Editor's Introduction: Multicultural and Multilingual Aesthetics of Resistance

Abstract

Either get out, get white or get along. --George Schuyler, Black No More (11) As George Schuyler sarcastically comments his novel Black No More (1931), US culture seems to offer its multiethnic or non-white citizens few choices: Either get out, get white or get along (11). Exiting the system, whitening, or assimilation are posited as the only viable options for ethnic subjects. Yet this issue of MELUS illustrates that ethnic writers often undermine such simplistic choices through a multicultural and multilingual aesthetics of resistance. As W. Lawrence Hogue points out his essay, for postmodern theorists such as Jacques Derrida, meaning the West is defined terms of binary oppositions, a violent hierarchy which one of the two terms governs the Within the white/ethnic binary opposition the United States, the ethnic subject often becomes defined as an inferior other. However, many of the authors discussed this issue deconstruct this binary through oppositional and resistant aesthetic practices; furthermore, some of these authors take western modes of writing or subjectivity--such as sentimentalism or the persona of the slave--and turn these modes inside out, so they no longer exclusively signify subjugation or abjection. These writers thereby participate the project of reclaiming and repositioning ethnic subjectivities. By turning to multicultural aesthetics or by deforming western tropes, they may undermine or challenge Eurocentric modes of writing, releasing the potential of ethnic subjectivity to transform not only art, but culture itself. In her essay, Property Rights and Possession Daughters of the Dust, Nancy Wright argues that Julie Dash's landmark 1991 film uses specific aesthetic practices--such as visual images and voice-overs--to talk back to Anglo-American political and legal theories of property from the historical period represented the film, which positions the ancestors of enslaved Africans and First Nations people as the dispossessed. Wright argues that the film Gullah and First Nation groups enact a concept of their relationship to the land that is communal and custodial, rather than property based. Two sequences the film associate characters and the landscape with communal property relationships--a montage which Iona Peazant reads aloud a love letter from Saint Julian Last Child, and a sequence of images set the family graveyard, where Nana Peazant explains to her great-grandson Eli Peazant his relationship to his unborn child and ancestors. As Wright astutely notices, in these sequences, visual images locate the themes of family, possession, and property a matrix of historical allusions to property law and legal rights of ownership. They also contest visually and aesthetically the dominant view of the residents of Dawtaw Island (the film's setting) as the dispossessed. These characters may lack individual, exclusive rights to property, but their communal relationship to the land endows them with agency and allows them to retain their culture. Aesthetic practices used by eighteenth-century poet Wheatley--a diasporic presence and the creation of a distinct black slave persona and perspective--also endow her work with agency and cultural identity. In Phillis Wheatley, Diaspora Subjectivity, and the African American Canon, Will Harris argues that few critics have accounted for the uniqueness of Wheatley's contributions to diaspora writing. Wheatley's poetry was recognized England and France as a watershed literary feat and became a focal point for discussion of diasporal literary accomplishment among individuals such as Voltaire, John Paul Jones, and Francois, the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois. To understand the diasporal impact of Wheatley's poetry, Harris argues, her writing must be compared to black writers whose works preceded or paralleled hers and to contemporaneous writers who may have been influenced by her work. …