Dissenting Fictions: Identity and Resistance in the Contemporary American Novel

187 Pages·2000·5.981 MB·English

by  Cathy Moses

Literary Criticism and
Cultural Theory
The Interaction of Text
and Society
Edited by
William E. Cain
Professor of English, Wellesley College
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Dissenting Fictions
Identity and Resistance in the
Contemporary American Novel
Cathy Moses
I
~ ~~o~~~;n~~;up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First Published in 2000 by
Garland Publishing, Inc.
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2000 by Cathy Moses
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and record
ing, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from
the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-815-33653-2 (hbk)
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
p~~ ~
Chapter 1 1
Introduction: The Dissenting Subject
Chapter 2 17
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being and the Africanist
Presence in Russell Bank's Continental Drift
~~~3 ~
Playing in History's Dark: The Struggle for
Agency in Toni Morrison's Jazz
Chapter 4 55
Identity, Masculinity, and Desire in
David Bradley's Fiction
Chapter 5 83
The Center of Power is Nothing: Storytelling, History, and
Resistance in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead
Chapter 6 123
Queering Class: Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues
Afterword 151
"Sabotage and Subversion, Then, Are This Book's
Objectives"
Works Cited 157
Index 167
v
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Deborah Clarke, without whose support, direction, and
faith this book would not have been possible. Thanks also to Jennifer
Jackson, Bernard Bell, and Christiane Makward, for all of their help,
support, and patience. And, most of all, to Sunny and Lila Chirieleison,
for their understanding and unflagging confidence.
vii
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Identity! My God! Who has any identity any more any
way?
-Young Emerson, in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
The question that launches Ellison's Invisible Man on his identity quest
is more pertinent to the American novel now than it was when Invisible
Man came out in 1952. The last quarter of the twentieth century has
been marked by a developing skepticism about whether there is any
thing universal in the experience of being a woman, or a man, or an
African American, or a lesbian, or a member of any other identity cate
gory once assumed to be universal-a skepticism reflected in the con
temporary American novel. Chief among the questions this skepticism
engenders is how resistance to racial, sexual, gender, and class oppres
sion is to be effectively practiced if the individual subject can no longer
assume her or himself to be part of a group with shared interests based
on identity.
The culture of the sixties gave rise to the politics of identity: the
notion that "the personal is political," that one's identity determines
one's politics. Sixties identity politics produced the Black Power and
later the women's liberation and gay liberation movements and served
to mobilize large groups against racial, gender, and sexual oppression.
ix