Ethnic Autobiography Research Articles

Ретроспективное исследование становления этнической идентичности в детском возрасте: анализ этнических автобиографий старшеклассников

The contradiction between the necessity to identify the resource potential of ethnic identity in modern conditions, on the one hand, and the contradictory data on its development in persons whose socialization takes place in an ethnically homogeneous environment, on the other hand, makes the study issue relevant. The research purpose: a retrospective study of the ethnic identity development in high school students living in a mono-ethnic Russian region – the Smolensk region. Research questions: At what age do children living in a mono-ethnic environment acquire the first information about their own and other ethnic groups? How do children feel about their ethnic group in the process of identifying with it? What is the role of the family in shaping the ethnic identity of children? The study participants are 185 secondary school students from Smolensk who identify themselves as Russians, aged from 15 to 18; the average age is 16.3 years old; 59.5% of them are females. The research methods (tools) used: the technique “Ethnic autobiography” (by P. V. Rumyantseva), aimed at studying the development of ethnic identity in the childhood. The processing of the research results was carried out with the help of frequency and content analysis methods. The research results: most of the students acquired their first knowledge of Russian and other ethnic groups at preschool and primary school age and experienced positive feelings about their ethnicity. A third of the high school students showed an indifferent attitude to their ethnicity. The contribution of the family to the ethnic identity development weakens in a situation where parents belong to different nationalities or when the children do not know their parents’ nationality. The main conclusions. Development of the ethnic identity of the majority of high school students, who live in a mono-ethnic Russian environment, takes place in the process of family upbringing, it is smooth, without any shocks and changes, it is characterized by a positive attitude towards their belonging to the Russian ethnic group. The indifferent attitude of some high school students to their ethnicity may, on the one hand, indicate its irrelevance and insignificance for children living in a mono–ethnic environment, and on the other hand, it can be considered as an indicator of a “hidden” identity that can be actualized under certain conditions. The research findings should be taken into account in order to increase the effectiveness of intercultural interaction and to develop national civil Russian consolidation.

К ВОПРОСУ О ФОРМИРОВАНИИ ЭТНИЧЕСКОЙ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ

The increase of ethnic activities in a contemporary world is connected with the phenomenon of ethnic identity. This article is dedicated to the topical theme of the development of ethnic identity. The purpose of this work is the analysis of the stages of the formation of ethnic identity. Ethnic identity is regarded as a part of social identity as well as a process of awareness of the belonging to a particular ethnic group. This article examines domestic and foreign classifications of the formation of ethnic identity. In the current work cross-cultural studies connected to the differences in ethnic belonging at different age periods are examined. The present paper addresses ethnic perceptions, ethnodifferentiating traits as well as the main socialization agents that influence the development of ethnic identity in each individual age period. The methodological difficulties that researchers face in studying the formation of ethnic identity are indicated. The results of the study of the formation of ethnic identity on the example of the biographical method “Ethnic autobiography” are considered. Four stages of ethnic identity formation are highlighted: preschool age, primary school age, adolescence, youth age. In preschool age ethnic perceptions are characterized by instability and socialization agents such as family and preschool institutions play a significant role. In the primary school age school and peers play an important role in the development of ethnic identity. This period is characterized by the diffusiveness of ideas about one's own ethnic identity. In adolescence affective component of identity prevails over the other components. This stage is characterized by a deeper understanding of one’s ethnicity, the commonality of historical fate and religion. Awareness of ethnic identity based on ethnodifferentiating traits occurs in adolescence and considered as most stable compared to previous age periods. This age is characterized by the most complete system of self-awareness as a member of the ethnic community. The process of ethnic identity formation does not end in youth due to the fact that questions about ethnicity can be raised at other stages of a person's life path.

