In The Interethnic Imagination, Caroline Rody heralds “multiethnic fusion” as a potentially liberating tendency. The mixed-raced children at the end of a number of 1990s novels by Asian American writers, her heterogeneous college classrooms, and the era of President Barack Obama are all indicative of “American's undeniably multiracial future” (xi, viii). Her study claims that
what we have long thought of as ethnic literature is becoming interethnic literature. That is, since the last quarter of the twentieth century, the focus of ethnic texts has begun to drift toward the borders of ethnic experience, away from being-ethnic as a problematic in itself, to the condition of being ethnic amidst a hybrid collective, as part of a “difficult” but undeniable “we.” (ix)
Rody supports her optimistic assertion through nuanced and insightful readings of a number of key texts: Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange. These elegant and beautifully written chapters reminded me of the pleasure of well-crafted literary analysis. Much of Asian American scholarly work these days has become interdisciplinary in its approach. While cultural studies, sociology, and history have much to contribute to literary interpretations, many scholars (and readers) place more importance on the theoretical argument than in the literary text. Novels rarely get more than a few pages in a chapter these days, while larger issues of nationhood, citizenship and belonging, abjection and melancholia, subjective formations, model minorities, and US imperialism take centre stage. Rody deals with these questions; reveals rich, intertextual links between Asian American novels and other canonical American works; traces motifs within narratives; and provides careful close readings. For example, linking Lee's Native Speaker to Richard Wright's 1940 Native Son, Rody argues that Lee signals its affiliation with blackness silently through its title yet maintains a “distance haunted by longing, by guilt, and by violence” (74). At the same time, she notes the presence of Frank Chin's yellow masculinity in Lee's novel as well as its “rhapsodic tribute to the multicultural city of New York” (81). Citing a description of the bustle of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese, Haitians, Colombians, and Nigerians in the city streets, Rody writes, the narrator Henry's “portraits of the city unfold in such lyrically mounting phrases and end with such disarming appeals to love or charity that they manage to cast rays of beauty over the grittiest scenes” (81). She notes Lee's Whitmanian tropes, the use of anaphora and parataxis and the way in which Lee's “Asian American novel can represent and serve all the people without losing its sense of history and identity” (85).
Rody asserts that Gish Jen's Mona is the first “purely comic” (90) second-generation Asian American story in its crossing of two ethnic traditions: Jewish and Asian American. She describes Mona as “a bildungsroman that comically modifies the traditional bourgeois Euro-American along ethnic, feminist, and postmodern critical lines to portray the contested dialogic, intersubjective development of a girl who questions the meaning of all the ‘matrices’ that frame her own and others' possibilities” (92). Having included the novel in a course on Jewish American fiction, Rody discovers, to her surprise, that her students thought that Gish Jen's Jewishness was “cool” (103). She notes that Jewishness marks the “intersection of home and homelessness” and outlines the ways the novel's Camp Gugelstein, “a cross-race experiment,” is remarkably similar to her own classroom with its spirited “multicultural collaboration” and “multiethnic engagement” (109).
Aside from lucid, extended readings of these three novels, Rody writes four other chapters and “interchapters” which provide overviews of the interethnic paradigm, black presences in Asian American fiction, Jewishness in Asian American and other contemporary fiction, and mixed-raced children. These chapters discuss a wide range of novels that engage with a “spatial, horizontal axis of encounter … taking the novel beyond its traditional interest in and association with a single people or nation, and including not just ethnic or racial binaries but multiple differences of ethnicity, language, national origin, class and citizenship status” (5–6). For me, these were the most inspiring chapters, as they made me want to read and learn more about works such as Japanese Hungarian American Jiro Adachi's The Island of Bicycle Dancers (2004), Patricia Chao's Latino-influenced Mambo Peligroso (2005), and Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man (2002). Rody's positive attitude about the “promise of a thriving and increasingly open-ended ethnic literature” brought about by these recent interethnic works is optimistic and appealing, and her keen observations tremendously satisfying.
