“NARRATIVES OF A NEW BELONGING”
The Politics of Memory and Identity
In Contemporary American Ethnic Literatures

Magisterarbeit
In der Philosophischen Fakultät IV
(Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften)
der Universität Regensburg

vorgelegt von

Michael Fink

2004

Table of Content

1. ‘Narratives of a New Belonging’ - Introduction and Aim of the Study ... 5

2. ‘Ethnic America Fights Back’ - Approaching Contemporary (Ethnic) America ... 9
2.1 ‘The Turn to Culture‘ - Approaching American (Ethnic) Studies ... 10
2.2 ‘From Melting Pot to Cosmopolitism’ - Approaching American (Ethnic) Ideologies ... 12
2.3 ‘Vanishing Race, Invisible Men and Forgotten People’ - Approaching American (Ethnic) Histories and Social Realities ... 16
2.4 ‘Ethnic America Writes Back’ - Approaching Contemporary American (Ethnic) Literatures ... 20

3. ‘Stories of the Uprooted’ - The Politics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary American Ethnic Literatures ... 26
3.1 ‘Identity Politics One’ - The Return-To-Roots Narrative ... 28
3.2 ‘Identity Politics Continued’ - Rewriting the Return-To-Roots Narratives ... 31
3.3 ‘Identity Politics at Work’ - Politics of Memory and Identity in American Ethnic Writing ... 34

4. ‘The Search for a Sense of Place’ - Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima ... 36
4.1 ‘Living in the Borderlands’ - Antonio’s State of Alienation at the Beginning of the Novel ... 40
4.2 ‘Ultima’s Blessing and the Sacred Presence of the Land’ - Antonio’s Quest for a Collective Identity and a New Sense of Place ... 46
4.3 ‘Tony’s Development into a New World Person’ - Transculturation and Cultural Negotiation in Antonio’s Life ... 58

5. ‘The Search for a Usable Past’ - Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day ... 63
5.1 ‘Struggling with Diaspora’ - Ophelia’s State of Alienation at the Beginning of the Novel  ... 67
5.2 ‘Miranda’s Curing and the Magical Presence of the Past’ - Ophelia’s Quest for a Collective Identity and a Usable Past ... 75
5.3 ‘Baby Girl’s Development into a New World Person’ - Transculturation and Cultural Negotiation in Ophelia’s Life ... 86

6. ‘The Search for a Community’ - N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn ... 94
6.1 ‘Lacking the Right Words’ - Abel’s State of Alienation at the Beginning of the Novel ... 99
6.2 ‘ Pan-Indian Healing and the Sustaining Power of the Community’ - Abel’s Quest for a Collective Identity and a Sustaining Community ... 106
6.3 ‘Abel’s Development into a New World Person’ - Transculturation and Cultural Negotiation in Abel’s Life ... 118

7. ‘Narratives of a New Belonging and the Healing Power of the Word’ - Conclusion ... 125

8. References and Works Cited ... 129

1. ‘Narratives of a New Belonging’ - Introduction and Aim of the Study
In March 1968 Robert Kennedy reported the following about the miserable living conditions on most Native American reservations to a Senate sub-committee: “The first Americans are still the last Americans in terms of income, employment, health and education. I believe this to be a national tragedy for all Americans, for we all are in some way responsible” (qtd. in Breidlid 1998: 6).

Opening this thesis with this rhetoric pun on the first and the last on the American continent has been a deliberate decision as Kennedy’s status quo report provides for a nice introduction to this thesis’ larger subject matter. When his dialogics of the first and the last are not only restricted to U.S. American Indian communities, the overall image evoked can in fact easily be applied to other U.S. ethnic groups as well. Having long settled the desert regions north of nowadays U.S. Mexican border, contemporary Hispanic Americans, for instance, as the descendents of an early mestizo population of Mexican-Indian, European-Spanish and Anglo-American ancestry, share a collective memory which far precedes the U.S. presence in North America. Likewise African Americans can provide for a historical legacy that through the Diaspora of the Middle Passage and the system of plantation slavery easily traces itself back to the very first beginnings of American civilization. When in recent years many other immigrant and minority groups have handed in similar claims, the overall picture of American history evoked is no longer one of a WASP unitarian sense of historiography, but of transcultural diversity and plurality which clearly contradicts the proclaimed assimilatory homogeneity of the American character. Having already started to re-imagine Ethnic American historical legacies in the U.S. as of having been among the first on the American continent, it still remains to provide for the respective present-day social realities as of being among the last in terms of power structures. With many Ethnic American communities still leading a marginal existence on the edge of U.S. society, torn between the opposing worlds of their split cultural heritage while at the same time confronted with rampant economic exploitation, overt political discrimination and far-reaching social oppression by a dominant Anglo-American elite, Kennedy’s report once more turns into a generic term to describe the living conditions of most Ethnic American communities within the contemporary United States. Along the lines of what W. E. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk at the turn to the 20th century has called the problem of the color line (cf. Du Bois 1970), traditional notions of American exceptionalism have only recently turned into contested myths. When the melting pot’s former vision of cultural integration and assimilation has only gradually given way to minority discourses and the collective experience of marginalization, alienation and cultural estrangement till the very day provide for modern threats to American Ethnic cultural survival as dangerous as the smallpox and slavery in the centuries before.

