-tion’ seems to
acknowledge and even celebrate cultural difference, his ideal was in
fact of a unified people in which cultural and historical difference was
elided” (15). Specifically, Walzer shows, Bourne elides racial and
gender differences in his focus on male European-American citizens.
Walzer addresses “Trans-National America” only briefly; however, a
closer look at the text of Bourne’s essay shows how exclusion is part of
his cultural pluralism. Arguing against those who would criticize recent
immigrants for their “newness,” Bourne asserts that “We are all foreignborn or the descendants of foreign-born, and if distinctions are to be
made between us they should rightly be on some other ground than
indigenousness” (249; my emphasis). Bourne’s claim in this sentence
already suggests a narrowness to his “we”: he certainly does not have
American Indians in mind as part of this group. Bourne continues by
claiming that both early and late arrivals to America have come for the
same reasons: “They came to get freedom to live as they wanted to.
96 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
They came to escape from the stifling air and chaos of the old world;
they came to make their fortune in a new land” (250). By focusing on
European colonists and later immigrants, Bourne ignores Africans
brought to America as slaves and their descendants. Throughout the
essay, Bourne maintains this focus on European immigrants and their
descendants as the threads of his transnational fabric. He mentions
“Germans,” “French,” “Scandinavians,” “Poles,” and “Bohemians” as
parts of the transnation, but not “Chinese,” “Mexicans,” or
“Armenians.” Bourne’s cosmopolitan vision turns out to be distinctly
Europolitan.
“Trans-National America” also suggests that Bourne, while opposing
the “melting pot” model of assimilation, saw some degree of
assimilation as desirable. Bourne notes, “I do not mean that the illiterate
Slav is now the equal of the New Englander of pure descent. He is the
raw material to be educated, not into a New Englander, but into a
socialized American…. Let us speak, not of inferior races, but of inferior
civilizations” (250). Bourne continues in this vein, claiming that
immigrants “evolve” with time: “America has burned most of the baser
metal…from them” (259). Thus, through education and through contact
with people of “superior” cultures, European immigrants transform into
the ideal Americans of the future.
In My Ántonia, Cather presents a vision of cultural pluralism that
resembles Bourne’s in a number of ways. Most obvious is Cather’s
choice of ethnic characters. The narrator Jim is “native” American, the
Shimerdas are Czech, a number of characters are Scandinavian, and
minor characters are Russian and Italian. Like Bourne’s transnational
threads, significant characters have European ancestors. But the
similarities between Bourne’s vision and the America of My Ántonia go
beyond Cather’s focus on European-American characters; like Bourne,
Cather rejects the melting pot as a promising metaphor for the nation
and instead envisions a cosmopolitan Midwest. As did Bourne, Cather
later would later use the word cosmopoli tan to describe the ideal
federation of cultures: “it is in that great cosmopolitan country known
as the Middle West that we may hope to see the hard molds of
American provincialism broken up” (qtd. in Reynolds 80). In My
Ántonia, Cather presents this culturally pluralistic Nebraska, where
people not only retain their cultural distinctiveness while living side-byside but also contribute significantly to the future of the United States.
Before examining the similarities between Bourne’s and Cather’s
ideals of cultural pluralism, I first need to clarify the relationship
between Cather and her narrator Jim, a relationship that is fraught with
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 97
complications and contradictions. At least since the time that Blanche
Gelfant published her landmark essay “The Forgotten Reaping Hook:
Sex in My Ántonia” (1971), critics have questioned Jim’s reliability as a
narrator. Breaking with a critical tradition that tended to equate Jim’s
voice with Cather’s, Gelfant asserts that Jim is “disingenuous” and
“self-deluded” (60), thus opening the door for subsequent critics who
have addressed Cather’s authorial intention and the extent to which
Cather’s views correspond with those expressed by her narrator. Some
of the most interesting interpretations of this relationship occur in
feminist scholars’ analyses of gender and sexuality in My Ántonia and
in Cather’s life. Deborah Lambert (1982) and Judith Fetterley (1986),
for example, both see Jim as a mask for Cather’s own lesbian
consciousness. Other critics, such as Susan Rosowski (1986) and Jean
Schwind, (1985) focus on how Cather seems to distance herself from,
and undercut, Jim’s narrative. Cather biographer Sharon O’Brien
effectively summarizes the questions addressed, at least implicitly, by
these critics (and raised by numerous others): “Does Jim Burden speak
for Willa Cather? Does Cather carefully maintain ironic distance from his
vision? Or does she waver, at times detaching herself from Jim, at times
seemingly identified with his perspective?” (23).
The plethora of differing and often contradictory interpretations of
the relationship between Cather and her narrator suggests an affirmative
response to O’Brien’s third hypothesis. The full extent to which Cather
identifies with Jim and distances herself from him has been the subject
of many critics’ analyses over the past three decades and is not within
the scope of this chapter. Because, however, I wish to discuss the
visions of cultural pluralism and racial formation that Cather presents (as
opposed to those presented by an unreliable narrator), it is important that
I clarify my stance on the relationship between Cather and her narrator
regarding these visions. It is impossible to deny what numerous critics
have pointed out: Cather gives the reader reason to doubt Jim’s
reliability. On the issues of cultural pluralism and race, however, the
reader has at least two reasons to believe that Jim’s vision corresponds
with Cather’s. First, in the sections of the book that I discuss here,
Cather does not undercut Jim’s general impressions. While the
descriptions in these sections might come from a narrator with a
“generally romantic and ardent disposition,” as Cather describes him in
the introduction to the novel (xi), Cather gives the reader no reason to
question the events of the story: Jim’s visit to Ántonia at the end of the
novel and the performance of Blind d’Arnault, that I will analyze in the
remainder of this chapter. Second, Jim’s apparent attitudes toward
98 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
cultural pluralism and racial difference resemble what we know of
Cather’s own attitudes. As Reynolds shows, Cather allied herself with
cultural pluralists of her time in her opposition to assimilationist
tendencies (79–81). Furthermore, as Elizabeth Ammons demonstrates in
“My Ántonia and African American Art,” Cather “readily participated
in mainstream racist attitudes prevalent early in the twentieth century”
(61), attitudes that coincide with those expressed by her narrator Jim9.
I return now to the similarities between the cultural pluralism of
Randolph Bourne and the vision of cultural pluralism that Cather
presents, particularly in the last section of the novel. Toward the end of
My Ántonia, Jim returns to Nebraska to visit Ántonia after twenty years.
After marrying a Czech immigrant, Anton Cuzak, Ántonia has settled
on a farm and had many children. Numerous critics have examined this
section of the novel, many paying specific attention to the connection
between Ántonia and the Nebraskan land and to Jim’s image of her as a
symbol of fertility. She has been described as an “earth goddess, mother
earth, the madonna of the cornfields” (Woodress 51) and a “central
fertility figure” (Gelfant 63). Whether this image is viewed positively or
more ambivalently (see Deborah G.Lambert’s “The Defeat of a Hero:
Autonomy and Sexuality in My Ántonia”), the connection between
Ántonia and the land dominates critical discussions of the novel’s last
section.10 Jim describes Ántonia’s skin as “brown and hardened” (379)
like the earth, and he explicitly connects her to agricultural fertility: “She
had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and
look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and
tending and harvesting at last” (398). Jim’s descriptions of Ántonia in
this final section of the novel, however, also add to the novel’s
configurations of race and assimilation, and this last section of the novel
presents Cather’s ideal of cultural pluralism.
For Jim, the older Ántonia is a positive figure. Jim describes the
moment when they first meet again: “As I confronted her, the changes
grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the
full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished” (374). As
they talk, Jim observes to himself that “Ántonia had not lost the fire of
life. Her skin, so brown and hardened, had not that look of flabbiness,
as if the sap beneath it had been secretly drawn away” (379). Jim
emphasizes retention of identity in these descriptions; it seems important
to him that, despite the changes of time, Án-tonia remains much the
same person he knew in childhood. The idea of retention of identity also
involves Ántonia’s ethnic self. She claims, “I’ve forgot my English so”
and notes that the children learn to speak Bohemian first, learning
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 99
English only in school (378). The retention of language, too, is viewed
positively by Jim, who describes the children speaking to each other in
“their rich old language” (394). Jim notes ethnic markers other than
language: Ántonia’s son Leo plays “Bohemian airs” on his
grandfather’s violin, and Ántonia continues to make the same pastries,
kolaches, that she made as a child (392, 381). The Czech characters are
not explicitly racially marked, as I have shown; rather, in this final
section they retain positively-framed ethnic markers.
Jim’s description directly parallels Bourne’s description of ideal
immigrants who “retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and
their national spiritual slants” (259). According to Bourne, difference
becomes a creative force when Americans work as a “cosmopolitan
federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures from whom the sting
of devastating competition has been removed” (258). This
cosmopolitanism, so central to Bourne’s transnational America, also
reverberates in the ending of My Ántonia. Ántonia’s children learn
Bohemian at home but become bilingual at school, which they
presumably attend with people from a variety of cultures. The family
maintains cultural traditions from Europe, but, as Reynolds has pointed
out, “Ántonia fulfils the American dream of pioneer settlement even as
she revivifies a European way of life” (83). And “native” American Jim
befriends Ántonia’s Czech husband Cuzak, plans to take the oldest boys
on hunting trips, and hopes to “tramp along a few miles of lighted
streets with Cuzak” himself (418). The ending of the novel shows interchange between cultures as well as what Bourne terms a “peaceful
living side by side” (258).
Bourne looks to the future for a definition of American culture: “As
long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the ‘melting-pot,’ our
American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was something to which
the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light of our changing
ideal of Americanism, we must perpetrate the paradox that our
American cultural tradition lies in the future” (“Trans-National
America” 256). For Bourne, American culture will be forged as people
of different cultures interact and learn from each other. He implies that
it will be the descendants of immigrants, not necessarily immigrants
themselves, who will see the cosmopolitan society he envisions. In My
Ántonia, Jim Burden too looks to the future as the site of a new
American culture. When describing his visit to Ántonia and her family
toward the end of the narrative, he offers a descriptive paean of Ántonia
as the earth mother figure. He then concludes his chapter with a striking
two sentence paragraph: “It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and
100 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races”
(398). This passage is remarkable for a number of reasons. Certainly,
Ántonia’s “tall and straight” sons contrast with eugenic descriptions of
Alpine stature, and rather than being the “unfit” immigrant mother so
popular in eugenicist discourse, Ántonia is “a rich mine of life.” In
addition, however, and with an eye to the future like Bourne, Jim sees a
new “race” in Ántonia’s descendants. Ántonia is not the new American;
rather, she is the conduit through which her sons become American.
