In the Lion's Mouth

Abstract

Ethnicity is always emergent, insofar as new sociocultural fractionalizations and hybridities are always latent, ready to re- veal themselves. But these essays together suggest, too, that eth- nicity has a periodicity and could one day again subside, even dis- appear, except as the artifact of a certain phase of late modernity. In the US, however, the age of so far remains virtually coexistent with the life and contours of an American national literature. If became more carefully conceptualized in the late nineteenth century through racialized science, anthropology, and immigration law, one can nevertheless find its anatomy in, say, Moby-Dick and the massive literature of early exploration and empire of which Herman Melville's novel was the pinnacle. Like- wise, the American Bureau of Ethnography's exhumation of American Indian burial mounds is one chapter within the Ro- mantic mythology of the doomed native, whose stereo-typology, so to speak, stretches across several centuries of popular cul- ture from the tragic sentimentalism of James Fenimore Cooper, through the proliferation of Indian figures advertising canoes, fountain pens, and sports teams, and on to the visceral ironies of Sherman Alexie. Death practices do situate ethnic minorities within the flow of American history for the good reason that ex- posure to violence, whether quotidian or catastrophic, is a defin- ing feature of ethnicity as it overlaps dangerously with race. Their alienation has not prevented minority writers from em- bracing the promise of American democracy, whether in Frederick Douglass's fervent identification with the patriarchs of the Age of Revolution in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); or Charles Eastman's journey of self-discovery that took the revealing title From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916); or Carlos Bulosan's autobiographical testimony that, as his title put it, America Is in the Heart (1946). Such declarations of belonging to America, spo- ken strategically from the nation's margins, signal the minority writer's precarious (and usually incomplete or illusory) transcen- dence of race into the realm of ethnicity. Reversal is always pos- sible. Adopting the mask of abnegation, John Okada, who served