The Politics of Privacy in Contemporary Native, Latinx, and Asian American Metafictions by Colleen G. Eils

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Politics of Privacy in Contemporary Native, Latinx, and Asian American Metafictions by Colleen G. Eils Jeehyun Lim EILS, COLLEEN G. The Politics of Privacy in Contemporary Native, Latinx, and Asian American Metafictions. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 234 pp. $69.95 hardcover; $29.95 e-book. How does literature relate to discussions of privacy in the millennium that evolve around social media and new technologies? How do contemporary writers of color negotiate the voyeuristic demands of the readers and the publishing industry that are rooted in long histories of racial violence yet manifest in relation to changing ideas about access to knowledge and information? Colleen G. Eils’s The Politics of Privacy in Contemporary Native, Latinx, and Asian American Metafictions thoughtfully addresses these questions. A sustained reflection on privacy in the post-9/11 era through the perspectives of writers of color, the book turns to how a number of Native American, Latinx, and Asian American writers experiment with the conventions and devices of metafiction to confront excessive and intrusive probes into the experiences of people of color without surrendering the field of literary publishing. Three of the four chapters are organized around a theme that indexes particular stakes of privacy for writers of color: ethnography, state surveillance, and the literary market. Chapter One examines David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr. Apelles, Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines, and Nam Le’s short story “The Boat” against the ethnographic gaze of the readers. Chapter Two examines Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, Nam Le’s short story “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” and Stephen Graham Jones’s The Bird Is Gone: A Monograph Manifesto in relation to mechanisms of state surveillance. Chapter Three returns to Plascencia’s The People of Paper and Le’s “Love and Honor” with an eye to how they comment on “works of fiction as ethnic commodities” (27). Coupled with an examination of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s representation of the Hollywood industry in his novel The Sympathizer, this leads to an analysis of the pressures of the literary market. Through Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, Chapter Four ruminates on the limits of literary studies that valorize textual records to the exclusion of perspectives erased from documentation. Eils draws out the concept of narrative privacy, which emerges through narrative strategies utilized by these writers to transform silence and invisibility into acts of agency. Characters are unreliable and/or withhold information from readers, and commentaries on the author’s position, authority, and views are frequently part of the narrative (2–3). Narrative privacy can be a “broadly transportable reading methodology” because, as formal strategy, it deflects readers’ expectations for access and teaches them to be aware of what they seek in narratives by writers of color (3). Admitting the inherent contradiction in the concept—all the works of fiction analyzed in the book are published to be read by others—Eils clarifies that narrative [End Page 431] privacy in her study concerns “performative assertions of privacy” intended to draw attention to the particular challenges faced by writers of color (154), an important clarification in relation to both her methodology and the book’s scope. The Politics of Privacy relies on formal analysis, or close reading of texts. In this regard, its interests in privacy are quite different from, say, those in Deborah Nelson’s Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, another study on privacy and literature which interweaves analysis of mid-twentieth-century confessional poetry with legal decisions on privacy to show the imbrication of literature in the social and legal discourse of privacy. Eils outlines her approach in relation to Min Hyoung Song’s in The Children of 1965 in Chapter Three where she examines the fiction of Plascencia, Le, and Nguyen in connection with the literary market; calling Song’s method “multidisciplinary” in that it “supplements literary analysis with interview and statistical information on the publishing industry and literary award processes,” Eils describes her methodology as focused “more narrowly on how several contemporary writers use literary form to contend with the commodification of their own work by the publishing industry” (113, 114...