Significantly, Jim does not mention Ántonia’s daughters here, implying
that this new “race,” this new American culture, will be the domain of
men. To complicate this issue further, this passage is included in book 5
of the novel, titled “Cuzak’s Boys.” Jim views Án-tonia as the founder
of a new race of which her sons are evidence; yet, according to the
book’s title, the sons are her husband’s, not hers.
Bourne’s ideas can again help to explain this apparent contradiction.
Despite Bourne’s apparent radicalism, his writing, as Andrew Walzer
shows, expresses a nostalgia for an earlier vision of the nation as an
“imagined community” of European-American men.11 According to
Walzer, Bourne’s “apparently pluralistic vision has to be seen along
side [his writing that expresses] an ideal of the nation as a deep
fraternity of male citizens and site of male power” (18).12 Despite Jim
Burden’s explicit admiration of Ántonia, he apparently shares Bourne’s
ideal of the nation as a fraternal site of male power. At the end of
“Cuzak’s Boys,” which begins with Jim traveling to vis it Ántonia, we
find him making plans to take the oldest sons hunting the following
summer, we find him spending the last evening of his visit talking with
Cuzak, and we find him musing, “There were enough Cuzaks to play
with for a long while yet. Even after the boys grew up, there would
always be Cuzak himself! I meant to tramp along a few miles of lighted
streets with Cuzak” (417–8). Frances W. Kaye notes that “given the
conventions of male bonding, Jim’s friendship would have to be with
Cuzak, not his wife” (108), but it is the very inclusion of male bonding,
not just Jim’s friendship, that is important here. In a work that ends
looking to the future and imagining the founding of a new race, this
focus on men and male bonding takes on new resonance. Ántonia may
be important for her character, her experiences, or her fecundity, but
ultimately it is the men of the novel who are important to the new
cosmopolitan nation.13 “Cuzak’s Boys” are the future of culturally
pluralistic America.
Ann Moseley has lauded Cather’s stance on cultural pluralism,
claiming that Cather’s “attitude toward these immigrants and cultures
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 101
other than her own was not just that of acceptance and sympathy;
rather, it was one of understanding and great admiration” (11). But
Cather’s presentation of cultural pluralism is more complex than
Moseley allows. The male-focused future implied by the end of the
novel already suggests a problem with idealizing Cather’s version of
cultural pluralism as critics such as Moseley have done.14 Moreover, the
cultural pluralism expressed in the novel presents another problem: the
cultural cost of descendants of Europeans coming together to form a
new “cosmopolitan” nation. This cost is the exclusion of non-European
Others who are not a part of this cosmopolitan future even though they
are crucial to bringing it about. As I will show in the rest of this chapter,
Cather’s cosmopolitan cultural pluralism is made possible by a black
Other, “Blind d’Arnault, the negro pianist” (206).
As I discussed earlier in this chapter, Cather rejects eugenic ideas of
racial difference among Europeans; however, images of biological
racial difference are not absent from the novel. In a chapter at the very
middle of My Ántonia, Jim tells of an impromptu dance at Black
Hawk’s hotel. Blind d’Ar-nault, a traveling African-American piano
player, has come to town, and he performs for the hotel guests and
townspeople. Jim’s description of d’Ar-nault conforms in many ways to
long-lived stereotypes of the “Negro minstrel”:
He was a heavy, bulky mulatto, on short legs, and he came
tapping the floor in front of him with his gold-headed cane. His
yellow face was lifted in the light, with a show of white teeth, all
grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids lay motionless over his
blind eyes…. [His voice] was the soft, amiable Negro voice, like
those I remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile
subservience in it. He had the Negro head, too; almost no head at
all; nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped
wool. He would have been repulsive if his face had not been so
kindly and happy. It was the happiest face I had seen since I left
Virginia. (209)
Jim’s description condenses a number of nineteenth-century minstrel
stereotypes. His description of d’Arnault’s “gold-headed cane” invokes
the fiction of the “urban black ‘dandy’” that Eric Lott has located in
black-face minstrelsy.15 The characterization of d’Arnault’s “soft,
amiable Negro voice,” “with the note of docile subservience,” can be
read as both feminizing and infantilizing, two other stereotyping
strategies occurring in white visions of black minstrelsy, as Lott has
102 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
shown. And the description of d’Ar-nault’s “Negro head” recalls the
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practice of anthropological
anthropometry, popular with eugenicists in particular as a way of
“proving” biological racial inequality.
Blanche Gelfant, and several critics subsequent to her, have noted
this racist language with which Jim describes Blind d’Arnault. Gelfant
reads the scene as evidence of Jim’s moral blindness; he is unaware of his
“stereotyped, condescending, and ultimately invidious vision” (80).
Like Gelfant, other critics who make note of the scene generally see it
as developing some theme or motif in the novel. In Redefining the
American Dream: the Novels of Willa Cather, for example, Sally Peltier
Harvey sees d’Arnault as representing the American Dream; he has
pulled himself up as a successful traveling musician. In an introduction
to the novel, Stephanie Vaughn notes the racist language of the scene,
then suggests that d’Arnault is representative of Cather’s “real artist”:
“Real artists, in both Cather’s fiction and her journalism, are always
barbarians and sensualists” (xx). In Conflicting Stories: American
Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, Ammons
regards the scene as evidence of Cather’s blindness, rather than, as
Gelfant would have it, Jim’s blindness:
Cather’s racism and ethnocentricity undercut her attempt to create
art somehow outside of or at least in dialog with inherited,
conventional, white western narrative tradition…. Cather can put
herself inside the experiences of Eastern European immigrants,
French Americans, or Canadians, people in many ways quite
unlike herself. But when it comes to Americans of other races,
such as Indians, Asians, Chicanos, or blacks, her racism blinds
her. (134)
Ammons’s analysis is certainly an important addition to Cather
criticism; numerous readers have long admired Cather as a “writer of
broad and inclusive sympathies and imagination” (Ammons Conflicting
Stories 134), and carefully examining the accuracy of this favorable
impression, as Ammons does, can only help illuminate Cather’s writing
and suggest new directions for study.
Ammons herself explores one such direction in her essay “My
Ántonia and African American Art” (1999). As I noted at the beginning
of this chapter, Ammons shows Cather’s artistic indebtedness to
African-American music, how an African-American cultural presence
reveals itself through Blind d’Arnault, and also how that presence
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 103
remains concealed in My Ántonia. Apart from Ammons, however,
critics tend to view the scene with d’Arnault as either a progression of
themes articulated in other parts of the novel or as a sort of anomaly in
the novel, an eruption of Cather’s racism that has no necessary narrative
or ideological connection to the rest of the text. I wish to take a
different tack here. Like Ammons, I view the scene as an integral, not
marginal or anomalous, part of the novel’s fabric. Instead of analyzing
d’Arnault as evidence of an African-American culture presence, I wish
to turn to an examination of how and why d’Arnault functions as a racial
presence in My Ántonia. Ultimately, the character of d’Arnault does not
so much further continuing themes as several critics have suggested;
rather, d’Arnault shows the exclusionist impulse at work in the
formation of Bohemian whiteness, a cost that is otherwise hidden in the
novel.16 Ántonia, or more precisely the promise that Ántonia produces
in the form of her sons, can be an ideal of Americanness at the end of
the novel only because d’Arnault is assigned the role of Other.
The manner in which d’Arnault takes on this role, however, is
complex. Ammons points out in a parenthetical aside that d’Arnault
appears suddenly in the novel and for no necessary reason in terms of
narrative development: “One of the important facts about the black
pianist is that he does not have to be in the book. He seems to
materialize out of nowhere, to pop into the text as if by his own will”
(Conflicting Stories 132). This “unexpected” quality, the strangeness of
the episode, is emphasized by the manner in which Jim relates early
details of d’Arnault’s life and how he came to learn to play the piano.
Jim interrupts his description of the piano performance to tell of how
d’Arnault “was born in the Far South, on the d’Arnault plantation,
where the spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted” (210). After he was
blinded while a baby, his mother concluded that he was “‘not right’ in
his head” and kept him away from the “Big House” where she worked
as a laundress: “She loved him devotedly, but he was so ugly, with his
sunken eyes and his ‘fidgets,’ that she hid him away from people”
(211). Nonetheless, Jim describes, the child would sneak up to the Big
House to listen through the window as “Miss Nellie d’Arnault practised
the piano every morning…. If Miss d’Arnault stopped practising for a
moment and went toward the window, she saw this hideous little
pickaninny, dressed in an old piece of sacking, standing in the open
space between the hollyhock rows, his body rocking automatically, his
blind face lifted to the sun and wearing an expression of idiotic rapture”
(212). Eventually, Jim tells us, Miss d’Arnault allows him to play the
piano and he shows an innate aptitude.
104 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
The “unexpected” aspect of this narrative is highlighted by its lack of
an apparent source. Jim does not state how he became aware of the
details of d’Arnault’s early life but instead launches into the narrative
with no preface, stating the details as simple facts. Although Jim, like
d’Arnault, is from the South, he never suggests that he has become
personally acquainted with d’Arnault, hearing the story from him firsthand, nor does the often derogatory language of the narrative suggest
that it is told from d’Arnault’s point of view. Like d’Arnault himself,
the detailed description of his early life seems to “materialize out of
nowhere.”
The unprefaced, ex nihilo quality of the narrative about d’Arnault
adds power to his construction as savage. I noted earlier that Cather
does not undercut Jim’s narrative authority when he describes
d’Arnault. Jim, as a narrator and as a character in the novel, recedes as
he tells d’Arnault’s story; there is nothing to suggest that the reader
should question Jim’s descriptions, impressions, or the “facts” that he
relates. It is almost as if Cather herself steps into the novel to briefly
take over the narrator’s function. The reader is asked to accept the
racialized description of d’Arnault as “the truth,” not as the skewed
impressions of an unreliable narrator.