It is at the example of Chicano, American Indian and African American histories and social realities that the national tragedy of Kennedy’s ethnic dilemma becomes most obviously phrased. Contemporary Native, Hispanic and African Americans, however, are far from being helpless victims in the sense of a vanishing, invisible or forgotten race. Since the outbreak of the Civil Rights Movements as the first unified ethnic resistance movement against former U.S. assimilationist policies, Ethnic America has witnessed a number of major changes since the second half of the century. When in the aftermath of the Civil Rights’ political activisms a new generation of American Ethnic artists literally fought their ways into the U.S. cultural scene, political emancipation and active protest went hand in hand with a renaissance in Ethnic American arts and literatures. With the establishment of American Ethnic Studies as a university discipline in recent years, Ethnic American expressive cultures figure among the most prominent interdisciplinary academic research topics today and ample of scholarship has been dedicated to the study of U.S. minority discourses both within and outside of American university campuses.

Whereas most recent literary histories provide for a concise overview of the width and heterogeneity of the discipline of American Ethnic Studies, the following M.A. thesis has intentionally established a selective canon of only three major American Ethnic novels as seminal texts: Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and African American female author Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1984) Whereas extensive research has already been done on the three novels within their specific cultural contexts as seminal texts of a respectively American Indian, Chicano or African American literary renaissance, little critical interest so far has been devoted to a comparative reading of the novels’ identity and memory politics along transcultural terms, and the myriad ways of how the three texts provide for a set of strategies of transcultural survival. When contemporary critics, as for instance Günther Lenz and Lothar Bredella, have made convincing pleas for American Studies to eventually overcome former minority discourses and cultural nationalisms in favour of a dialogics of transcultural and international American Culture Studies and a truly cross-cultural assessment of America’s heterogeneous character (cf. Lenz 2002, Bredella 2002), this thesis’ reading of the three texts as narratives of a new transcultural sense of belonging can rely on a firm theoretical basis.
On grounds of contemporary notions of texts as cultural artefacts that are not hermetically sealed, but point beyond themselves, scholarship in American Ethnic literatures is faced with a wide range of methodological approaches, opening themselves up to myriad interpretative ways. Based on sociological thought that in any minority discourse the process of identity recovery of the individual will always in a first step require the recreation of a shared sense of belonging through the subject’s search for his collective roots within a larger cultural context, any concise analysis of Ethnic American literature has to be grounded on what leading New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt has called “a full cultural analysis” (cf. Greenblatt 2001:225). Although most likely a cultural outsider to his or her subject culture, the critic respectively has to free himself from former New Critic paradigms of the primacy of text, in favour of what Louis Montrose, a second leading New Historicist, has called the textual anthropologist’s approach which requires the critic to acknowledge existing links between literary discourses and their neighbouring disciplines, as for instance archaeology, anthropology, cultural history medicine and religious sciences (cf. Montrose 1981). Most likely, however, a critic following Greenblatt’s agenda of culture as “a complex network of institutions, practices, and beliefs” (cf. Greenblatt 1982:6) will at some point be required to leave behind purely empirical grounds in favour of a study of his subject culture’s mythology and cultural psyche, which has been most prominently done by means of Myth Criticism. In combining Montrose’s textual anthropologist’s position with Joseph Campbell’s theory of the monomyth, the following thesis wants to provide for a concise analytical basis of the myriad ways of how the politics of identity and memory are realized in the novels within the framework of their given cultures and are consequently turned into powerful intracultural narrative strategies of identity formation. Based on sociological theory, the subject’s search for a collective identity, however, can only provide for one transitory stage within a more complex continuum of cultural negotiation and transculturation. On grounds of recent approaches in Postcolonial Theory, Diasporic Literary Criticism, Intercultural Contact Studies and Borderland Theories former New Historicist and Myth Critic approaches therefore have to be substituted by critical theories that provide for a firm analytical basis to the novels’ transcultural strategies of identity formation, in which former collective identities are eventually transformed into new hybrid identities of difference.

Along the lines with this thesis’ transcultural agenda, the following close-readings of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn therefore want to demonstrate how the complex interplay of memory and identity politics in the novels can be dissolved into a set of intracultural and intercultural strategies of cultural negotiation and transculturation. By means of illustration each text will focus on one single event - the search for a sense of place in Bless Me, Ultima, the search for a usable past in Mama Day and the search for a sustaining community in House Made of Dawn. The following comparative reading of the three texts in succession, with Bless Me, Ultima being the first to be followed by Mama Day and House Made of Dawn, will, however, make it soon obvious, how these strategies not only constantly relate to each other, but essentially all tie up to this thesis’ larger theme of cultural negotiation and transculturation as narratives of a new belonging.

2. ‘Ethnic America Fights Back’ – Approaching Contemporary (Ethnic) America

Along the lines of Bill Ashcroft’s catchy phrase “The Empire Writes Back” (Ashcroft 1989:1), which describes the overall development of postcolonial discourse in recent years, contemporary Ethnic America has experienced fundamental changes, too.

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