New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Fiction: Tan, Kingsolver, Castillo, Morrison

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New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Fiction

new visions of community in contemporary american fiction Tan Kingsolver Castillo Morrison

Magali Cornier Michael University of Iowa Press  |  Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 http://www.uiowapress.org Copyright © 2006 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by April Leidig-Higgins No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Michael, Magali Cornier.   New visions of community in contemporary American fiction: Tan, Kingsolver, Castillo, Morrison / by Magali Cornier Michael.   p.   cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-58729-505-8, ISBN-10: 1-58729-505-9 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-1-58729-511-9, ISBN-10: 1-58729-511-3 (pbk.)   1. American fiction — 20th century — History and criticism.  2. American fiction — Women authors — History and criticism.  3. Women and literature — United States — History — 20th century.  4. American fiction — Minority authors — History and criticism.  5. Ethnicity in literature.  6. Community in literature.  I. Title. PS374.W6M525  2006 813'.54099287 — dc22   2006044514 06  07  08  09  10  C  5  4  3  2  1 06  07  08  09  10  P  5  4  3  2  1

Contents

vii Acknowledgments

One

1 Introduction: Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century Two 39 Choosing Hope and Remaking Kinship: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Three 73 Negotiating Collectivities: Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven Four 113 Collective Liberation and Activism via Spirituality: Ana Castillo’s So Far from God Five 151 The Call to Love, to Assert Power with Others: Toni Morrison’s Paradise Six 185 Conclusion: Looking to the Future

195 Notes



221 Bibliography



237 Index

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the people and institutions that helped make this book possible. Duquesne University provided me with a sabbatical during the spring 2003 semester, a Wimmer Family Foundation Faculty Development Grant during the summer of 2003, and a Presidential Scholarship Award during the summer of 2005, all of which gave me some time away from teaching responsibilities to write large portions of this book. I also thank the Duquesne English Department for providing me with parttime research assistants each semester and thank those graduate students who helped me so wonderfully in terms of the research for this particular project — Laurie McMillan, Christine Cusick, Amal Abdelra­ zek, Kara Mollis, Jessica Chainer, and especially Mindy Boffemmyer. Special thanks go to my friend and colleague Linda Kinnahan, who has been a willing and invaluable reader of my work throughout this project and whose constructive criticism pushed me to develop my ideas in much sharper terms. Moreover, her encouragement and intellectual energy created for me a productive space within which to think and write. I also thank all the talented graduate students in my classes with whom I have had the opportunity to discuss the ideas and the literature that have shaped this project. My thanks also go out to the anonymous reviewers for the University of Iowa Press, who took the time to read carefully and offer incredibly useful criticism that allowed me to revise the manuscript into one that has become stronger. My growth into someone who eventually chose to become a literary scholar was made possible initially by the support and encouragement of my parents, sister, and brother, for which I will always be grateful. More­over, we shared a particular set of experiences when we moved to and made our home in the United States, which I cannot help but think informs at least in part the kinds of issues and questions that this book explores as well as my particular interest in ethnic American writers and issues of community. Most of all, I thank Adrian for his ever-constant encouragement and love through the years. And our children, Valerie and Brian, I thank for their constant reminder that the world of human connections is of ut-

most importance and that the material always informs everything we humans do and think. I also thank the following, who have given me permission to reprint excerpts from previously published material: The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver, copyright © 1988 by Barbara Kingsolver, excerpt reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and the Francis Goldin Agency; Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver, copyright © 1993 by Barbara Kingsolver, excerpt reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and the Francis Goldin Agency; So Far from God: A Novel, by Ana Castillo, copyright © 1993 by Ana Castillo, excerpts used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and the Susan Bergholz Literary Service; Paradise, by Toni Morrison, copyright © 1997 by Toni Morrison, excerpts reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.; The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, copyright © 1989 by Amy Tan, excerpts reprinted by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.

viii  Acknowledgments

New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Fiction

Chapter 1 Introduction Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century

T

he sheer volume of human beings migrating, individually or in groups, voluntarily or not, across national borders around the globe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first century has resulted in an incredible mixing of diverse peoples and cultures, which in turn has created both serious problems and potential for the future. The most serious negative consequences of such massive, ongoing migrations have included ethnic strife (to the point of ethnic cleansing at times), political and economic processes of class stratification and exclusion, diverse forms of racism, and intolerance with respect to religious and cultural practices that differ from those that dominate in any given nation or culture. However, more positive consequences are also emerging. Focusing specifically on the case of the United States, which continues to pride itself on its status as an immigrant nation, the racial demographics of the country are changing at such a rapid pace that whites will no longer be in the majority after the first few decades of the twenty-first century. Although this movement toward an increasingly diverse population has been marked historically by the problems just noted, I want to suggest that indications of the positive potential of this diversity are also emerging. Indeed, many people are beginning to accept the reality of an increasingly multicultural nation and are reaching across differences to form communities and build coalitions as they work to imagine and start creating a future free of oppressive practices. Although such work — in the realms of theory and of practice — has been in progress most visibly since the beginning of the civil rights movement, it has progressively moved past a white-black binary as it attempts to address not only a much broader notion of diversity but also, crucially, processes of hybridization. In-