But if the reader is asked to accept d’Arnault’s racialized presence as
“the truth,” what is she to make of this “truth?” What function does this
presence play in the novel? One answer to this is that Blind d’Arnault’s
scene is crucial for bringing men and women of different backgrounds
together. Jim describes how, when d’Arnault begins his impromptu
piano playing at Black Hawk’s hotel, the audience consists only of men—
young men from town like Jim, as well as traveling salesmen such as
“Willy O’Reilly, who travelled for a jewellery [sic] house” and “a
dapper little Irishman” who travels for a department store (208). As
d’Arnault plays, however, he realizes that people are dancing in the
adjoining dining room and announces, “I hear little feet, girls, I’spect”
(215). The immigrant “hired girls,” Ántonia, Lena Lingard, Tiny
Soderball, and Mary Dusak, are persuaded to dance with the “lonesome
men on the other side of the partition” (216).
Jim describes how d’Arnault instigates the dancing, not only through
his music, but through his urging as well:
D’Arnault spread himself out over the piano, and began to draw
the dance music out of it, while the perspiration shone on his
short wool and on his uplifted face. He looked like some
glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood.
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 105
Whenever the dancers paused to change partners or to catch
breath, he would boom out softly, ‘Who’s that goin’ back on me?
One of these city gentlemen, I bet! Now, you girls, you ain’t goin’
to let that floor get cold?’ (217–8)
Jim’s description of the pianist as “some glistening African god of
pleasure, full of strong, savage blood” at first evokes the stereotype of
the “black-beast-rapist.”17 But Jim also counters any threat posed by
d’Ar-nault’s racialized presence: the musician is grinning, happy, and
subservient. D’Arnault is therefore also the “happy darky” of antebellum
and reconstruction myth; he is ultimately nonthreatening, a source of
fascination. Thus, rather than portraying d’Arnault as the “black-beastrapist,” Jim stereotypes him as a highly sexualized black savage,
grotesque yet welcome, whose powers work to bring ethnically
different men and women together.
This representation of Blind d’Arnault works within a number of
seeming contradictions. By including the narrative about d’Arnault’s
youth, Cather can invoke two very different stereotypes of AfricanAmerican men: d’Arnault is presented as both the sexualized black
savage and the pickaninny. He is repulsive, yet fascinating. D’Arnault
is a catalyst for the dance, but he is ultimately a nonparticipant.
In Powers of Horror (1982), Julia Kristeva develops a theory of
abjection that is useful to understanding the dynamics of oppression and
how these dynamics create the complex, and seemingly contradictory,
figure of d’Arnault. According to Kristeva, abjection arises in the
moment of separation between self and other, specifically as the infant
seeks to separate itself from the mother’s body prior to entering the
symbolic order. The abject is “opposed to I”; yet, it is not fully an
object (1). The abject consists of that which is alien and threatening to
the bounded self, and the self thus responds with revulsion to that which
disrupts the illusion of a unified self and reveals the instability of its
boundaries (Kristeva “Powers”).
Following Kristeva, Iris Marion Young, in Justice and the Politics of
Difference (1990), describes abjection in terms of the reaction of the
self to bodily excretions:
The process of life itself consists in the expulsion outward of
what is in me, in order to sustain and protect my life. I react to the
expelled with disgust because the border of myself must be kept
in place. The abject must not touch me, for I fear that it will ooze
through, obliterating the border between inside and outside
106 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
necessary for my life, which arises in the process of
expulsion. (144)
The abject is not removed far enough from the subject to be an object
(Kristeva 7); rather, it is “only just the other side of the border” (Young
144). While Kristeva primarily focuses on how abjection affects women
in patriarchal culture, Young explains that abjection also plays a part in
other forms of oppression. According to Young, the “involuntary,
unconscious judgment of ugliness and loathing” that signifies abjection
partly constitutes racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ableism.
When these forms of oppression “exist at the level of discursive
consciousness, the despised groups are objectified. Scientific, medical,
moral, and legal discourse construct these groups as objects, having
their own specific nature and attributes, different from and over against
the naming subject, who controls, manipulates and dominates them”
(145). Young continues by explaining what occurs when claims of
superiority and inferiority are no longer discursively conscious. At that
point, oppressed groups “no longer face a dominant subject as clearly
identifiable objects different from and opposed to itself. Women,
Blacks, homosexuals, the mad, and the feebleminded become more
difficult to name as the Others, identifiable creatures with degenerate
and inferior natures. In xenophobic subjectivity they recede to a murky
affect without representation” (145). According to Young, there is a
kind of ambiguity to this “murky affect.” While abjection is “the feeling
of loathing and disgust the subject has in encountering certain matter,
images, and fantasies, the horrible, to which it can only respond with
aversion, with nausea and distraction,” Young also acknowledges that
the “abject is at the same time fascinating; it draws the subject in order
to repel it” (143).
Cather seems to fluctuate between representing the abject and object
in her characterization of Blind d’Arnault. Jim’s detailed description of
d’Ar-nault shows a certain fascination, and the language he uses to
describe the piano player as a child (“ugly,” “hideous”) is the language
of abjection. Yet, d’Arnault is not fully understandable in terms of the
abject: Jim claims that d’Arnault “would have been répulsive if his face
had not been so kindly and happy. It was the happiest face I had seen
since I left Virginia” (209; my emphasis). It seems that Jim’s
objectification of d’Arnault fends off the possible eruption of the abject.
Similarly, despite the fact that d’Arnault is called a mulatto, a term that
destabilizes the racial binary of black and white, it is his black
“THIS HIDEOUS LITTLE PICKANINNY” 107
Otherness that is continually emphasized. The threat to the white
subject’s boundaries, in the form of the abject, must be checked.
Leonard Cassuto’s analysis of the racial grotesque is specifically
relevant here. In The Inhuman Race: the Racial Grotesque in American
Literature and Culture, Cassuto argues that attempts at human
objectification are never completely successful. Because humans also
have a tendency to acknowl edge the humanity of others, attempts at
objectification, at denying others’ humanity, tend to result in tension
between the two impulses, a tension that configures the victim of
objectification as grotesque (xv). Grotesqueness, an abject state, is
liminal and conflicted; it is an “ontological netherworld” of being “part
human and part thing” (16). Read in this framework, Jim’s
configuration of d’Arnault as grotesque reveals the incompleteness of
his attempts at objectification, but by also representing d’Arnault as the
“happy darky,” Jim effaces that grotesqueness. Jim is still compelled,
however, to frame d’Arnault as object. As the abject he would threaten
the boundaries of whiteness; as object, however, he would work to
define whiteness. Hence, Jim’s descriptions of d’Arnault as grotesque
are interspersed with an insistence on his inhumanity: d’Arnault has
“almost no head at all; nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under
close-clipped wool”; his body while playing the piano is “like an empty
mill grinding on” (210); his approach to music is “mere instinct” (214).
While d’Arnault’s grotesqueness reveals that he is not completely
Other, Jim continues to insist that he is.
For Jim, d’Arnault functions to normatize whiteness, to establish its
borders, but to leave difference within the category of whiteness
unmarked. The dancers in the hotel have differing ethnicities: the group
includes Norwegian, Irish, Anglo, and Czech Americans. However,
these identities are not salient during the dance; apart from gender, Jim
barely notes differences among the dancers. D’Arnault’s racial
difference from the dancers, in contrast, is emphasized throughout the
passage, both in Jim’s physical description of him and in his
configuration as a “savage.” Toni Morrison has addressed the
importance of examining representations of “blackness” in literature:
“What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary
imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to
discover, through a close look at literary ‘blackness,’ the nature, even the
cause, of literary ‘whiteness”” (9). Because Jim continually emphasizes
d’Ar-nault’s “blackness,” the unmarked sameness of the dancers is also
emphasized; we have binary, mutually exclusive, racial categories.
Young explains how “the logic of difference as hierarchical dichotomy,
108 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
masculine/feminine, civilized/savage” functions: “The second term is
defined negatively as a lack of the truly human qualities; at the same
time it is defined as the complement to the valued term, the object
correlating with its subject, that which brings it to completion,
wholeness, and identity…the valued term achieves its value by its
determinately negative relation to the Other” (170). The “blackness” of
Blind d’Arnault, the Otherness that Jim sees in his physical body and
“savage” presence, works to establish the unmarked, collective white
identity of the European-American dancers.
It is in this sense that My Ántonia participates in a specific project of
racial formation. Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain that “racial
projects are always concretely framed, and thus are always contested
and unstable. The social structures they uphold or attack, and the
representations of race they articulate, are never invented out of thin air
but exist in a definite historical context, having descended from
previous conflicts” (58). Cather relies on previous articulations of
blackness to develop her own representation. But she also has a number
of different articulations of whiteness from which she can develop her
own: as I have shown, during the time that Cather wrote My Ántonia,
the conflict over who was white was an important cultural question. In
contest was the racial assignment of the “new waves” of immigrants
from Europe. Were these immigrants racially distinct from one another
and classifiable in a hierarchical structure of Nordic, Mediterranean, and
Alpine? Or were they all to be subsumed under a monolithic whiteness?
My Ántonia affirms the latter, moving away from earlier constructions of
European racial identity and toward a construction of whiteness that
remains familiar even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What
Cather constructs is a form of whiteness with fluid boundaries; all
European Americans are able to slip in. In order to show that all
European Americans are white, however, whiteness must still have
meaning; it must remain bounded. This boundary is precisely what the
character of Blind d’Arnault both constitutes and reveals. While there
may be some fluidity to whiteness, Jim insists on an object, an absolute
Other. For European Americans to be white, for a discourse of
whiteness to even exist, the dualism of colonial discourse must remain
intact; Bohemian whiteness demands a “hideous little pickaninny” and
an “African god of pleasure full of strong, savage blood.”
Epilogue
The Legacy of Progressive Era Racial Formation
and the Re-Racialization of Immigrant Bodies
When I review the eugenicists’ anti-immigration arguments from the
Pro gressive Era, I am tempted to remark on the significant changes that
have occurred in both scientific and popular discourse since then. Elazar
Barkan has characterized one shift that occurred between the world
wars as The Retreat of Scientific Racism in his book by that title (1992).