Translation as Strategic Foreignization: A Study of the Politics of Translation in Mother Forest: An Unfinished Autobiography

The study draws upon Lawrence Venuti’s concept of foreignization as a strategic tool employed in the translation of CK Janu’s Mother Forest: An Unfinished Autobiography. The translation works to mould an ethnic autobiography and represent a subaltern subject through explicit signifiers of subalternity, masqueraded as an attempt to “retain the flavour of Janu’s intonation and the sing-song nature of her speech in translation”. As a mode of representation, this study identifies the text as catering to a transnational publishing industry and the global academic marketplace, transforming the cultural value of an ethnic subaltern text into what Graham Huggan describes as “tawdry ethnic goods” in the late capitalist supermarket.

Autobiography in black & brown: ethnic identity in Richard Wright and Richard Rodriguez

Richard Wright was the grandson of slaves, Richard Rodriguez the son of immigrants. One black, the other brown, each author prominently displays his race in the title of his Autobiography: Black Boy and Brown. Wright was a radical left winger, while Rodriguez is widely viewed as a reactionary. Despite their differences, Michael Nieto Garcia points out, the two share a preoccupation with issues of agency, class struggle, ethnic identity, the search for community, and the quest for social justice. Garcia's study, the first to compare these two widely read writers, argues that ethnic autobiography reflects the complexity of ethnic identity, revealing a narrative self that is bound to a visible ethnicity yet is also protean and free.These autobiographies, according to Garcia, exemplify the tensions and contradictions inherent in identity. In their presentation of the self we see the rejection not only of essentialized notions of ethnic authenticity but also of any conception of an ethnic self that is not also communally derived. The image reflected in the mirror of autobiography also reminds us that consciousness itself is altered by our reading, and that the construction of modern ethnicity is shaped to a considerable extent by print culture.

Latino Autobiography, the Aesthetic, and Political Criticism: The Case of <em>Hunger of Memory</em>

This 2003 essay, entitled “Latino Autobiography, the Aesthetic, and Political Criticism: The Case of Hunger of Memory,” was previously published in Nor Shall Diamond Die: American Studies in Honour of Javier Coy, edited by Carme Manuel and Paul Scott Derrick (Valencia: Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans, Universitat de València). In a fierce defense of the aesthetic properties of the ethnic autobiography, Isabel Durán, “as an outsider” to the politics of “Chicano” critics working in the US (“I am Spanish, and live in Spain”), argues that certain politicized critical approaches to ethnic autobiography inside the US have insisted on an identity politics that reads ethnic or minority writing as “good” if and only if it is “obedient” to the critic’s political ideology, regardless of its aesthetic value as art. Proposing a “renewed theory of the aesthetic,” Durán offers a strong refutation of Ramón Saldívar’s critical assessment of Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, while simultaneously demonstrating how a transnational American Studies produces very different intellectual concerns.

Postmodernism And Subjectivity Reconstructed In Edward Said's Out Of Place: A Memoir

Abstract This paper studies the connection between the textual politics of ethnic autobiography and postmodern aesthetics as demonstrated in Edward Said's Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). It explores the complexities of the relationship between the dominating western discourses of identity and constructing subjectivity. This paper shows that Said is rewriting the diasporic model of subjectivity as a position of difference, by doing so he challenges both the traditional prevailing notion of a coherent universal transcendental subject, and the essentialist concepts of the other. It also examines the way in which Out of Place as a postmodern autobiography provides insights into the contemporary dilemmas about the limits of an autobiographical discourse attempting to speak in the name of truth and yet of difference.