deed, I want to argue that processes of hybridization make possible all sorts of creative other ways of rethinking ideas of community and coalition building that are crucial to addressing the future of the multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural nation that the United States has become at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this book, I focus in particular on the recent contributions of American women novelists to the process of reimagining community and coalition building within the context of an increasingly multicultural and multiracial America. Specifically, this book examines the ways in which much fiction by prominent American women at the end of the twentieth century draws upon and creates hybrid versions of other than dominant conceptions of community and coalition. Crucially, these other versions of community and coalition derive from a variety of ethnic American traditions and differ substantially from established Western notions and forms of community and coalition. Moreover, this fiction’s engagement in processes of revising and revitalizing notions of community and coalition work results in a reimagining of viable, dynamic forms of agency, of the possibility of engaging in actions that have effects out in the world. Indeed, I argue for positioning these literary texts as active participants in current intellectual debates about the possibility of agency at a historical and cultural moment in which subjectivity itself and, consequently, agency have been called into question. Although I did not set out to work specifically with texts written by American women descended from racially marked ethnic groups — from ethnic backgrounds more difficult to blend into dominant white America because of overt differences in skin color and facial features, such as African American, Asian American, Native American, and Mexican American — and/or choosing to draw from the rich systems of thought, histories, and lived experiences of these hybridized cultures, it slowly became apparent that analyses of these particular texts had the most to contribute to my project. What had initially triggered the project was a more general observation that late twentieth-century fiction by women tends to address agency in terms that highlight to a much greater degree than fiction by men the importance and necessity of community and coalition building and that, indeed, the fiction of these women often revises dominant Western conceptions of community and coalition building within the literature they produce, which then leads to new approaches to the very ideas of subjectivity and agency. Indeed, literary texts by men during the same period tend to focus on the cultural paranoia result-

  Introduction

ing from the absence of community rather than on renewed notions of community. As I continued to work on this project, however, I found that the texts that offered the most innovative and most constructive revisions of the concepts of community, coalition, subjectivity, and agency were for the most part authored by American women engaging issues of race and ethnicity at the turn of the twenty-first century. Because these texts have access to, emerge from, and/or choose to address mixed, hybridized cultural contexts, they bring with them more varied conceptions of community and coalition, as well as of subjectivity and agency, including many that differ substantially from the dominant ones deriving from a predominantly post-Enlightenment, Eurocentered system of thought. Indeed, the novels by American women that I explore in this project all work in different ways to offer more open, diverse, and dynamic communities, made possible by ongoing coalition processes, that revalue caring, nurturing, loving interaction, and support as well as notions of nonhierarchical justice and of the common good. Such processes of community and coalition create a space for alternative forms of agency in the face of the workings and power of social and economic forces in contemporary America that tend to marginalize and oppress women and ethnic/racial others. Although a great number of texts published recently exemplify this thesis, I have chosen to focus on detailed examinations of the following novels: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998). That all these novels have enjoyed relatively wide readerships not only means that they will be familiar to most readers but also reinforces my point that the trends I am delineating appear at the forefront of literary production and not merely in obscure, littleknown, or little-read texts. More importantly, these novels have in common a focus on a certain utopian gesturing that accompanies welldeveloped conceptions of subjectivity and agency anchored in and derived from communities and coalitions of women responding to oppressive white male – centered systems of social and economic power. Indeed, all these novels derive impetus for their visions and revisions from culturally specific feminist political stances — in the sense that they all engage (albeit differently, given the particular ethnic cultural contexts they examine) in critiques of the dominant white male – centered culture and the resulting power relations and aim in various ways to offer models for how to remedy and ultimately end women’s oppression.