Barkan’s choice of words, unfortunately, is apt. He cannot write of the
end or the death of scientific racism, only its retreat. As I pointed out in
the preface to this project, Gates asserted in 1985 that “Race, as a
meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been
recognized to be a fiction…Nevertheless, our conversations are replete
with usages of race that have their sources in the dubious pseudoscience
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (“Writing ‘Race’” 4). His
observation rings equally true almost twenty years later. While
scientific racism may have retreated, the racial constructions of earlier
eras continue to inform the lives of all Americans, even when race is
couched in social and political terms rather than the terms of science.
During the years that I have worked on this study, critical race theory
has made significant advancement toward understanding how, when,
and why specific formations of race have come to be. Taking a global
perspective and tracing changes in contemporary racial formations back
a bit farther, Howard Winant, in “White Racial Projects,” claims that
We are living through a profound upheaval in the meaning of race,
the emergence of perhaps the most contradictory and unsettling
racial formation that has ever existed. In a sentence: the past half
century or so has been the first time since the dawn of modernity,
since the rise of capitalism and the knitting together of the globe
in one unified “system,” that white supremacy has been called
seriously into question on a world-historical scale. (98)
110 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
During this same time, however, the “usages of race” in print, visual,
and audio media, as well as in the everyday lives of many Americans,
have continued to draw on older, essentialized concepts of racial
difference. One of the significant changes that I have noted during this
time is an increase in, or perhaps more accurately an increase in the
visibility of, the tension between two ways of looking at race: as either
essence or as a sociopolitical construct.
One obvious example of this tension at the end of the twentieth
century occurred in the critical response to Richard J. Herrnstein and
Charles Murray’s 1994 publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and
Class Structure in American Life. The Bell Curve, which harkens back
to the eugenicism of the early twentieth century by arguing that class
status is directly linked to intelligence and that both are determined by
race, has been both a widely popular book and one that has garnered
severe criticism of its methodology and assumptions. The book has
prompted numerous responses in journal articles and entire book-length
anthologies, such as Steven Fraser’s (ed.) The Bell Curve Wars: Race,
Intelligence, and the Future of America, and in more general responses
to scientific racism such as Ashley Montagu’s (ed.) Race and IQ. 1 The
publication of, and response to, The Bell Curve seems indicative of the
contemporary racial climate. We live in a time when a book such as The
Bell Curve cannot be published without receiving harsh criticism;
however, the fact remains that The Bell Curve was published and became
a best-seller. While blatantly racist texts can still find an audience, not
all contemporary texts that draw on essential racial categories do so as
obviously as The Bell Curve. In the rest of this epilogue, I examine one
text that harkens back to essentialist racial ideology but that does so in a
much subtler, yet still disturbing, way.
In a special issue of Time magazine published in the 1990s, the
editors chose, on the magazine’s cover, to show a cyborgian simulation
of a female descendant of immigrants to the United States.2 “Take a
good look at this woman,” the cover copy reads, “She was created by a
computer from a mix of several races. What you see is a remarkable
preview of…The New Face of America: How Immigrants Are Shaping
the World’s First Multicultural Society.” The latter part of the text is in
large type and centered beneath an image of what appears to be a
woman’s head and shoulders. Inside the magazine, in a brief note “From
the Managing Editor,” the reader learns that the simulation on the cover
is a product of computer-generated morphing; Time created the image
as a way to “dramatize the impact of interethnic marriage, which has
increased dramatically in the United States during the latest wave of
THE LEGACY OF PROGRESSIVE ERA 111
immigration” (2). For me, the image, as well as the contents of Time’s
special issue on immigration, suggests many of the contradictions
inherent in current media representations of “the immigrant question.”
Like so many recent discussions of immigration, Time’s special issue
attempts to acknowledge the actual diversity present in the United
States while, at the same time, it falls back on old racist assumptions—
assumptions that find a chief reiteration in images of immigrant bodies,
whether these images be photographs, descriptions, or morphs.
By using the computer software program Morph 2.0, Time magazine
combined and altered actual photographs to create the face of a nonexistent woman who is light-skinned and, according to what current
visual media representations prescribe, very pretty. Although she was
supposedly created from a mix of different “races” (the copy tells us that
she is “15% Anglo-Saxon, 17.5% Middle Eastern, 17.5% African, 7.5%
Asian, 35% Southern European and 7.5% Hispanic” [2]), based on the
ways that race is currently constructed in the United States, she would, I
suspect, be labeled white by most people in this country. What, then,
does the magazine’s cover representation say about the “new face of
America?” First, the image suggests that immigrants might be
acceptable if they appear as pretty white women. This “immigrant”
poses no threat to those who believe that white women should be the
“reproducers of the nation” (Mohanty 7). Through computer morphing,
immigrant “races” have become amalgamated into a body that conforms
to hegemonic ideals of physical desirability. While many debates about
immigration revolve around questions of cultural assimilation, Time’s
special issue also suggests an insistence on a sort of racial
amalgamation, a concept that rests on the premise of racial essentialism.
The production of this racially amalgamated bodily image, however,
is not an arbitrary process. The issue of Time includes an article titled
“Rebirth of a Nation, Computer-Style” that shows the reader fourteen
photographs of people from different “races” from which the cover
illustration was generated. Along the top of the chart, photographs of
women are labeled “Middle Eastern, Italian, African, Vietnamese,
Anglo-Saxon, Chinese, Hispanic,” and photographs of men descending
along the left margin of the two-page layout are labeled in the same
way. Computer-generated images of the “progeny” of these “races”
cover the remainder of the page (66–7). The faces are notably light in
color; as Michael Rogin notes in Blackface, White Noise:Jewish
Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, they “are rendered in polite,
pastel shades of light yellow-brown” (7). The reader, according to the
magazine, is to “move across from the left and down from the top to see
112 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
resulting progeny” (66). The forty-nine images of “progeny” generated
from the fourteen photographs appear to be as “real” as those from
which they were generated; when I first looked at the layout, I could not
tell which was a photograph and which was a computer-generated
morph.
A particularly troubling aspect of the morphing project is that the
criteria for selecting photographs are not mentioned in the article. The
project relies on the assumption that the photographs somehow represent
essentialized features of people from different parts of the world. But
what criteria allowed the project’s creators to determine that a
photograph of a Vietnamese man, for example, displays singularly
“Vietnamese” facial features? From where did they obtain these
supposedly representative photographs? And why are the project’s
creators careful to distinguish between the Italian and Anglo-Saxon
representations while lumping an entire continent together with
“African” male and female representations? While the authors of the
essay do not describe how they selected the supposed racial
representatives, they do suggest the non-arbitrary construction of the
images of progeny: “Most of the images, or ‘morphies,’ on the chart are
a straight 50–50 combination of the physical characteristics of their
progenitors, though an entirely different image can be created by using,
say, 75% of the man’s eyes, or 75% of the woman’s lips” (66). Even
this seemingly objective 50–50 ratio is itself governed by someone’s
preconceptions. Presumably, the programmers of the software package
Morph 2.0, with which the images were generated, decided that
“Sometimes pure volume counts. The more information extracted from
a given feature, the more likely that feature is to dominate the
cybernetic offspring. Even when the program is weighted 50–50, if an
African man has more hair than a Vietnamese woman, his hair will
dominate; the same thing applies to larger lips or a jutting jaw” (66).
While human genes certainly do not privilege “pure volume” in the way
that Morph 2.0’s creators and users do, I find that, even if the images
could be somehow “genetically based,” Time’s presentation would have
frightening connotations.
The very idea of cross-breeding upon which the morphing project is
based relies on the notion of biologically distinct racial categories.
While most contemporary scientists agree with Gates that racial
categorization is a socially constructed system—a “fiction”—race
continues to be used as if it referred to classifiable genetic difference. I
view Time’s cover and its accompanying article as precisely such a
usage of race. Even though the magazine’s editors claim, in a short,
THE LEGACY OF PROGRESSIVE ERA 113
easy to overlook, note inside the magazine, that they present the cover
image with “no claim to scientific accuracy” (2), their assertion that the
image is the result of “a mix of several races” works to reify the fiction
of an essential, biological, basis of race. Time’s writers present
categories such as Middle Eastern and Chinese with no consideration of
how these categories are culturally constituted. Instead, without stating
so, they use these terms as biological essences, recalling early twentiethcentury depictions of racial difference, such as those in the Immigration
Commission’s Dictionary of Races. There is no other way that such a
project in cross-breeding could be performed.
When I first came across Time’s special issue on immigration, I
recognized its cover and accompanying article to be a reiteration of the
trope of race-as-essence that Gates discusses, but the morphing project
troubled me in a new way. When the media invoke “race,” they do so
with the assumption that racial categories bear some relationship to
living persons. Time’s cover image, however, seems to be at least once
removed from the usual referential processes of racial categorization.
The image, after all, does not pretend, in the ways that the photographs
inside the magazine do, to have a specific referent; despite the “real”
appearance of a woman (pores and all), there is no living person who
looks like the cover image. Even the supposed pseudo-referents of the
image—the “African,” the “Anglo-Saxon,” the “Middle-Eastern”
persons who have purportedly produced this descendant—are
themselves presented as signs; the reader is shown photographs that have
been selected based on a constructed system of racial assumptions.
Jean Baudrillard’s understanding of simulacra can provide a clearer
interpretation of how Time’s cover image functions. In “The Precession
of Simulacra,” Baudrillard claims that “[a]bstraction today is no longer
that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation…is
the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal”
(342–3). He also asserts that an image “bears no relation to any reality
whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (346–7). The image on Time’s
cover, like Baudrillard’s description of contemporary simulation, is not
a mirror of any actual woman. It is a computer- and human-generated
image that has no referent in this world. The image, however, is not
presented as the pure simulation of Baudrillard’s definition; it is,
contradictorily, presented as a simulation making “no claim to scientific
accuracy,” and also as a familiar representation of a person. Even
though photographs are themselves representations with questionable
relationships to “reality,” they tend to function, for many people,
without questioning that relationship. Since Time’s cover image is
114 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
indistinguishable from a photograph, it makes the same claims that a
photograph does: it claims some relationship—if fleeting, if
momentary—with an actual person. The wording on the magazine’s
cover abets presumptions of such a relationship; the image, according to
the magazine cover, “is a remarkable preview of the new face of
America.” The prominence of the image on the magazine’s cover and
the wording of the cover text work to ground the image in some sort of
reality.