Charles Reis Felix's Through a Portagee Gate: Lives Parceled Out in Stories

The recent publication of Charles Reis Felix's Through a Portagee Gate (2004) is a unique addition to Portuguese American Literature, a still relatively small field but one that, in the last twenty-five years, has experienced what amounts to a flurry of critical and artistic activity.1 Both an autobiography of the author and a biography of the author's father, Through a Portagee Gate is remarkable because ideologically and thematically it blurs generic boundaries; further, it employs a highly creative mode of storytelling to articulate its autobiographical content. Although there are about a dozen Portuguese immigrant and ethnic autobiographies by US writers, none attain the level of literary sophistication and mastery of the representation of orality that Felix's work manifests.2 Through a Portagee Gate is comprised of two life stories or intercultural itineraries: that of the ethnic narrator Charles Felix, and that of the immigrant Joe Felix, Charles's father. The book does not have a subtitle or any other designation identifying it as an autobiography, a biography, or a combination of the two. As George Monteiro argues, the book is both an autobiography and a biography (Preface xii). What I would like to propose, however, is that Felix's work embodies several interrelated subjectivities: that of the immigrant father, who is allowed to tell his own life story in his own voice; that of the individual of Portuguese descent, who distanced himself from the ancestral culture and initially was

The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography: Representation of Family by Four American Authors (review)

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography: Representation of Family by Four American Authors Michelle M. Tokarczyk (bio) Elizabeth Bidinger . The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography: Representation of Family by Four American Authors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. 202 pp. ISBN 0-7864-2576-8, $35.00. In this text Elizabeth Bidinger takes up the often overlooked problems in writing autobiography that includes family members who, unlike the author, have not chosen to have their lives represented in literature. Given that most recognized writers stand to profit from literary works, there is a power imbalance between autobiographers and their families. This imbalance is heightened when autobiographers from the working-class represent family members, whom Bidinger classifies, following G. Thomas Couser, as "vulnerable subjects." According to Couser, as cited by Bidinger, vulnerable subjects are "persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship but are unable to represent themselves in writing or to offer meaningful consent to their representation by someone else" (3). In essence, working-class people do not have the facility with language or literary standing to represent themselves, and their ability to give meaningful consent is often compromised. Bidinger further argues that the representation of working-class subjects is problematic because many Americans are biased against the lower socioeconomic classes. Authors from working-class families often write with the expressed purpose of giving voice to those who cannot speak for themselves, or of representing an unfamiliar way of life to mainstream America. However, good intentions do not necessarily correlate with ethical representation, which Bidinger finds compromised in many works. Her definition of ethical writing is somewhat vague, but she most clearly articulates it in the final pages when she refers to Lynn Z. Bloom's view that in ethical autobiographies the truth is conveyed through characters and story "untainted by vindictiveness or special pleading" (190). Elsewhere in the text, Bidinger cautions against autobiographers demonizing or Orientalizing their subjects. Bidinger begins with a chapter in which she analyzes some twentieth-century texts for their strategies in representing working-class relatives: Theodore Dreiser's Dawn, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Anzia Yezerska's Red [End Page 227] Ribbon on a Horse, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory. In Dreiser's and Wright's work, she finds the genesis of the contemporary tendency to showcase family secrets, and in Wright's case, to distort familial characterizations for ideological purposes. Yezerska's autobiography laments her distortion of family members' lives in her fiction while simultaneously continuing the distortion by glaringly omitting her child from her autobiography. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings achieves an aesthetic and ethical excellence because it presents family members as complex characters who enabled her creativity and ambition. Angelou neither romanticizes nor demonizes. Bidinger's discussion of this text is especially illuminating in presenting a model of an ethical autobiography, and in doing so, further explaining the extraordinary power of this work. Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory is seen as a noteworthy departure from the genre of ethnic autobiography. While most of these works represent the development of an ethnic identity, Rodriguez explores the transformative impact of an education that alienates him from his roots. Bidinger is a keen, close reader and a skillful prose stylist. Yet it's difficult to place this chapter in the context of the book, for the works discussed here are rarely—if ever—mentioned later in the text. Bidinger also offers no rationale for beginning with works written in the early twentieth century when, as she briefly notes, Ben Franklin's autobiography, slave narratives, captivity narratives, and many other forms of personal writing existed before the American republic. Finally, while Bidinger is well versed in the scholarship on autobiography, she seems unfamiliar with that in working-class studies, with the exception of Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb's The Hidden Injuries of Class. The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography is, unfortunately, weak on class analysis. The body of the book is comprised of four chapters, each of which focuses on a contemporary autobiography. Bidinger praises...