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century 

Each novel contributes something different to the project, however, by offering new forms of community and new versions of more communal and coalition-based notions of subjectivity and agency that have their roots in different hybrid cultural traditions: Asian American in Tan, Native American in Kingsolver, Mexican American in Castillo, and African American in Morrison. Even though all the novels engage issues of economic power and oppression, Kingsolver’s texts engage much more fully in an exploration of how issues of class intersect with gender, ethnicity, and race. Moreover, through a willingness to reimagine and reconstruct established ideas of subjectivity and agency via a process of creative bricolage, these texts offer particularly vivid and creative ways of reconceptualizing the notions of subjectivity and agency themselves. As a group, these novels function as particularly strong examples of recent fiction that actively engages in the cultural work of theorizing that in the intellectual climate at the turn of the twenty-first century tends to be associated with philosophic and other theoretical texts in various academic disciplines rather than with the creative arts — indeed, for all the verbal championing of interdisciplinarity, knowledge and modes of thought for the most part remain compartmentalized according to established disciplines. However, these novels’ theorizing differs from the traditional forms that theorizing takes not only because of their novelistic format but also because the novelistic format enables a conjoining of theory and practice, something that feminist thinkers have always deemed absolutely necessary. These texts are able to speculate about and think through ideas via creative formal experimentation and narrative scenarios grounded in the material world and the lived experiences of their characters. The writers of these texts thus join the long-lived tradition not only of celebrated philosopher-novelists like Voltaire and Albert Camus but also of many feminist thinkers who also wrote widely read fiction like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Simone de Beauvoir. My contention is thus that one of the most striking things about much American fiction by women at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century is its engagement with ethnicity and race, in conjunction with gender and class, as it reimagines more communal and collective modes of agency by drawing from the incredibly rich and diverse cultural traditions that thrive within the United States. Given “the prediction by population experts that by the year 2010 there will no longer be a white majority in America,”1 the prevalence within fiction of an interest in ethnicity and race is certainly not surprising. As Richard Rodriguez puts it, “America is wildly, if reluctantly, multicultural”;2 and

  Introduction

I contend that contemporary women writers are mining this diversity of cultural traditions that coexist, often in tension with each other, to create new hybrid conceptions of subjectivity and agency that are more communal in impulse and vision. In the United States, as in many countries at the turn of the twentyfirst century, “it is more and more difficult to demarcate ethnic groups, and the boundary between ethnic groups and the majority culture is not always clearly defined.”3 That ethnic groups are becoming more fluid and less fixed is in part a function of the increased mobility of people (thanks to the tremendous technological advances in transportation), frequency of cross-cultural and biracial parentage, and other forms of cultural mixings, all of which people have become more aware of (whether they want to or not) via the multiple, pervasive media with which they are bombarded daily. The novels I analyze acknowledge and act on what they envision as the great potential of, in Gerard Delanty’s terms, the “cultural mixing [that] produces identities that are constantly in the process of definition.” 4 Because cultural mixing destabilizes group and individual identity, it allows for reconstructing those identities in alternative ways; and the fiction examined in this book engages in just such a process of reimagining identity, along with the notions of subjectivity and agency tied to it. In contemporary America, ethnicity is inextricable from race, although that has not always been the case across the board. The term began to have added currency in the United States in the midnineteenth century in relation to the rising waves of immigrants from various European countries on the East Coast and Asiatic countries on the West Coast. With respect to the European immigrants, ethnicity tended to be associated with national and cultural origin, whereas ethnicity with respect to the immigrants from Asia had more overt racial overtones. Immigrants visibly physically different from the dominant population with European ancestry were marked racially; compared to the European immigrants, they could not as easily assimilate because of the physical features that marked them as different, as foreign, as other. Moreover, the Asiatic immigrants’ cultures appeared markedly different from the European-derived dominant American culture. Even within the context of European immigrants, those from southern or eastern Europe with more mixed racial and cultural ancestries, made overt by their darker skin tone and hair color and more hybrid cultural traditions, were more likely to remain othered longer — this has also been the case for Latin American immigrants. Historically, according to Werner Sollors, “the

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century 

English [terms] ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethnicity’ ” derive from the “Greek word ethnikos,” which “meant ‘gentile,’ ‘heathen,’ ” and was typically used to refer to “ ‘others’ ” and shifted in English usage to meanings ranging from “ ‘non-Israelite’ ” to “ ‘non-Christian.’ ” While ethnicity in midnineteenthcentury America was attached to the more familiar meaning of “ ‘peculiar to a race or nation,’ ” Sollors argues that the term nevertheless retained the “memory” of “ethnic as other, as nonstandard, [. . .] as not fully American.”5 Consequently, the term ethnicity is not static or neutral, given that it not only is descriptive but also contains moral judgments that serve to effectively contain and exclude groups of people in particular ways depending on the specific cultural and historical context. Because of the slave trade that forcibly brought Africans to the United States to be bought and sold as chattel and positioned slaves as subhumans, as racially inferior, African Americans have tended until very recently to be thought of exclusively in terms of race rather than of ethnicity  — perhaps due in large part to the association of ethnicity with the noticeable increase in immigration that began in the mid­nineteenth century and gained momentum at the turn of the century. As nonimmigrants and former slaves, African Americans held a different position within the landscape of American culture and demographics. In contrast, although Native Americans and many Mexican Americans were also not immigrants, since their presence within the geographical area that now makes up the United States predates the establishment of the nation, they have tended to be viewed in terms of ethnicity, but an ethnicity inflected by race and thus devalued. Since the 1960s, however, assertions of racial and ethnic identity and pride such as the black power movement and the Chicano power movement, among others, have shifted the way in which ethnicity is conceived by effectively revaluing it. As Maria Lauret explains, this shift “towards affirmation is characterized by a search for identity which is positive and/or confrontational rather than tragic and victimized.” 6 These movements asserted and embraced ethnicity tied to race as a form of exclusivist communal identity. While this celebration of ethnicity has had indisputable positive consequences, the exclusivist tendencies of these celebrations are potentially problematic since they reassert processes of othering and exclusions. More recently, in the context of the current dominance of constructivist philosophical ideas, a recasting of ethnicity has emerged that asserts ethnicity as itself essentially a construct, even if it clearly has concrete effects out in the world. As Sollors argues, ethnicity is “an ‘invention,’ a cultural construction,” rather than