Still, the editor of the magazine, James R. Gaines, asserts in his
column “From the Managing Editor,” that the image is presented “in the
spirit of fun and excitement” (2). While such a disclaimer seems, on one
level, to work to temper the “real” appearance of the magazine’s cover,
it also coincides with Baudrillard’s ideas about how simulation functions.
In his analysis of Disneyland, Baudrillard claims that the “imaginary
world is supposed to be what makes [Disneyland] successful. But what
draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the
miniaturized and religious reveling in real America, in its delights and
drawbacks” (351; emphasis in original). The cover of Time also
purports to be a microcosm; it is “a preview of the new face of
America.” The challenges, demands, and opportunities of cultural
diversity are ignored, and the perceived threat of racial difference has
been miniaturized. What the magazine’s editor calls “various ethnic and
racial backgrounds” have been condensed into a non-threatening,
“beguiling” female icon (2). Baudrillard asserts that “Disneyland is
there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real”
America, which is Disneyland…Disneyland is presented as imaginary
in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los
Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the
order of the hyperreal and of simulation” (352). I want to suggest, here,
that the image on Time’s cover works as a racial Disneyland to conceal
the social construction of racial categories. The writers of Time
acknowledge that the image is a simulation, but that simulation is only
possible through the invocation of “real” progenitors who are racially
determined. The cover image, presented “in the spirit of fun and
experiment,” promises that “the rest is real;” that, while the image is a
racial Disneyland, races, defined biologically rather than socially,
really exist.
Significantly, the “beguiling” racial Disneyland appears in the form of
a woman. Just as the project’s creators omit their criteria for selecting
racially representative images, they also neglect to fully discuss how
they determined the apparent gender of the cover image: the neck, they
THE LEGACY OF PROGRESSIVE ERA 115
claim, “often determines the gender of the morph offspring” (64). The
selection of a woman to represent “the new face of America,” however,
hardly seems an arbitrary choice. In “Cartographies of Struggle,”
Chandra Talpade, Mohanty argues that “the construction of immigration
and nationality laws, and thus of appropriate racialized, gendered
citizenship, illustrates the con tinuity between relationships of
colonization and white, masculinist, capitalist state rule” (23). Women’s
bodies, Mohanty goes on to suggest, are especially important to debates
about immigration, as immigration and nationality laws “explicitly
reflect the ideology of (white) women as the reproducers of the nation”
(26–7). The image on Time’s cover, then, works to reassure anyone who
believes that white women’s duty is to be a “reproducer of the nation.”
In this limited sense, the simulation works against racially motivated
anti-immigration sentiment. But my concerns, here, are not with the
intentions or agendas—whether for or against immigration—of those
who used Morph 2.0 to create the cover image; instead, I am worried by
the ideologies upon which such an image relies. By presenting an image
of an apparently white woman as the future of immigration, by
suggesting that the hope of America lies in the reproduction of
homogenization, the magazine can ignore that the people currently
living within and entering the United States are not represented by this
image. Biologized racial categories are reified, racism as a social force
is masked, and white women’s bodies have become the site where this
formation of race is articulated and perpetuated.
One of the weapons used by current structures of power, Baudrillard
tells us, is the discourse of desire. “‘Take your desires for reality!’ can
be understood as the ultimate slogan of power,” Baudrillard states, “for
in a nonreferential world even the confusion of the reality principle with
the desire principle is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality” (360).
Time’s cover image represents precisely such a confusion of the desire
principle and the reality principle, as the magazine’s editor makes clear
in his commentary on the image: “As onlookers watched the image of
our new Eve begin to appear on the computer screen, several staff
members promptly fell in love. Said one: ‘It really breaks my heart that
she doesn’t exist’” (2). The reader is not told why this desirable “new
Eve” was produced from the mixture that it was (7.5 percent Asian, 35
percent Southern European, etc.) or why certain photographs were
selected as representative of races. The simulators’ choices are left
unexplained, begging the question of which and whose desires helped to
form this image, and whose desires and political agendas are satisfied
by the construction of whiteness itself.
116 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
Time’s special issue on immigration suggests not only how the terrain
of whiteness has shifted since the Progressive Era, but also how
differently the literature of immigration functions in racial formation
today. During the Progressive Era, race was generally considered a
“truth”; writers such as Mary Antin and Willa Cather questioned the
borders within the racial system without questioning that race itself was
real, while Sui Sin Far interrogated the “truth” itself, the śupposed
essentialism of racial categories. All three of these writers created
representations of race that were linked to the racial power structures
outside of their texts. Time’s racialized “New Face of America” does not
represent a racial reality outside the text nor does it question existing
racial power structures; rather, by invoking race through a hyperreal
simulation “in the spirit of fun and excitement,” it reifies racial
difference while concealing that race is a fiction, complexly formed.
Racial projects today, just as in the Progressive Era, often conceal their
own participation in the formation of race. Because of this, and because
of the evolving nature of racial projects, the continuing complicity of
literature in forming and transforming racial categories demands the
closest attention. Dismantling racially-based oppression requires that we
understand how racial categories have been, and continue to be, formed.
By studying literary works by and about immigrants as racial projects,
we can come to understand a small but crucial part of historical and
contemporary racial formation processes.
Notes
NOTES TO PREFACE
1. I am indebted to Michael Omi and Howard Winant for the term racial
formation which I borrow from their book Racial Formation in the
United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. I use formation and
construction interchangeably in this book; however, I use both to refer to
the “sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created,
inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (Omi and Winant 55).
2. I have chosen to use the phrase literature of immigration, rather than the
more common literature of the immigrant experience because it allows me
to examine works such as Sui Sin Far’s “Its Wavering Image,” a work
written by an immigrant about American-born characters. While this
story is not directly about the immigrant experience, its themes are
relevant to my larger discussion. In using the phrase literature of
immigration, I do not mean to imply that I focus solely on the act of
immigration; instead, I mean to connect literature-immigrationimmigrant in a looser way than the phrase literature of the immigrant
experience suggests.
3. I do not mean to imply here that Cather’s text is itself an example of
colonialist discourse but rather that the racial binaries she invokes
resound with the Manichean racial constructions of colonialist discourse.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. In his closing essay of “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. explains the editorial decision to place the word race in
quotation marks in the collection’s title. The editors chose to do so “to
underscore the fact that ‘race’ is a metaphor for something else and not
an essence or a thing in itself, apart from its creation by an act of
language” (“Talkin’ That Talk” 402–3). I was faced with a similar
decision while writing this study. When using terms such as race and
118 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
whiteness, I have largely chosen to omit quotation marks on the
assumption that these terms will be read in context as referring to the
social constructions that are my subject. On occasion, I do put such terms
in quotation marks to reemphasize their constructedness. I was faced with
an equally difficult decision regarding how to refer to the people of the
nation in which I live. The term Americans is inaccurate when used to
refer to a specific nationality, as Rogers M. Smith has pointed out, in that
all the inhabitants of the Americas are equally “Americans” (507 n1).
Similarly the term United States and its abbreviation U.S. can refer to
other nations with those words in their names. Smith finds no adequate
substitute for conventional usages; I regret that I have not either and use
these conventional terms in this book. Complicating the matter further,
American also describes a fictional set of values and practices assumed to
be shared by the nationals of this country. When I emphasize this fictional
identity, I often put the term American in quotation marks. Finally, when
using compound identity adjectives, such as in the phrase “ChineseAmerican writer,” I follow the conventions of my publisher in using a
hyphen; however, I remain aware of the complex politics of hyphenation.
See Tucker, pages 55, 68, and 86, as well as Stepan and Gilman’s
“Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific
Racism.”
See also my discussion in this chapter of the Dictionary of Races or
Peoples in the Reports of the Immigration Commission.
Stepan and Gilman’s essay addresses some of the few who did question
this assumption.
In 1790 Congress enacted that immigrants who were “free white persons”
could be naturalized. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese
residents from naturalization and prohibited most Chinese immigration.
See also Smith, pages 359–63.
See also Tucker, pages 35–6 and 59–61, and Smith, pages 446–8.
In “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness” (2001), Frankenberg adds
the term “power-evasive race cognizance” to describe a mode of seeing
that she observes at the beginning of the twenty-first century (91).
I return to this issue later in this chapter.
I return to this idea in the section “Immigrant Women and Race” later in
this chapter.
A special issue of The Henry James Review from 1995 presents a forum
on race in the author’s work, and a number of articles in that issue
specifically address The American Scene. Of special interest is a series of
interrelated articles that begins with Sara Blair’s “Documenting America:
Racial Theater in The American Scene,” and continues with Ross
Posnock’s response to Blair’s article, Blair’s rebuttal of Posnock’s
criticism, and Kenneth Warren’s commentary on the exchange between
Blair and Posnock. This series of essays provides an excellent overview
NOTES 119
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
not only of James’s complex treatment of race in The American Scene
but also of the different ways that modern critics interpret that
complexity.
Forty-two volumes were announced; however, the forty-second volume
(intended to be an index) was not printed.
Fairchild reflects this view in chapter 18 of Immigration: he uses the
terms “assimilation” and “Americanization” synonymously and writes of
“assimilation to the American type,” while implying that this “type” is
essentially English. A.Piatt Andrew makes a similar assumption while
arguing against immigration restriction in “The Crux of the Immigration
Question” (1914). Other examples occur in Max J.Kohler’s “Some
Aspects of the Immigration Problem” (1914), Arthur Dunn’s “Keeping
the Coast Clear” (1913), and James D. Phelan’s “Japanese Question from
a Californian Standpoint” (1913). Phelan actually uses the term
“homogenous” to describe a “sturdy white population” (1437). One rare
early dissenting voice is heard in Ernest Crosby’s “Immigration
Bugbear” (1904), in which the author, criticizing the assimilationist
impulse, asks “why this craze to make all men and all things alike?”
(598). Later cultural pluralists like Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne,
whose ideas I analyze in chapter 4, also represented this alternative
ideological trend.
Figure 1 presents “an impression of the change in proportions” in
Hebrews and Sicilians from Boas’s study (38:9).
The “cephalic index,” a measurement to determine racial classification
that originated in the nineteenth century, represented the ratio between
the width and length of a human skull. See the Reports of the
Immigration Commis sion, vol. 38, chapter 1.
I will return to this immediate connection between body and mentality
inherent in the report’s conclusions when I discuss the work of Edward
Alsworth Ross later in this chapter.
