Material Bodies and Performative Identities: Mona, Neil, and the Promised Land

Abstract

Oh I'm looking for my missin' piece, I'm looking for my missin' piece. Hi-deeho, here I go, Lookin' for my missin' piece.-Shel Silverstein, The Missing Piece (1976)In Shel Silverstein's beloved children's classic, a circle with a wedge missing goes an adventure looking for his missing piece. He believes that there exists a state of material completeness, of unified identity, if only he can find that one elusive thing that will make him whole. In Silverstein's book, hero finds himself confronted with a plethora of identity fragments (missing pieces) that are not quite right, that is, that do not offer him imagined sense of unity he is seeking. However, once he is complete, he finds that without his missing piece he is cut off from wider world that he now rolls by too quickly to experience. He has to abandon what he thought he sought, realizing that being incomplete, fragmented, conflicted about identity, always searching for an impossible unity, is a much more radical and profound state. Like Silverstein's hero, heroes of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Gish Jen's Mona in Promised Land (1996), two texts at center of this article, feel themselves to be incomplete and adrift. They long for a sense of identity that always seems to be just outside their grasp. In their quests for their missing pieces, they find that materiality of their bodies often forces them into situations where identities they long to try on simply do not fit, while those that do fit at times take them away from world that they want to live in.Jews, like many groups of early immigrants to United States, strongly desired to assimilate-to find that missing piece that would allow each to roll through American society and toward American dream quickly and unimpeded by either past or stigma of Otherness.1 This is world that is only just ebbing in 1950s of Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, story of a young Jewish man's pursuit of one of American literature's first suburban Jewish princesses. The deep ambivalence of this period-the seemingly antithetical desires for a body that could be read Anglo-white and an anticipatory longing for an ethnic identity that had not quite been left behind-is the ambivalence of white American dream [. . .] emptiness of consumerism and loss of an authentic, sensual, active Jewish (Brodkin 164). Jen's Mona, a Chinese girl growing up late 1960s, experiences world a more complex space in which multicultural, hybrid identities are celebrated. By late 1960s and 1970s, ethnicity was commodified: bought and sold, eaten, worn, celebrated, braided into self (Halter 3-24). This commodification represents a longing for belonging, a desire to find a true self rooted in an anterior and fully meaningful identity outside myth of transcendental assimilation into American culture. This is a desire to stand in performative space of hyphen, what Jennifer Devere Brody calls the intersection of assimilation and difference (149), and to see this as a productive site of contestation (153).I also seek a productive ambivalence between ways of imagining identity, where materiality and performativity of identity do not cancel each other out. I do this in part by acknowledging historical groundedness of two narratives in question, and by recognizing that racialization and ethnicity are further problematized by their inevitable intersection with gender and class, nation and history, which together form a ground of identity that cannot be confined by myths of unified trajectories of either consent or descent. Instead, I explore ambivalent, multiple relationships between materiality and performativity at work in Mona and Columbus.2 In these cultural landscapes, certain identities are privileged, and this privilege is located in a mobile understanding of precarious white-Jewish identity that is both material and performative (Dyer 9). …