Shifting Forms of Sovereignty

Relying on contemporary immigrant, migrant, and ethnic autobiographies, this essay deals with a crucial aspect of the gift economy, namely the dynamics of giving and receiving under the negative biopolitical condition of being treated as an alien in an often hostile culture. While I am interested in the notions of gratitude, indebtedness, and the obligation to reciprocate that obtains between parents and children and benefactors and their wards, I also focus on the shifting forms of sovereignty that they provide. In the next section I will glance at Japanese-American autobiographies in order to discuss the creative ways in which this ethnic group responded to the harsh and extremely humiliating conditions of the detainment camps during World War II; and will present examples from other ethnic groups to suggest ways in which the gift economy works to shore up people's communal sovereignty in a way that complements mere democratic citizenship.

‘They are just like any of us’: improving teaching students' understanding of marginalized urban pupils through the use of contextualized literature

In this article, I describe the use of ethnic autobiographies along with extended immersion in an urban diverse community in the education of teaching students to enhance their understanding of pupils from such backgrounds. The strategy is also acquiescent to professional development in schools where the staff' social markers manifestly differ from those of the pupils. For this teacher research case study, the setting is a small urban enclave inhabited by various Latino groups in the north-eastern part of the United States. The ethnic literary works implicated are meant to raise awareness and promote understanding of the populations they symbolize in terms of their cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic markers. The outcomes of this study suggest that ethnic autobiographies can help teaching students identify their pupils' prior knowledge, beliefs and values, and thus design consequential curriculum and instruction that incorporate their pupils' lived experiences.

Philip Roth's Patrimony and Art Spiegelman's Maus: Jewish Sons Remembering Their Fathers

It's an old joke:A Jewish boy comes home from school and tells his mother he's been given a role in school play.Wonderful. What part is it?The boy says, play Jewish husband.The mother scowls and says, Go back and tell teacher you want a speaking part.In Jewish American fiction, father often has been consigned to role of nebbish, under thumb of his assertive, talkative wife; Jake Portnoy in Philip Roths Portnoys Complaint is archetype of such a character. Mr. Balkan in Daniel Fuchs's Homage to Blenholt and Morris Bober in Bernard Malamud's The Assistant also are shlemiel fathers. But there are other sorts of fathers in Jewish American fiction, such as tyrant who rejects his offspring, seen, for example, in Albert Schearl in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Dr. Adler in Saul Bellow's Seize Day, Mr. Gold in Joseph Heller's Good as Gold, or Reb Smolinsky in Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (although Reb seems to merge monster father with ineffectual shlemiel). A third type is absent father, as in Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky-David's father is dead-or Saul Bellow's The Adventures ofAugie March-Augie's father ran off.Art Spiegelman's Maus ( 1986) and Maus II ( 1991 ) and Philip Roth's Patrimony (1991) are memoirs by Jewish American sons paying homage to their fathers and are most moving accounts of relations between Jewish fathers and sons in recent literature. These two works of nonfiction depict a different kind of Jewish father: a mensch (although others might term a kvetch or a nudzh, a complainer or a nag). Michael Rothberg describes Vladek and Herman as what Paul Breines, in a recent attempt to characterize post-sixties Jewish maleness, has called a 'tough Jew' (678). Even though Vladek Spiegelman was born in Poland and survived Holocaust, and Herman Roth lived in New Jersey, they show many of same attributes-stubbornness and tenacity, a capacity for hard work, and a devotion to family-that defined Jewish men of their generation and enabled them to survive and succeed despite their lack of education and obstacles of anti-Semitism.Neither Vladek nor Herman was easy to live with, although they were not cold tyrants like fictional fathers depicted by Henry Roth, Bellow, Heller, or Yezierska. Instead, they were loving, difficult, and domineering, even maddening, men from whom their sons sometimes fled but to whom they were nevertheless deeply attached. In their memoirs, sons show mixed motives: on one hand, to memorialize father and to record family history; on other hand, to expose father and to triumph over through art. As Adrienne Rich writes in her essay memoir Split at Root, have to claim my father, for I have my Jewishness from [and] in order to claim I have in a sense to expose him (qtd. in Miller 29). Finally, their accounts of their fathers' lives and of their complicated, conflicted relationships with them enable Art Spiegelman and Philip Roth to mourn and to come to terms with deceased fathers and with Jewish patrimony they have left to them.In talking about their relationships with their Jewish fathers, Spiegelman and Roth are writing ethnic autobiography, a genre that Barbara Frey Waxman sees as a double discourse negotiating between two cultures. Such authors must nourish both ethnic hunger of memory and auctorial appetite for an American (literary) future, and therein lies tension in their texts (219). Another way to theorize this tension is as opposition between descent and consent, which Werner Sollors calls the central drama in American culture: Descent language emphasizes our position as heirs, our hereditary qualities, liabilities, and entitlements, in other words, our patrimony, while consent language stresses our abilities as mature free agents and 'architects of our fates' to choose our spouses, our destinies, and our political systems (6). …