For an excellent discussion of Boas’s views on race, his influence on
other anthropologists, as well as a survey of differing anthropological
views on race, see Barkan, chapter 2.
For more on the history of “republican motherhood” from the late
eighteenth to the early twentieth century, see Smith, pages 185–6, 230–5,
453–9.
While the notion of “republican motherhood” is no longer explicit in legal
definitions of citizenship, it continues to have social resonance even at
the beginning of the twenty-first century. Chandra Talpade Mohanty
recognizes a parallel in contemporary Britain. In “Cartographies of
Struggle,” her introduction to Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism (1991), Mohanty draws on the arguments of the Women,
Immigration and Nationality Group (WING) noting that “immigration
and nationality laws in Britain are a feminist issue, as they explicitly
120 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
reflect the ideology of (white) women as the reproducers of the nation”
(26–7).
19. See, for example, articles by Devine, Hayes, Ripley, and Phelan.
20. Omi and Winant criticize attempts to see race as either a social structure
or a cultural representation; instead, they argue that we must look at race
as both at the same time.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1. The autobiographical Antin does not mention her age at immigration.
Antin’s father, Israel Antin (called Pinchus in the autobiography), arrived
in the United States in 1891, and the rest of the family arrived three years
later (Handlin, Foreword to The Promised Land vii), making Mary Antin
twelve (almost thirteen) at the time of immigration. A letter by one of
Antin’s teachers, included in the text of the autobiography, claims that
Antin is twelve during her first year in school, implying that the
autobiographical Antin could have been as young as eleven at the time of
immigration. This inaccuracy is likely due to a lie on the part of Israel
Antin when he filled out the forms for his children to attend school. By
putting Mary Antin’s age at two years younger than it actually was, her
father ensured that she would have three more years of compulsory
schooling. See Keren R. McGin-ity’s “The Real Mary Antin: Woman on
a Mission in the Promised Land” 291–5, as well as Sollors xxvii-xxviii.
2. When I use the word assimilate in this chapter, I refer directly to cultural
assimilation. There is, however, certainly some overlap between cultural
and structural assimilation in Antin’s work, especially regarding how
participation in American institutions, particularly the schools, affect
cultural assimilation. Furthermore, I use the words assimilate and
Americanize interchangeably in this chapter. While any meeting of
people from different cultural backgrounds involves change on both
sides, notions of assimilation early in this century assumed change
primarily on the part of the immigrant. Assimilation connoted that the
immigrant would “become like” U.S.-born Americans, and the cultural
character of these Americans was generally assumed to be coherent and
static.
3. James Craig Holte, in The Ethnic I: A Sourcebook for Ethnic-American
Autobiography, claims that “Mary Antin provides an example of
Americanization at its best” (31). See also Betty Bergland, “Ideology,
Ethnicity, and the Gendered Subject: Reading Immigrant Women’s
Autobiographies,” and Cecyle S. Neidle, America’s Immigrant Women.
4. I use the name “Antin” to refer to both the author/historical figure as well
as to the author’s autobiographical persona. When I discuss the events of
the autobiography, the latter persona should be assumed as the referent.
NOTES 121
5. While water symbolizes this fluidity across borders for Anzaldúa, a fence
symbolizes the consciousness of the borderlands. As the second epigraph
to this chapter suggests—“the thin edge of/barbwire”—that position is not
always a comfortable one. While Antin’s identity construction as a
Russian Jew cannot be equated with Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness,
the parallels in their imagery suggest what it means to negotiate the
complexities of a “both/and” identity. The parallels between Antin and
W.E.B.Du Bois that I discuss later in this chapter are similarly
suggestive.
6. Interestingly, Antin’s criticism of women’s subaltern position in Jewish
life does not extend to the second half of the autobiography, her
description of her life in the United States. By restricting her criticism of
patriarchy to her Russian Jewish community, she avoids confronting her
American readers with the implications of patriarchy within the United
States. For a useful, brief discussion of women’s relationships to
patriarchy within the Pale, especially regarding women’s positions within
secular Yiddish culture, see Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks,
chapter 4.
7. It is important to note that Frankenberg uses the term “practice” to refer
to an ongoing process: “the term ‘practice’ in the singular designates not
a thing but a process or activity…‘white cultural practice’ does not
suggest uniformity of belief system or worldview, but rather the idea that
activity is taking place” (White Women, Race Matters 194).
8. The ease with which Antin makes this “conversion” is certainly due, in
part, to her father. Antin describes her father as one whose desire to see
his family assimilate outweighs his ties to Judaism: “being convinced
that to hold to the outward forms of orthodox Judaism was to be
hampered in the race for Americanization, he did not hesitate to order our
family life on unorthodox lines…. On the Holy days he bought my
mother a ticket for the synagogue, but the children he sent to school”
(246–7).
9. For more on these different positions regarding the role of education, see
Smith 463–9.
10. Antin’s aversion to Hotchkins’s appearance is rooted in his literal
whiteness, presumably biologically-based. This is one of the rare
instances in The Promised Land when Antin veers from her implicit
contention that cultural forms and practices constitute whiteness and
instead suggests a biological basis of racial difference. I address these
two aspects of racial difference later in this chapter in my discussion of
the racial binary of Jim Crow.
11. While America seemed to provide tremendous opportunities for the
Antins in terms of education, self-expression, and freedom from
persecution, it did not immediately provide the economic opportunity
that so many immigrants of Antin’s generation expected. Mary Antin’s
122 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
12.
13.
14.
15.
father repeatedly failed in his attempts at retail business. Despite Israel
Antin’s hard work, the family was forced to move into ever more
dilapidated “evil corners of the slums of Boston” (357). Toward the end
of the autobiography, Antin notes that her family was eventually able to
leave the tenements for “a darling cottage of our own” but she does not
describe how they were able to do so, claiming only that “we found a shortcut” (357). By eliding a “bootstraps” part of her family’s economic
struggle, Antin also subverts the dominant autobiographical pattern.
While I believe that Bree is correct in noting this trend, she may be
overstating her case. A number of recent theorists have warned against
trying to precisely delimit a women’s tradition in autobiography, and in
consequence re-essentializing difference. Kristi Siegel, in Women’s
Autobiogra phies, Culture, Feminism (1999), provides a useful summary
of these arguments.
Antin describes the process of renaming, so common among newly
arrived immigrants at the time:
Fetchke, Joseph, and Deborah issued as Frieda, Joseph, and Dora,
respectively. As for poor me, I was simply cheated. The name they gave
me was hardly new. My Hebrew name being Maryashe in full, Mashke
for short, Russianized into Marya (Mar-ya), my friends said that it would
hold good in English as Mary; which was very disappointing, as I longed
to possess a strange-sounding American name like the others. (188)
While renaming is frequently considered a first step toward
assimilation, Antin suggests an interesting motive for desiring a new name;
she is attracted by the exoticism of the “strange-sounding American”
names. Renaming frequently occurred at the point of entry into the
United States or in the public schools. Antin’s use of the term “my
friends” in the passage above, however, suggests that her family
voluntarily adopted new names in an attempt to Americanize.
My position on Antin’s individualism versus her communalism differs
slightly from that expressed by Wendy Zierler in “In(ter)dependent Selves:
Mary Antin, Elizabeth Stern, and Jewish Immigrant Women’s
Autobiography.” Zierler argues that “Mary’s (masculine) individualism
repeatedly cracks under the pressure of her prior ‘interdependent
existence’” (6; my emphasis). However, Antin refers to her
autobiographical subject’s reliance on others throughout the
autobiography; it is not just part of her past.
The importance of the autobiography’s first half to Antin is suggested in
a letter she wrote to her publisher. Responding to a suggestion that she
focus the book on her experiences in the United States at the expense of
those in Russia, she asserted that doing so would “leave me out of the
book” (qtd. in Sollors xxvi; emphasis in original).
NOTES 123
16. This assumption about Antin’s agenda is supported not only by the text
of The Promised Land but also by Antin’s other writings. Her They Who
Knock at Our Gates (1914) is an overt argument against xenophobia.
17. Antin remarks in The Promised Land that Horatio Alger, after Louisa
May Alcott, was one of her favorite authors when she was a child (257).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. For examples of such discussions, see the essays “Shall the United States
Exclude the Immigration of Japanese and Korean Laborers?” by Burton
L. French, “Immigration from the Orient” by H.C. Nutting, and
“Immigration of Asiatics” and “Japanese Exclusion,” both by E.A.
Hayes.
2. In A Different Mirror, Ronald Takaki discusses the interconnection
between these economic arguments and racism (206–8). For an
interesting examination of the interconnection between social arguments
and racism, see Megumi Dick Osumi’s “Asians and California’s AntiMiscegenation Laws,” especially page 8.
3. The Independent also published Sui Sin Far’s “Leaves from the Mental
Portfolio of an Eurasian,” which I discuss later in this chapter.
4. Much of the biographical information about Sui Sin Far I include here
comes from Annette White-Parks’ important study Sui Sin Far/Edith
Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography. It is unclear whether Edith Maude
Eaton adopted the name Sui Sin Far as a pseudonym or whether this was
the name she was called by family and friends. White-Parks claims that
Sui Sin Far was a name used from early childhood; however, her
evidence is not entirely convincing (xvi). Elizabeth Ammons’ Conflicting
Stories, Carol Roh-Spaulding’s “‘Wavering’ Images: Mixed-Race
Identity and the Stories of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far,” and Xiao-Huang
Yin’s “Between the East and the West” all contain discussions of the
meaning and connotations of the name Sui Sin Far.
5. I present the section title Mrs. Spring Fragrance without punctuation or
italics in order to distinguish it from the book Mrs. Spring Fragrance and
the short story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.”
6. As with many of her stories, Sui Sin Far does not mention a specific city
as the setting of “Its Wavering Image.” She does, however, note that Pan
had lived in Chinatown all her life, and she describes Pan’s father
running an “Oriental Bazaar on Dupont Street” (85). Grant Avenue, one
of the oldest streets in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was named Dupont
Street until 1906.
7. For a discussion of similarities between Fanny Fern and Sui Sin Far, see
Ning Yu, “Fanny Fern and Sui Sin Far: The Beginning of an Asian
American Voice.”
124 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
8. In this opening episode, the nurse uses the name “Sui” to refer to her
charge. I will use the name Sui to refer to the autobiographical subject in
order to distinguish this subject from the author.