  Introduction

based on “any a priori cultural difference,” which nevertheless “does not imply that ethnic conflicts thereby appear less ‘real.’ ” 7 The fiction I analyze in this book co-opts a hybrid version of these two seemingly opposed recent reconceptualizations of ethnicity. While these texts value elements of diverse ethnic traditions and borrow from these traditions, they refuse to view them as static but rather highlight their fluidity by engaging in a creative bricolage to create hybrid — in the sense of new, stronger, healthier, more utopian — versions of concepts addressed differently in the various already hybrid cultural traditions that make up American culture. Rather than embracing ethnic communities as separatist enclaves, these literary texts insist on and value differences within communities themselves. Ethnic cultures are presented as grounded “in particular cultural and historical experiences” rather than in shared “blood or common ancestry,” so that “ethnicity is less a matter of identity than of identification with others who are perceived to share the same plight,” with plight “often articulated in political terms.” 8 These novels posit ethnic cultures as having critical functions and as repositories of concrete useful practices and ideas and yet as always dynamic. Moreover, this fiction demonstrates the ways in which ethnic cultural practices and conceptions in the United States are necessarily hybrid. As Bonnie TuSmith explains, “Ethnic groups are not just products of the ‘Old Country’ transplanted in America but are continually being recreated by their new American experiences.” 9 In slightly different terms, May Joseph argues that “the diasporic movement of peoples from one context to another sometimes unconsciously frees these communities to explore new realms of self-invention.”10 If the United States is an increasingly polyethnic nation and if ethnicity is necessarily constructed and hybrid and yet today is often connected to identity and communal agency, then it is not surprising that the novels I examine in this book look to the diverse, hybrid ethnic traditions to construct their own versions of more communal forms of agency and subjectivity. These novels evidence a particular interest in the prevalence among most American ethnic cultures, and especially those marked by “racial visibility and forced marginality,” as TuSmith explains, of a “collectivist or communal orientation.”11 Because racially marked ethnic groups have tended to be marginalized in a country in which the centers of power remain chiefly in the hands of white men of European descent, they have often depended on community to ensure both individual and group survival. Moreover, because members of these groups have had less access to the

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century 

mechanisms of power that privilege individualism, they have not necessarily adopted individualism as wholeheartedly as have other Americans  — although certainly many have. Furthermore, given that the work of individual, familial, and community sustenance has traditionally been associated with women both in the dominant American culture and in many of the various ethnic groups in the United States, the novels I examine tend to focus on women characters and how they work to create alternative subjectivities and develop communal forms of agency through dynamic processes of community and coalition building that borrow from various ethnic traditions but reject exclusivist and static notions of ethnicity. These texts put their faith in what Paul Lichterman describes as a notion of “community that sustains [. . .] self-redefinition” and is committed to “inclusive participation.”12 While adopting certain ethnic traditional practices that value and sustain community, this fiction opens up community to diversity and to continuous refashioning. By focusing on ethnic communities and on the marginalized in American culture, these novels also assert a valuing of the local and of the concrete material circumstances in which human beings live in the United States. Rather than thinking in terms of large social movements, these texts point out the myriad ways in which individuals and communities construct each other and thereby find ways of acting in the world, of taking actions that have concrete effects on the lives of human beings. Community is reimagined in terms that are dynamic and filled with a kind of utopian vision that nevertheless remains grounded in material conditions. Indeed, these texts embody Delanty’s notion that today community is more likely to take place “in temporary groupings, in the flux of life,” in “a re-enchantment of everyday life,”13 as well as Alberto Melucci’s notion that “collective action is fed by needs that originate in the social fabric of everyday life.”14 By shifting to a notion of communal agency that values everyday life and views the multiple practices that characterize everyday life as sites where individual and communal identities are constructed and can potentially be reimagined, this fiction effectively resituates and reconceives notions of identity and agency rather drastically. The novels’ position is that, if agency is to be possible in a contemporary American culture that contains and constrains individuals, community needs to be reconceived as flexible and in flux, as a function of a dialectic between the individual and the community and between need and choice. Embracing Delanty’s notion that “individuals are not placed into communities only by social forces” but that they also and simultane-