Ethnic Autobiography as Children's Literature: Laurence Yep's The Lost Garden and Yoshiko Uchida's The Invisible Thread

Ethnic Autobiography as Children's Literature:Laurence Yep's The Lost Garden and Yoshiko Uchida's The Invisible Thread Rocío G. Davis (bio) Ethnic American autobiographies are narratives that highlight the intersection of consciousness of cultural difference from the mainstream and personal development. Many of these ethnic autobiographies have challenged the generic scripts ostensibly required by traditional American autobiography. These revisionary texts center on individual awareness of the subject's ethnic position in relation to other dominant and minority cultural groups, and on the possibilities for its representation, and on how each group occupies certain areas, negotiates historical specificities, and forms communities. Importantly, these texts also subvert some of the traditional narrative structures of autobiography, offering innovative manners of inscribing life: through linked short stories, collaborative autobiographies, shifting or multiple perspectives, among other strategies. The evolution of recent ethnic autobiography for children written by minority groups has tended toward historical realism and toward intercultural narratives that emphasize the varied cultural influences a child growing up in the United States experiences, rather than on depicting that child acquiring a pure heritage identity. Contemporary ethnic literature for children tends to highlight ways of affirming and celebrating cultural differences as they simultaneously seek ways to cooperate and collaborate across different ethnic boundaries. When a constitutive part of that network of concepts involves ethnic appreciation and understanding, the autobiographical text plays a more operative role in articulating the context within which children can engage in a significant process of self-awareness, self-formation, and self-representation. These ethnic autobiographies thus perform a necessary task: by recontextualizing the forms and themes of traditional American autobiography, they enact alternative modes of being and identifying as American, through itineraries marked by separation and difference, rather than by integration. This essay on ethnic autobiography for children, which centers on two Asian American texts, supports the idea that language, immigrant histories, family, and location exist in a relation of dynamic interdependent parts that acquire significance as they are deployed in the representation of highly individual processes of subjectivity and affiliation. Laurence Yep's The Lost Garden and Yoshiko Uchida's The Invisible Thread, both published in 1991, offer multilayered approaches to the act and the art of ethnic life writing. Close readings of Yep's and Uchida's texts illustrate how ethnic autobiographies for children can complicate and enrich traditional conceptions of life writing with a dialogical structure and a heightened concern for metaphor. The protagonists' engagements with bilingualism; their positions as speaking subjects who illustrate Betty Bergland's idea of ethnic subjects as "inscribed by multiple discourses, positioned in multiple subjectivities and situated in multiple historical events" ("Postmodernism" 135); and the evolution of their perspective on immediate reality are paradigms of their process of representation. Interestingly, both Yep and Uchida are among the most prolific of Asian American writers for children, and their autobiographies were published when their status as children's authors had already been established. With almost 100 volumes of children's books between them—including non-fiction, picture books, mythology and folk tales, realist and historical narratives, the majority of which center on immigrant life in the United States—Yep and Uchida represent a vital component of Asian American writing. Reading their autobiographies critically gestures toward the multilayered meaning of their fictional production. The metaphors the writers choose and the often fragmented quality of their narratives thus signify on several levels, communicating specific knowledges and discourses about the lives of Asian American children. Thematic concerns related to the history and the role of Asians in the United States link Yep's and Uchida's autobiographies for children, and both foreground the act of writing as constitutive of the process of discovering or negotiating identity. These texts thus become highly complex engagements with ethnic and artistic reality because both are primarily Künstlerromane that stress their protagonists' process of creative development and describe the genesis of Yep's and Uchida's future literary endeavors. They are, likewise, autobiographies that emphasize how memories and consciousness of ethnicity in the United States inform and nuance their writing. Stuart Hall's description of the two simultaneous axes or vectors that "frame" diasporic identities applies to these texts: "the...