9. For an interesting discussion of some of these rewards and penalties of
passing, see Adrian Piper’s “Passing for White, Passing for Black.”
10. Similarly, the Orientalized text of Mrs. Spring Fragrance can be read as
Sui Sin Far’s publisher’s attempt to conform to the European-American
audience’s expectations of an “Oriental” writer. For a fuller discussion of
the material reality of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, see Ammons, “Audacious
Words” in Conflicting Stories.
11. This passage suggests that Sui Sin Far was quite familiar with the basic
tenets of Confucianism. Central to Confucianist ren, or human virtue, are
the notions of self-awareness and fidelity to one’s true nature.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
1. For some recent analyses of ethnicity in My Ántonia, see Sally Allen
McNall’s “Immigrant Backgrounds to My Ántonia: ‘A Curious Social
Situation in Black Hawk’,” Ann Moseley’s “A New World Symphony:
Cultural Pluralism in The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia,” and Helen
Wussow’s “Language, Gender, and Ethnicity in Three Fictions by Willa
Cather.” One additional recent critic who has examined race in My
Ántonia is Mike Fischer, whose “Pastoralism and its Discontents: Willa
Cather and the Burden of Imperialism” addresses the erasure of the
Plains Indians from the novel.
2. See William H.Tucker’s The Science and Politics of Racial Research,
chapter 3.
3. Examples of these articles include E.T.Brewster’s pro-eugenic “When a
Man Marries: Selection and Heredity as They Apply to the Individual”
(1906), Burton J.Hendrick’s “The Skulls of Our Immigrants” (1910),
which summarizes Franz Boas’s anti-eugenic contributions to the
Dillingham Commission’s reports, and Marion Hamilton Carter’s “The
Conservation of the Defective Child” (1909) which argues against
specific eugenic tenets without directly naming them.
4. See fig. 2. While Grant envisions a number of “Nordics” in central
Europe, Bohemia is shown to be almost entirely “Alpine.”
5. It is, of course, the narrator Jim who tells the story; however, in this case,
I think it fair to say that Cather rejects these racial categories, as she
gives the reader no reason to question Jim’s reliability in respect to his
physical description of characters. I address this complex relationship
between Cather and her narrator Jim later in this chapter.
6. Nor does Reynolds reconcile his alternating use of biculturalism and mul
ticulturalism.
NOTES 125
7. I choose to use the term cultural pluralism (rather than a term such as
multiculturalism) with some trepidation. The term has been used by
recent writers to refer to a related yet different concept that has evolved
within the context of postmodernism. Iris Marion Young, for example,
cites Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Frank Cunningham, and James
Nickel in developing a concept of “democratic cultural pluralism” (163).
In this postmodern version of cultural pluralism, “there is equality among
socially and culturally differentiated groups, who mutually respect one
another and affirm one another in their difference” (Young 163). In
contrast to this postmodern version of cultural pluralism, what I term
cultural pluralism in the context of the 1910s is restrictive regarding just
what kinds of difference are to be respected and affirmed, as I shall
show. When I refer to cultural pluralism, then, this concept should be
read as historically situated. Referring to Cather’s views as culturally
pluralistic is, in a sense, anachronistic, as it would be to call her ideas
multicultural. The term cultural pluralism gained currency after Horace
Kallen used it in 1924 (Foner 436); however, the concept it describes was
articulated earlier by a number of writers, including Kallen himself.
8. In Immigrant Mothers (2000), Katrina Irving also reads Bourne’s writing
alongside My Ántonia.
9. For a fuller discussion of Cather’s cultural pluralism, see Guy Reynolds’s
Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (1996), chapter 4.
Regarding Cather’s racism, see Elizabeth Ammons’s Conflicting Stories:
American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (1992),
chapter 8, in addition to her essay “My Ántonia and African American
Art” (1999).
10. Katrina Irving asserts that “the cultural pluralists’ construction of the
immigrant woman as a primitive earth mother was an attempt to foment
an antirestrictionist temper among the public” (Immigrant Mothers 4).
11. Walzer borrows Benedict Anderson’s term.
12. Bourne wrote “Trans-National America” immediately prior to the United
States’ entry into World War I. While some proponents of the war saw
U.S. participation as an opportunity to renew an imagined fraternity of
European-American men, Bourne vehemently opposed the war, and
Walzer notes that the United States’ entry into it caused Bourne to lose faith
in the ideal of the national fraternity (17). See also Bourne’s essay
“Twilight of Idols” (1917).
13. Paralleling My Ántonia to other pluralist works, Katrina Irving sees
another way that Ántonia, along with other immigrants, has “value”:
“that value…is directly indexed to the immigrants’ retention within
poorly remunerated and nonprofessional forms of labor” (Immigrant
Mothers 107).
14. See Moseley’s “A New World Symphony: Cultural Pluralism in The
Song of the Lark and My Ántonia.”
126 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION
15. See especially Lott, chapter 5.
16. The term Bohemian, of course, has a number of connotations in English,
and a full discussion of all of these connotations is not within the scope
of this chapter. While I focus on how characters described as Bohemian
are racially figured as white, I do not mean to deny the slipperiness of the
term itself. I refer the reader to Marilee Lindemann’s Willa Cather:
Queering America (1999), especially pages 61–9, for an interesting
discussion of the ambiguity of Bohemian and its sexual, as well as ethnic,
resonances.
17. I borrow this term for the stereotype from Nell Irvin Painter’s “Hill,
Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype” (208).
NOTES TO THE EPILOGUE
1. See also Naomi Glauberman and Russell Jacoby (eds.), The Bell Curve
Debate; Joe L.Kincheloe, Shirley R.Steinberg, and Aaron D.Gresson III
(eds.), Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined; Bernie Devlin et al.
(eds.), Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell
Curve\and Claude S.Fischer et al. (eds.), Inequality by Design: Cracking
the Bell Curve Myth.
2. I completed this epilogue, as well as my original draft of this book,
before I read Katrina Irving’s Immigrant Mothers: Narratives of Race
and Mater nity, 1890–1925. In that study, Irving begins her introduction
by noting the racialized, anti-immigrant ideology inherent in much of
Time’s special issue. Irving’s work explores intersections of race, gender,
sexuality, and class in literary works about immigrant women, and she
pays particular attention to the multiple and differing racist discourses
between 1890 and 1925. Considering our similar concerns, I find it
especially significant that we both found a connection between our
studies of literary women immigrants in the Progressive Era and Time’s
late twentieth-century special issue. Rather than viewing this as a
coincidence, I see it as further evidence that contemporary antiimmigrant anxieties often take a shape similar to those a century earlier.
As Irving puts it, “Time had reached back to [the Progressive Era] for its
rhetoric in order to bring subsequent immigration history up to date”
(Immigrant Mothers 2). While Time’s morphed cover image reveals how
differently the literature of immigration can operate in processes of racial
formation today, as I discuss in this epilogue, the influence and
continuance of Progressive Era formations of race emphasizes the
importance of understanding and critiquing them.
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Index
abjection, 104–107
Addams, Jane, 37, 39
African Americans, 1, 4, 9–10, 62, 88,
95;
and identity, 56;
literary representations of, xvi, xx,
15–16, 22, 88, 100–108;
stereotypes of, xvi, 100–108
Alcott, Louisa May, as literary model
for Mary Antin, 40, 122n17
Alger, Horatio, as literary model for
Mary Antin, 40, 54, 122n17
Allen, Theodore W., 8–10, 12–13
Alpine race. See European races
American Indians, 1, 85, 95, 123n1
Ammons, Elizabeth, 65–66, 82, 88,
101–102, 122n4, 123n10, 124n9
Anderson, Benedict, 124n11
Anderson, Siu Wai, 58
Andrew, A. Piatt, 119n12
Antin, Mary, xvii, 7, 22, 28–57, 60,
116, 119n1, 120n4, 120n5, 120n6,
121n8, 121n10, 121n11, 121n13,
122n14, 122n15, 122n16, 122n17;
writing by:
From Plotzk to Boston , 35
The Promised Land , xvii, 22,
28–57;
reviews of, 28–29
They Who Knock at Our Gates: A
Complete Gospel of Immigration ,
122n16
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 28, 32, 73, 120n5
Appiah, Anthony, 5
Arthur, Chester Alan, 60
Asian Americans, 1, 58–82;
and identity, xix, 22, 59–60, 67,
69–82
assimilation:
cultural, xix, 17, 24–25, 28–29,
35, 37, 39–42, 47–48, 54–57, 62,
65, 67–71, 94, 98, 110, 118n12,
120n2, 121n13;
English language
as indicator of, 40;
patriotism as indicator of, 38–40,
43;
structural, 68.
See also melting pot
autobiography, narrative structure of,
43–49, 54, 122n15
Babb, Valerie, 40–41
Bacon’s Rebellion, 9
Barkan, Elazar, 21, 108
baseball, as indicator of structural
assimilation, 68
Baudrillard, Jean, 113–115
The Bell Curve , 109
Bergland, Betty, 120n3
binarism, racial, xx, xvii, 11, 49–53
Blair, Sara, 118n10
Bliven, Bruce, 62
135
136 INDEX
Boas, Franz, 17–18, 89, 119n13,
119n16, 123n3
bodies:
race and the study of, 17–22,
68–69, 90–91, 92;
women’s, as locus of racial
reproduction, xiv, 24–26, 115
Bohemian immigrants, xix, 27, 86.
See also Cather, Willa;
My Ántonia
boundaries:
physical, 31–32, 56–57;
of identity, 34, 56–57, 108
Bourne, Randolph, 88, 94–96, 98–99,
119n12, 124n8, 124n12
Bree, Germain, 44, 121n12
Brewster, E.T., 123n3
Brodkin, Karen, 11–12, 49, 52, 120n6
Carter, Marion Hamilton, 123n3
Cassuto, Leonard, 106–107
Cather, Willa, xix, 22, 27, 83–89, 91,
92–94, 96–108, 116, 116n3, 124n5,
124n7, 124n9;
relationship to narrator Jim
Burden, 96–97, 103;
writing by:
“The Bohemian Girl,” 91
My Ántonia , xix, 22, 27, 83, 88,
91, 92–94, 96–108, 123n1, 124n8,
124n13
Chicana/os, 85.