  Introduction

ously “situate themselves in community,”15 these novels acknowledge the workings and power of social forces and yet carve out a space for agency within communities that are open, diverse, dynamic. As such, this fiction by American women actively participates in the current theoretical discussions about the status of the subject and of agency in the contemporary moment; but they do so by linking theory and practice, by engaging in a radical rethinking of key concepts through an imaginative presentation of concrete ways in which such reconceptualizations can materialize out in the world. Moreover, their work is clearly inflected not only by a focus on race and ethnicity but also by feminist theories and practices, which suggests a certain affinity between issues of gender and those of race and ethnicity. Indeed, although race and ethnicity clearly cannot be collapsed with gender, explorations of gender often intersect with those of race and ethnicity in the sense that, in Western cultures, dominant social and economic structures tend to be white male – dominated and tend to devalue and other all who are not white males.16 Consequently, feminist critical theories that explore these structures of power can often be useful in explorations of ethnicity and race, although not always wholesale. That the novels examined in this book are engaged in the theoretical discussions of their day is immediately apparent in their direct addressing of and movement beyond the series of dilemmas in which late twentiethand early twenty-first-century feminists potentially are caught as a result of the poststructuralist and postmodern challenges to the notion of the autonomous humanist subject.17 To summarize briefly, on the one hand, feminists have tended to be suspicious of the seeming erasure of the subject and of agency — which has traditionally been viewed as a function of the centered self-determining subject — as women have become increasingly active in the public sphere, including participating in intellectual and ideological debates; on the other hand, adherence to the Western humanist subject is problematic for some contemporary feminists in that twentieth-century versions of humanism are inextricable from certain abstract forms of instrumental reason and the workings of capitalism, which have resulted in practices of offering subjecthood to a limited number of privileged human beings — and indeed have all too often depended on the othering of entire subsections of the human race, including the categories of women and of racially and ethnically marked people. Moreover, while incredibly productive and provocative, the emphasis on differences in feminist criticism and theory and women’s studies since

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century 

the late 1980s has also effectively splintered any kind of unified feminist or women’s movement. Feminists are seemingly caught in a bind with respect to the notion of differences, in that, historically, large-scale movements have functioned by ignoring differences and marginalizing whole groups of women, so that nostalgia for such movements is problematic; but equally problematic is the inability to address large systemic historically and culturally specific problems when attention is directed exclusively to differences. These dilemmas have thus seriously unsettled notions of subjectivity and agency. While contending that recent fiction by American women addresses and offers ways of moving beyond such dilemmas, I am not suggesting that this fiction merely reflects the current theoretical debates. Rather, I seek to advance the larger claim that this fiction actively participates in and contributes to those debates at the same time that it functions as feminist practice in its construction of alternative models of subjectivity, community, coalition building, and collective agency that retain a sharp attention to differences. These literary texts demonstrate that to give up certain humanist notions of the subject as stable, fixed, or centered need not preclude political action and thus agency. Indeed, these novels offer characters whose subjectivities are composites of multiple ever-changing subject positions but who still function as agents. Chantal Mouffe’s theorization of subjectivity here proves useful to a discussion of ethnicity and race, even if she does not focus on these, because of her insistence that all human beings occupy multiple and dynamic subject positions. For her, identity can be viewed as “an ensemble of ‘subject positions’ that can never be totally fixed in a closed system” and as “always contingent and precarious, temporarily fixed at the intersection of those subject positions.” These points at which subject positions meet or intersect function as “nodal points, partial fixations,” as “precarious forms of identification” that have the potential to construct “forms of unity and common action” that do not depend on “centered subjects or on pre-existing identities or unities.”18 Indeed, as subsequent close readings will demonstrate, the novels I examine explore how the intersections or nodal points between the subject positions of their characters function as historically and culturally specific temporary grounds from which their characters can act by constructing and sustaining communities from which to organize collective political action. Moreover, these texts offer models or figurations for rethinking the ways in which the notions of coalition politics and community agency have been theorized and often enacted in the West.19