Metanarrative in Ethnic Autobiography for Children: Laurence Yep's "The Lost Garden" and Judith Ortiz Cofer's "Silent Dancing"

Metanarrative in Ethnic Autobiography for Children: Laurence Yep’s The Lost Garden and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing Get access Rocío G. Davis Rocío G. Davis University of Navarre Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 27, Issue 2, March 2002, Pages 139–156, https://doi.org/10.2307/3250605 Published: 01 March 2002

Lost in Nostalgia: The Autobiographies of Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez

In Plural Self: The Politicization of Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiographies, in which she compares N. Scott Momaday's The Names, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez concludes, Ethnic autobiography gives meanings and new possibilities to term autobiography. Using retrospection to gain a vision for future, ... autobiographers create a hybridized, double-voiced form of autobiography in which collective memory and individual memory are linked in a dialogue. (57) Although Browdy de Hernandez's argument is convincing with respect to three writers she discusses, I will demonstrate that some American autobiographies resist hybridization and double-voicedness. Hybridization, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is the mixing, within a single concrete utterance, of two or more different linguistic consciousnesses, often widely separated in time and social space (429). Furthermore, Bakhtin's definition of double-voiced discourse is speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a (324) so that double-voiced discourse is always internally dialogized (324). The examples of double-voiced discourse that Bakhtin cites are comic, ironic or parodic discourse, refracting discourse of a narrator, refracting discourse in language of a character and finally discourse of a whole incorporated genre (324). I would like to suggest that discourse could consequently be read as discourse of an writer who dialogizes dominant language by self-consciously resorting to form and language to express his or her intentions in a refracted way through dominant language. Since autobiography is traditionally both a western and an androcentric genre, double-voicedness in autobiography would be apparent in refraction of conventional discourse, that is, in its rewriting, or, at least, in its self-reflexive questioning of autobiographical conventions. A comparison of texts by writers of different ethnic/racial background also raises certain methodological questions. After a brief overview of current debates over methodological concerns regarding critical writing about literature, I will compare and contrast autobiographies of Eva Hoffman, a Jewish Polish immigrant to United States, and of Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, to demonstrate that neither is hybridized and double-voiced. In doing so, I will not neglect differences between respective diasporic locations of two writers. Other autobiographies by so-called visible minority writers born in United Stated lend themselves to comparison with Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, such as Maxine Hong Kinston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, not least because, like Rodriguez's autobiography, their texts have been criticized for misrepresentation by members of their own ethnic groups. However, I choose to compare a text by a non-Anglo-Celtic immigrant and that of an American-born writer whose group has experienced colonization in a way not shared by any other group in United States. The similarities and differences between these autobiographies are instructive, and a comparison of two can provide significant insight into intricacies involved in comparing two texts that are both consent oriented (1) and that share a number of narrative strategies, even though their authors and autobiographical selves represented in texts belong to different groups. The main question one needs to consider when comparing texts of writers with different backgrounds is how one can read these texts as sharing ways of conceptualizing pull of two or more cultural loyalties without losing sight of fact that their communities have experienced different degrees of dislocation, colonization, and racism. …

