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Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature, by Catherine Rottenberg. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2008. 180 pp. $50.00.
Performing Americanness is the kind of unprecedented, richly comparative study that significantly changes the nature of the conversation by cogently presenting how African-American and Jewish-American writers of the early twentieth century narrated the critical categories of identity that enlivened their era. Rottenberg begins with the important premise that both minority literary traditions experienced vital transformations at roughly the same moment; aware of their inherent liminality, writers from both backgrounds strategically created a place for themselves within American letters analogous to the struggle of each group to accommodate itself in American society as a whole. The seminal novels addressed in Rottenberg’s six lean and lively chapters include classics of the Harlem Renaissance such as James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen’s novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), alongside representative texts of the early Jewish-American literary canon: Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Anzia Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements (1923), Arrogant Beggar (1927), and others.
In my courses on the dynamic of “Passing” in 20th-century American literature I was long ago struck by the glaring fact that both Johnson’s and Cahan’s troubled protagonists conclude their narrative journeys by expressing regret for having somehow failed to keep faith with their own better natures. Rottenberg is the first writer I have come across to successfully delineate the implications of that shared narrative dynamic, and she does so in ways that greatly complicate the notion of the individual’s “authenticity” or “essence” while also raising important questions about each group’s collective identity. And of course such an analysis is fully warranted; after all, during the period that Rottenberg examines, Jewishness was still mediated within a racial discourse of identity, not only by others but by Jews themselves. Thus, she argues that the conclusions of both Autobiography and Rise of David Levinsky alert readers to “the coercive aspect of race identification, and the punishments meted out to subjects who attempt to identify differently” (p. 118). Rottenberg seeks to transcend the well-worn paradigm of reading early Jewish American works as struggles with assimilation by aligning them with the performative/reiterative nature of passing narratives. In this context she adroitly draws on Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work on social identity and performativity: “performativity, as the most efficacious form of positive power, tends to reinforce the hegemonic order and upholds existing hierarchal power relations. Reiteration produces the illusion of an identifiable and stable referent for regulatory ideals” (p. 28). Butler’s theoretical paradigm exposes the inevitable dissonance between normative roles and actual social behavior or lived experience. Hence, Rottenberg is excited by the premise that the novels she discusses each “dramatize a certain moral imperative—the necessity of ensuring that, at any given historical moment, there are always many possible, socially sanctioned, and thus normative ways of performing Americanness” (p. 15). Precisely because hegemonic order requires the reiteration of racial codes for its survival, avenues for potentially subversive variation opens up with exactly the same frequency.
Deeply engaged with the critical stakes over whether Larsen’s Passing, a milestone in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, should be read as an argument for passing as a subversive cultural strategy or one that merely serves the individual’s separate survival, Rottenberg posits that its two female protagonists each dramatize the “regulatory ideals that circulate and operate in the service of particular relations of power” (p. 35) and, even more significantly, reveal how in the dominant culture: “though whiteness is privileged over and against blackness . . . the very repetition and circulation of different, and, at times contradictory, racial norms create the possibility of subversion” (p. 50). Similarly, Yezierska’s fiction, while exposing the rigidity of American class structures of the 1920s (which bear roughly similar regulatory ideals to the racial norms critiqued in the racial novel of passing), present us with Jewish protagonists whose desires are joined by steely willpower that frequently enables them to achieve material wellbeing and upward mobility. But Rottenberg reads their rise in relation to America’s peculiar association of economic hierarchy and virtue, which though a seeming anachronism dating to the Protestant ethic was highly visible in the Progressive Era. Though the author misses important opportunities to highlight Yezierska’s ambivalent and conflicted portrayals of Jewishness, the tug of war between Old and New Worlds, Tradition and Modernity, (a curious omission given her attention to black consciousness elsewhere), she nonetheless produces a very valuable discussion of how Yezierska’s major novels are enlivened by the “contradictory strains of dominant U.S. class discourse” (p. 67).
A related chapter offers a valuable comparative reading of Nella Larsen and Yezierska’s female protagonists who attempt to achieve the American Dream on their own terms, while mindful of the independent New Woman ideal prevalent in the Jazz Age. In this regard, Rottenberg astutely contextualizes the different fates of Jewish and African American women characters: “Whereas [Yezierska’s] Adele is ‘allowed’ to emulate the New Woman . . . [Larsen’s] Helga is depicted as ultimately unable to approximate this ideal because . . . it precluded black women by its very definition” (p. 94). Rottenberg posits that the racialized category of black femininity available to women like Helga was a far more constricting condition. The New Negro Woman paradigm “entailed the repression of sexuality and concatenated presence in the public space with a de-sexualization. Helga’s tragedy . . . can be read as her desire and ultimate inability to find a space in which she can successfully combine sexuality with a meaningful . . . public existence. While the promise of self-fulfillment ‘embodied’ in the New Woman ideal appeared realizable for ‘off-white’ Jewish-American women, it was proscribed for African-American women” (p. 94). As this observation suggests, the chapter “Race and the New Woman” provides intriguing and poignant insights into lesser known aspects of both inter-racial tensions and the intra-racial divide.
At well over five-hundred pages, Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky is simply too vast a canopy for Rottenberg to cogently account for all its relevant ambivalences and vacillations in the short space she allots it (the other novels addressed are of a much more manageable length). Thus, in her first chapter, while faulting previous critics who upheld “a binary opposition between the Old and New Worlds that . . . essentializes both American and Jewish culture” (p. 16) Rottenberg does not ultimately manage to persuade us that Cahan himself saw things any differently, and while she ably identifies the identity categories that inform the novel (“masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality”) this does not always lead to a deeper understanding of the narrative’s idiosyncrasies, of Cahan’s ambivalent vision of Jewish immigrant life. Ultimately however, Rottenberg offers vivid analysis of at least a few select moments in David Levinsky’s wrenching transition from the Jewish role models of his childhood to Anglo Saxon norms of masculinity. Overall, Performing Americanness brilliantly succeeds in adding new layers of complexity and insight to previous comparative studies (including a growing shelf of exemplary titles such as Emily Miller Budick’s Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation, Hasia Diner’s In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935, Martin Japtok’s Growing Up Ethnic: Nationalism & the Bildungsroman in African American & Jewish American Fiction, and Adam Zachary Newton’s Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in 20th-Century America) and will likely prove invaluable to scholars and teachers interested in the disparate ways that the constructed and performative nature of race, gender, and class provoked some of the most memorable explorations of belonging and disenfranchisement by African American and Jewish American writers in the wrenching social transformations of the early twentieth century.
Ranen Omer-Sherman
University of Miami
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