10  Introduction

As will be discussed in greater detail later in this introduction, established social movements in the West have tended to retain hierarchical structures, to highlight individual over collective rights, and to emphasize winning — all values traditionally associated with Western white men. In contrast, the fiction examined in this book develops conceptions and offers illustrations of communities and coalitions that are much more communal, holistic, and nonhierarchical; that remain much more fully anchored in the material realm; and that aim at ensuring collective survival and justice — qualities traditionally associated in the West with women and other cultures. Indeed, this fiction explores community and coalition processes that are more accommodative, caring, and loving (again, traits typically associated with women) rather than exploitative, and that are aimed principally at survival and at moving toward new, alternative forms of nonhierarchical justice rather than at maximizing power and winning. Moreover, these novels focus on forms of collective agency that are more local and more temporary than largescale social movements but that nevertheless have concrete effects for their characters, their communities, and potentially the world at large. Because these differences in approach have been gendered in Western conceptual models, feminist theories are useful even if they have to be adapted to account for issues of ethnicity and race. In a nutshell, the literary texts that this project examines share with much current feminist scholarship the impulse to engage creatively issues of subjectivity and agency in order to offer new ways of thinking about how people who have been positioned as powerless, as non- or lesser beings, can be and act in the world. As Nancy Fraser notes, what is needed is “a coherent, integrated, balanced conception of agency, a conception that can accommodate both the power of social constraints and the capacity to act situatedly against them.” In answer to Fraser’s call, this book focuses on fiction that not only demonstrates an awareness that “social identities are discursively constructed in historically specific social contexts,” “are complex and plural,” and “shift over time”20 but also offers models of how subjects can develop (limited) forms of agency that are not only situated but, crucially, community and coalition based — mining other cultural traditions to do so. Indeed, these literary texts reformulate coalition to infuse it more radically with certain attributes of community, namely, community’s space for difference and its emphasis on empathy and ideas of the common good, particularly in terms of issues of collective survival and nonhierarchical forms of justice.

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  11

At the same time, the notion of community itself undergoes an alteration, in that the novels stress the ways in which community is always constructed, dynamic, and necessarily a function of coalition work among the people that make up the community, so that even ideas of the common good are never a given but must be constructed. Individual interests are always in dialogue with group interests within communities (whether that dialogue is acknowledged or not), and communities are always shifting as members enter and leave and as the interests of individual members change. As such, communities have the potential to be inclusive and to create spaces for difference — although they can also function to ensure sameness through exclusionary practices. According to Iris Young, Western representations of the ideal community typically “privilege unity over difference” and “sympathy over recognition of the limits of one’s understanding of others from their point of view” and thus tend “to suppress differences.”21 However, Fred Dallmayr makes a good case for rethinking community as not “imply[ing] a simple juxtaposition of supposedly independent agents” or a unity but rather, unlike “the sphere of movements or fused groups,” as fostering a more “communitarian mode [that] cultivates diversity.”22 Indeed, the novels I examine demonstrate that collective agency in the name of justice and survival requires both coalition and community, which cannot be separated if community is acknowledged as always in the process of construction and, in Joan Scott’s terms, as “a strategically organized set of relationships.”23 Coalitions aimed at survival and justice cannot depend solely on an individualistic, agonistic model; and progressive activism cannot depend on naturalized, fixed, and/or exclusivist notions of community. As feminists of all stripes have insisted, agency is always “coproduced.”24 As Mouffe more specifically insists, “collective, public action” requires “the construction of a ‘we’ in the context of diversity of conflict.”25 My contention is that the novels I discuss in this book are in sync with and further contribute to such feminist theorizing about the possibilities and positive ramifications of coproducing a communal form of agency in the context of cultural hybridity. This notion of constructing a “we,” as Mouffe puts it, does not negate the individual subject, however; rather, it depends on a conception of the subject as involving a continuous interchange and interdependence between the individual and various communities. Individuals create the “we” that constitutes communities and coalitions of human beings into collective actors. At the same time, however, those communities and co-

12  Introduction

alitions create individuals who find mechanisms for agency in a contemporary world that in so many ways constructs and circumscribes their actions and very beings. The novels I discuss in this book retain a notion of the individual while moving past a narrow version of American individualism as they find ways of reimagining subjectivity and agency in more collective terms. Moreover, they do so by reconceptualizing community and coalition to move beyond the hierarchical opposition between the public and the private and thereby make possible a revaluation of community and coalition as interconnected concepts that need not be associated with official and/or large-scale movements to carry possibilities of agency out in the material world. Oddly enough, however, given the high level across the humanities of recent scholarly interest in and debates about subjectivity and agency, what little literary scholarship exists on the relationship between subjectivity, agency, community, and coalition politics appears almost exclusively in postcolonial studies — for example, in the work of R. Radha­ krishnan and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.26 In contrast, I am exploring this relationship in the context of contemporary American fiction by women that places an emphasis on ethnicity and race in conjunction with gender and class. This specific focus makes it possible to demonstrate the ways in which dominant Western conceptualizations of the relationship between community, coalition, subjectivity, and agency, as well as recent dominant theoretical formulations and practices of community and coalition politics, have effectively masked and effaced other conceptual trajectories and other practices of community and coalition politics that might be useful as the United States navigates its increasingly multicultural makeup. Established dominant conceptualizations of and narratives about practices of community and coalition building have such visibility and sheer power that they make it difficult to see or imagine any others. However, I am arguing in this book that other conceptual trajectories and other practices of community and coalition politics do exist and often emerge from and/or are represented within Western cultural products  — particularly in those that focus on often marginalized ethnic American cultural traditions in the United States, as is the case with the fiction I examine. Nevertheless, because of the incredible sway of established conceptions of and histories of recent attempts at community and coalition building, more specific discussions of how recent novels by American women offer alternative, hybridized conceptions of community and

