Response to Jonathan Freedman

Abstract

Jonathan Freedman's American and Ethnic Studies Have a Problem; or, When Is an Ethnic Not an Ethnic, and What Should We Do about It? highlights the degree which American studies has fallen outside the purview of American studies and ethnic studies. The author attributes this marginalization in part a disciplinary rigidity that dogmatically delineates white from non-white. As Freedman avers, It is one thing think about Jewishness-as-whiteness in the context of the black-white binary that structures the historical constitution of the United States, but it is another to think about Jewishness in the context of Asian American or Latino or even Native American identities and experiences. At stake in Freedman's polemic is another way of seeing Jewishness outside established racial scripts of and privilege. Such a recuperative proposal--which re-members the contested ethnoreligious registers of American selfhood--revises the role of such affiliations in the making of American studies, engages other ethnic studies fields of inquiry, and expands the purview of American studies by way of transnationalism, globalization, and diaspora. In so doing, Freedman charts an evocative course for a comparative American/ethnic studies, wherein identities are relationally contextualized, subjectivities are presently fluid, and notions of US citizenship shift. To be sure, the essay's title explicitly calls forth an intersectional framework. Freedman's so-named Jewish Problem, which speaks the current state of American studies and ethnic studies affairs, accesses a turn-of-the-twentieth-century anxiety about Anglo-Saxon and heteronormative selfhood that was matched by the Immigrant Problem, the Chinese Problem, the Negro Problem, and the Woman Question. Such dilemmas substantiate Freedman's call for the evaluation of relations between and other forms of ethnic belonging and bring light connective national stories of anti-Semitism, nativism, racism, and sexism. This intersectional American studies/ethnic studies approach eschews essentialism in favor of complexity, privileges dialogues over monologues, and imaginatively restages the American experience by way of inter- and intra-ethnic movements. The invisibility afforded Americans--who, as Freedman maintains, are nonethnic ethnics--is most familiar those in Asian American studies. Born out of late-1960s student strikes and a Civil Rights Movement concerned with self-determinism, human rights, and representational politics, Asian American studies suffers from an analogous crisis. In particular, Asian Americans (like their counterparts) are de facto model minorities who achieve probationary whiteness by way of hard work, perseverance, and traditional family values. …