The Trials of the Ethnic Novel: Susan Choi's American Woman and the Post-Affirmative Action Era

Abstract

To make a large but I think useful generalization, the task of anti-racist literary work throughout most of the twentieth century was to establish the idea that racialized people are not at the mercy of their classification. In 1900, African-American writer Pauline Hopkins could envision the novel as a way of making black people human, a process that depended on the novel's particular ability to produce resonant accounts of the individual and his or her social order. In her preface to Contending Forces she wrote: “No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history” (14). Hopkins's phrasing—to make men and women—outlines a biopolitic of racialized cultural reproduction in which the African-American artist must rely on trustworthy narrative conventions such as thoughts, feelings, fire, and romance, to produce beings recognizable as humans. Nearly 90 years later, Maxine Hong Kingston has her hero Wittman Ah Sing tell his actor friends that the problem is not the roles they play but whether they are at the center of a soap opera: “Just because they let you wear a nurse's uniform instead of a Suzie Wong dress doesn't mean you're getting anywhere nearer to the heart of that soap. You're not the ones they tune in every day to weep over. We need to be part of the daily love life of the country, to be shown and loved continuously until we're not inscrutable anymore” (310).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.