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  13

coalition to creatively reformulate notions of subjectivity and agency require a thorough understanding of the ruling conceptualizations and histories. The remainder of this introduction seeks to position the literary analyses found in the succeeding four chapters with respect to established constructions and discussions of dominant and emerging conceptions of community and of the dominant mechanisms by which community action and coalition politics have been enacted and theorized recently in the West, with an emphasis on the case of the United States since the inception of the civil rights movement. Conceptual discussions of community and discussions of how coalition practices have been theorized and enacted are intimately interrelated, even if they are often not treated as such within scholarly work and even if, for the sake of clarity, I discuss them separately here — with the result that at times the discussions are bound to overlap. In contrast, the literary texts I discuss in subsequent chapters approach these issues of community and coalition and of theory and practice as intimately interconnected, which is what I believe enables them to make innovative contributions to the intellectual debate around these topics.

The novels I discuss in this book work to reinvigorate and reimagine community in the face of and in response to an American culture that offered naïve, artificial, short-lived forms of communitarianism in the 1960s and 1970s followed by a relentless reemphasis on individualism and materialism as the reigning values during the 1980s and 1990s. During those same decades, particularly the latter two, poverty and the gap between the rich and the poor increased — with the poor comprised predominantly of single mothers, children, ethnic/racial minorities, and combinations thereof. At the same time, the United States has become more and more diverse demographically. This increase in diversity and poverty has given rise to a renewed need for and interest in community as a means of ensuring survival and of securing the good life promised by one of the wealthiest nations, if not the wealthiest nation, in the world. Contributing to this response, the literary texts by women that I examine build optimistically upon ethnically diverse models of community, as well as on visions of community that arise out of feminist and ethical theories. In contrast, many texts by men have responded to the same situation in much bleaker and certainly less utopian terms by emphasizing the paranoia and lack of hope pervading a culture increas-

14  Introduction

ingly devoid of the possibility of agency — see, for example, the novels of the same period by writers like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. While the idea of community is an old one, with the modern idea of community in the West arguably having “its origins in the Greek political community, the polis,”27 it has been and continues to be variously conceived. For instance, Aristotle (384 – 322 b.c.) believed that “people came together in a community setting for the enjoyment of mutual association, to fulfill basic needs, and to find meaning in life,” whereas Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) “saw community as the natural process of people coming together to maximize their self-interest.”28 Such contrasting conceptions indicate that the notion of community, even within the confines of the Western tradition, is not a simple given and, therefore, requires careful analysis. Indeed, the concept of community needs to be recognized as always constructed within a particular sociohistorical context and to satisfy particular values and, thus, as necessarily strategic and dynamic. Recent Western feminist and ethical theories, for example, appear to derive from an Aristotelian conception of community, whereas the dominant paradigm within the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century rests on a more Hobbesian notion of community; and the fiction I examine builds on the former in conjunction with ethnically specific ideas and practices of community. Not only is community a dynamic concept, but actual communities are always dynamic entities since they are necessarily a function of coalition work among the different people that make up the communities —  although, in totalitarian forms of exclusivist communities, only certain people are allowed to be full-fledged members. While it is commonly understood that people tend to create communities based on place or geography, shared interests or identities, affection or empathy, or all of the above,29 such linkages do not in and of themselves produce communities: community requires ongoing negotiation and coalition work. In addition, despite the various ways in which it has been understood, the term community has tended in all instances, according to Delanty, to “designate both an idea about belonging and a particular social phenomenon.”30 Arguably, in the United States, the last decades of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century have witnessed for many of its citizens, as Emilia Martinez-Brawley notes, “a growing regard for the merits of memberships in community” as a means “to escape the freedom of individualism” and to provide “meaning, a sense of belonging, and well-being among people”31 in a culture increasingly characterized by fragmentation, dislocation, individualism, globaliza-