Negotiating Textual Terrain: A Conversation on Critical and Pedagogical Interventions in the Teaching of Ethnic Autobiography

Negotiating Textual Terrain: A Conversation on Critical and Pedagogical Interventions in the Teaching of Ethnic Autobiography

Reading Desi Arnaz in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Oscar Hijuelos's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) won high praise from reviewers its depiction of New York Latin music scene of forties and fifties, although some critics have faulted it a dragging plot and excessive descriptions.(1) Nicolas Kanellos, director of Arte Publico Press, called it the best Hispanic book ever published by a large commercial press (113). He gives following reason why this novel stands out: Not your typical ethnic autobiography which charts a protagonist's search American dream, The Mambo Kings instead is an evocation of period when one segment of Hispanic culture heavily influenced American popular culture, dancing its way right into heart of mainstream (113). Indeed, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is populated by many of greats who brought Latin rhythms of mambo, rumba, and cha-cha-cha into North American mainstream: Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Perez Prado, Beny More, and, most important to this novel, Desi Arnaz. In a New York Times Book Review article, Joseph Cincotti calls Hijuelos's effort to evoke this place and time literary archaeology (30), while Hijuelos himself, in same article, refers to it as wandering around 1952..., taking walks down memory lane, even if it's not my memory. One might wonder to whose memory Hijuelos is referring. It is significant that text itself reflects this memory/not memory tension, this search something experienced yet not experienced. This dichotomy is revealed in novel's crucial linguistic ambivalence, which has been described by Gustavo Perez Firmat,(2) and which Ilan Stavans calls for tourists.(3) On another level text suggests that memory it seeks to recover is a collective one rooted in both Anglo and Hispanic cultural experiences of music and television. I will argue that Desi Arnaz/Ricky Ricardo character construct serves multiple purposes in narrative, providing a stable referent author's archaeological finds while at same time creating unstable effects. The presence of historical characters in a novel may contribute to verisimilitude by relying on reader's knowledge to supply this very illusion of real, or it may serve a more subversive narrative purpose, such as creating tension between reader's knowledge and expectation on one hand and what narrative actually delivers on other. A proper name (say, Charlie Chaplin or John Wayne) is a locus of multiple meanings that can never be exhausted by a list of adjectives or a study of roles played. In The Mambo Kings names Desi Arnaz and Ricky Ricardo are deployed to draw on reader's experience of popular culture, thus providing a structure or map some of novel's thematic concerns; however, as we shall see, these names and their significance in popular culture are reinvented in novel. These names, not surprisingly, often appear in reference to I Love Lucy television show (a title which could arguably be said to function much way a proper name does), evoking even more extensive cultural significance. Fictional identities often blend, as reader of The Mambo Kings encounters references to Desi Arnaz (fictionalized historical person) and then Ricky Ricardo (fictional television character played by Arnaz) as if no boundary - real or fictional - existed between them. The effect is somewhat like a narrative optical illusion, where eye sees two distinct images but can process only one at a time.(4) This suggests, as histories of I Love Lucy show have said, that Desi Arnaz played himself in series.(5) While this is an easy line to swallow - after all Arnaz was a Cuban singer and bandleader and played one on show - it obfuscates division between performing self and non-performing self. For television viewer, Desi Arnaz and Ricky Ricardo are surely same entity. And reader of The Mambo Kings will have no difficulty visualizing Desi/Ricky in novel or assuming an acquaintance with him, because he is universally known. …

Michael Arlen's Fictions of Exile: The Subject of Ethnic Autobiography

Michael Arlen's Fictions of Exile: The Subject of Ethnic Autobiography