See also Mexican Americans
children:
education and, 33, 37–40, 44–47;
of immigrant women, 25–26
Chinese Americans, 63–82;
and identity, xix, 22, 59–60, 67,
69–82;
literary representations of, 60,
65–82.
See also Asian Americans, Asian
immigrants, Sui Sin Far
Chinese Exclusion Act, 1, 60, 63,
118n5
citizenship, American, 49;
race and, 1, 49
class, socioeconomic, identity and,
xvii, 11, 13
Commons, John R., 15–16, 86
Congress, United States, 13, 16–17,
25, 60
critical race theory, xiv, xvii, 3–14,
36
Crosby, Ernest, 119n12
cultural pluralism, xix, 88, 94–100,
124n7, 124n10;
gender difference elided by, 95;
racial difference elided by, 95
Cunningham, Frank, 124n7
Curran, Thomas J., 16
Cutter, Martha J., 70, 79–80
Czech immigrants:
see Bohemian immigrants
Degler, Carl, 8
Devine, Edward T., 119n19
Devlin, Bernie, 125
Dillingham, William, 21–22
Dong, Lorraine, 58–59
Du Bois, W.E. B., 9, 55–56, 120n5;
on “double consciousness,” 55–56
Eaton, Edith Maude. See Sui Sin Far
ethnicity:
identity and, xvii, xvii, 65, 85, 98;
theory of, 4
eugenics, xix, 15, 22, 24–26, 88,
89–92, 99–100, 108, 123n3
European Americans, xvi, 8–9,
12–22, 66–69, 76, 85, 95, 108;
and identity, xvi, xvii, 39–41,
46–49, 78.
See also Irish Americans;
Jewish Americans;
Italian Americans;
Antin, Mary;
INDEX 137
Cather, Willa;
Sui Sin Far
Fairchild, Henry Pratt, 14, 16, 86,
118n12
feminism, 6, 22;
and race, 5–7, 11–12, 22–23.
See also socialist feminist theory;
women;
bodies, women’s, as locus of
racial reproduction Fern, Fanny,
77, 123n7
Ferrarelli, Rina, 83
Fetterley, Judith, 96
Fischer, Claude S., 125n1
Fischer, Mike, 123n1
Folkmar, Daniel, 18–21
Folkmar, Elnora C., 18–21
Foner, Eric, 124n7
Frankenberg, Ruth, 6–8, 12, 36,
118n7, 120n7
Franklin, Benjamin, and American
autobiography, 44
Fraser, Steven, 109
French, Burton L., 16, 122n1
Friedman, Susan, 44
Gaines, James R., 114
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 3, 5, 108,
111–113, 116n1
Geary Act, 60
Gelfant, Blanche H., 96, 101
gender:
and race, xvii, 11, 22–26, 47–49,
73;
and autobiography, 43–49;
and attitudes about immigrants,
22–26.
See. also bodies, women’s, as
locus of racial reproduction;
feminism;
socialist feminist theory;
women Giannone, Richard, 88
Gilman, Sander L., 5, 118n2, 118n4
Ginsberg, Elaine K., 79–80
Glauberman, Naomi, 125n1
Gobineau, Arthur Comte de, 1
Gramsci, Antonio, 39
Grant, Madison, 15–16, 89–92, 123n4
Gresson, Aaron D., III, 125n1
Gwin, Minrose C., 83–85
Handlin, Oscar, 119n1
Harvey, Sally Peltier, 101
Hayes, E.A. , 119n19, 122n1
Hendrick, Burton J. 123n3
Herrnstein, Richard J., 109
Holte, James Craig, 120n3
Hom, Marlon K., 58–59
Homberger, Eric, 43
identity, American, xix, 37–57, 62,
65–68, 86, 102, 118n1.
See also African Americans and
identity, Asian Americans and
identity, Chinese Americans and
identity, European Americans and
identity, Jewish Americansand
identity, national identity
ideology, hegemonic racial, xvi, xvii,
22–23, 35–36
Ignatiev, Noel, 10–12
Immigration Act of 1924 , xvii,
13–14, 27
immigration:
Asian, 1, 14, 60–63;
European, 1, 8, 12–13, 24–25, 39,
60
immigrants, and work, 9, 45, 64, 85
In re Halladjian et al , 50
Irish Americans, 10–11.
See also European Americans
Irving, Katrina, 26, 85, 124n8,
124n10, 124n13, 125n2
Italian Americans, 16.
See also European Americans
138 INDEX
Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 3, 12–14,
21–22, 49–52, 92
Jacoby, Russell, 125n1
James, Henry, 15–16, 118n10
Japanese Americans, 62–63.
See also Asian Americans
Jewish Americans, 11, 15, 28–57;
and identity, xix, 7–8, 29–57,
120n5.
See also European Americans
Jim Crow Era, racial binaries during,
49–53, 121n10
Johnson-Reed Act. See Immigration
Act of 1924
Jordan, Winthrop, 8
Kahn, Julius, 63
Kallen, Horace, 88–89, 119n12,
124n7
Kaye, Frances, 100
Kincheloe, Joe L., 125n1
Kohler, Max J., 119n12
Kristeva, Julia, 104–106
Laclau, Ernesto, 124n7
Lambert, Deborah G., 96
Larsen, Nella, 70
Lindemann, Marilee, 125n16
Ling, Amy, 59, 64
Linnaeus, Carl von, xvii–1, 18
literary texts, as racial projects, 26–28
literature of immigration, defined,
116n2
Lott, Eric, 125n15
Lund, John M., 22
McGinity, Keren R., 120n1
McIntosh, Peggy, 5–6, 8
McNall, Sally Allen, 123n1
Mediterranean race. See European
races
“melting pot” model of assimilation,
94, 99.
See also assimilation
Mexican Americans, 1
See also Chicana/os
Michaels, Walter Benn, 85
minstrelsy, 10, 100–101
miscegenation, xvi, 72;
and “one drop” rule, 72
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, xiv, 115,
119n18
Montagu, Ashley, 109
Morgan, Edmund S., 9
morphing, computer-generated,
109–116
Morrison, Toni, 83–85, 88, 107
Moseley, Ann, 88, 100, 123n1,
125n14
Mouffe, Chantal, 124n7
Murray, Charles, 109
national identity, xvii, xvii, 39.
See also identity, American
Native Americans. See American
Indians
nativism, 23–26, 35
Neidle, Cecyle S., 120n3
Nickel, James, 124n7
Nordic race. See European races
Nutting, H. C, 122n1
objectification, failure of, 106–107
O’Brien, Sharon, 96
Omi, Michael, 4–5, 26–28, 36, 108,
116n1, 119n20
Osumi, Megumi Dick, 122n2
Painter, Nell Irvin, 125n17
passing, racial, 70, 79–81
patriotism, race and, 7–8, 50
Phelan, James D., 16, 62, 119n12,
119n19
Piper, Adrian, 123n9
Posnock, Ross, 118n10
privilege, defined, 5–6
Progressive Era, defined, xvii–xvii
INDEX 139
races, European, 86–88, 90–92, 123n4
racial categories, early construction
of, xvii–3
racial formation, defined, 4–5, 116n1
racial project, defined, 26–27
racism, xiv, xvi, 6–8, 27, 35, 72, 80
Reports of the Immigration
Commission , 16–22, 68–69, 113,
118n3, 119n14
Revolution, American, 10
Reynolds, Guy, 92–94, 124n6
Ripley, William Z., 119n19
Roediger, David R., 9–13
Rogin, Michael, 110
Roh-Spaulding, Carol, 122n4
Rosowski, Susan J., 96
Ross, Edward Alsworth, xvii, 24–26
Rubin, Steven J., 29, 53
Russia, Jewish life in, 29–34, 120n6
Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), xix,
22, 58–82, 116, 116n2, 122n3,
122n4, 123n6, 123n7, 123n8,
123n10, 123n11;
and Confucianism, 81;
writing by:
“Half Chinese Children:
Those of American Mothers and
Chinese
Fathers,” 58
“Its Wavering Image,” 71–76,
116n2, 123n6
“Leaves from the Mental Portfolio
of an Eurasian,” xix, 60, 76–82
Mrs. Spring Fragrance (book),
xix, 60, 64–76, 123n5
“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (story),
65–69, 123n5
“The Wisdom of the New,” 69–71
Said, Edward W., 26, 28
schools, as agents of assimilation, 37–
40.
See also children, education and
Schwind, Jean, 96
sexuality:
immigrant women’s, 23–26;
and identity, xvii
Siegel, Kristi, 121n12
simulacra, 113–115;
Disneyland as simulacrum, 114
slavery, 8–9
Smith, Rogers M., 23, 39, 118n1,
118n5, 118n6, 119n17
Smith, Sidonie, 44
Sochen, June, 43
socialist feminist theory, 6
Solberg, S.E., 62–63
Sollors, Werner, 50–52
Steinberg, Shirley R., 125n1
Stepan, Nancy Leys, 5, 118n2, 118n4
Stone, Albert E., 44
success, self-made, immigrant
narratives and, 43–46, 121n11
Takaki, Ronald, 122n2
Time magazine, xx, 109–116, 125n2
Trinh T. Minh-ha, 73
Tucker, William H., 118n2, 123n2
Vaughn, Stephanie, 101
Walzer, Andrew, 95, 99, 124n11
Warren, Kenneth, 118n10
Watson, Julia, 44
whiteness:
critical study of, xiv, xvii, xx–xxi,
5–14, 35–36;
viewed as normative, xvii, 5–7,
14, 35, 85–86, 107–108
White-Parks, Annette, 59, 64, 70,
76–77, 122n4
white supremacy, bible used to
justify, 80
Winant, Howard, 4–5, 26–28, 36–37,
108, 108, 116n1, 119n20
women:
as “reproducers of the nation,”
xiv, 23–26, 114–115, 119n18;
140 INDEX
in Russian Jewish society, 33;
Irish American, and race, 11;
reproduction and, 97–99, 110.
See also bodies, women’s, as
locus of racial reproduction;
feminism;
gender;
socialist feminist theory
Woodress, James, 97
Wu, William F., 59
Wussow, Helen, 123n1
xenophobia, xvii, 29, 35, 48, 54
Yin, Xiao Huang, 77, 122n4
Young, Iris Marion, 104–106, 124n7
Yu, Ning, 123n7
Zaborowska, Magdalena J. , 29,
48–49
Zierler, Wendy, 122n14