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  15

tion, the power of capital, and an ever-growing gap between the rich and the poor. Furthermore, this renewed American interest in community exists within the larger context of what Delanty terms “a worldwide search for roots, identity and aspirations for belonging.”32 While the contemporary yearning and nostalgia for community clearly indicates a need for belonging, a longing for what Maurice Blanchot terms “a being-together,”33 communities historically have all too often tended to participate in exclusionary practices. As Delanty notes, the Greek polis itself, which continues to serve as the ideal of a community in which “politics was not confined to the state but was conducted in everyday life in self-government by citizens,” functioned via “a high degree of exclusion [. . .] of others”34 — such as women and slaves. Indeed, conceptualizing community in terms of a fusion of state and society can lead to totalitarianism, as the experiences of Nazism and Fascism during the course of the twentieth century in Europe made clear. As De­ lanty argues, both Hitler and Mussolini can be understood as responding to a utopian “quest for community,” but one that was grounded in right-wing, “chauvinistic and authoritarian kinds of nationalism” and thus emphasized exclusivity.35 Such exclusivist instances of community based on fervent nationalism (and certainly more recent examples such as the former USSR and Yugoslavia come to mind) demonstrate the potentially dangerous relationship between identity and community if, as Marjorie Mayo argues, it involves “turning inwards, rather than turning outwards, to challenge the common sources of oppression”36 and thus engaging in exclusivist practices. Being nostalgic for community is thus potentially suspect, given that communities have historically had a penchant for excluding whole segments of human beings via violent practices as a necessary means of asserting their community status. That being said, historical precedents for nontotalitarian but still exclusivist utopian communities in the West do exist, the best known of which are “the early monastic orders [. . .] founded in the early Middle Ages” and the relatively more recent “radical communal movements of the Amish community and the Kibbutzim,” all of which sought “a radical alternative” to the world of their day.37 However, even in these much more positive forms, exclusivist models of community in the last instance are problematic in that they actively seek homogeneity; consequently, their utopian gestures always remain directed inward — which, as Delanty argues, leaves little “room for individuality and creativity.”38 In contrast, the contemporary American fiction by women that I ex-

16  Introduction

amine in this book explores possibilities for community that focus more fully on the other as fully human and that are more inclusive and, indeed, embrace diversity, thus promoting individuality (but not individualism) rather than erasing it as in the case of exclusivist communities. Indeed, these texts share Zygmunt Bauman’s vision that the only hope for community at the turn of the twenty-first century is in “a community woven together from sharing and mutual care; a community of concern and responsibility for the equal right to be human and the equal ability to act on that right.”39 While the language of equality and equal rights has grounded American individualism, it need not do so, as Bauman’s formulation makes clear. Bauman gestures, at the end of a book that is otherwise quite pessimistic about the possibility of community, toward a conception of community that divests itself of self-interested, anticommunal forms of individualism through an emphasis on an ethics of care and, thereby, a more communal notion of rights and equality, a notion of collective responsibility, and a revaluing of all human life.40 The novels I examine take up this call for radically alternative notions of community that value an ethics of care and in a variety of ways offer hybridized versions of such communities. The models of community that these texts offer envision the individual as necessarily engaged in a relationship of interdependence with the community through a process of care and responsibility and an acceptance of others in all their diversity. Very much in the spirit of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical ideas, these literary texts reject the opposition between self and other that has dominated Western thought and instead present the self as being fully human only in his/her acceptance of a “responsibility” for and a “welcoming [of] the Other.” 41 As Levinas makes clear, taking responsibility for the other is evidence of a “love of the other” as a human being.42 Such an acceptance makes possible a notion of community in which “solidarity [. . .] is responsibility” for the other and in which answering to this “responsibility [. . .] empties the self of its imperialism and of its egoism” and yet “confirms it in its selfhood.” 43 As William Corlett explains it, only then can “mutual service without domination” occur.44 Although Levinas does not posit the other in terms of ethnicity and race per se, his emphasis on the mutually beneficial process of recognizing the common humanity of the self and the other and moving beyond egoism and imperialism makes his theoretical model useful to a discussion of ways of creating positive forms of community within an ethnically and racially diverse nation such as the United States. In slightly different terms, such a notion of community based upon

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  17

responsibility and love for the other assumes interrelations between its members that are akin to friendships, in the sense that, according to Ray Pahl, friendships are always in process and depend on “choice,” “fidelity, solidarity and trust,” as well as on “reciprocity” — the latter particularly in the case of female friends.45 In a similar vein, the alternative communities created by the fiction I analyze are constructed on the basis of, and in turn value and validate, processes of caring, loving, and nurturing others — all outward-directed, communal activities — and assert that these processes are what instantiates the self as a human being. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms, “the existence of being-in-common” is that “which gives rise to the existence of being-self.”46 Being, subjectivity, and individuality thus require responsible, caring interaction with others in these models of community grounded in ethical theories. Furthermore, this interconnectedness between the individual and the community is what allows for agency, an agency that is simultaneously individual and communal: the individual gains subjectivity and is empowered to act as a consequence of her/his participation in the community, and the construction of a community is made possible by individuals actively coming together. These reformulations of community allow for a parallel reformulation of the American ideal of individualism as it presents itself at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Given that even the early American pioneer or cowboy version of individualism as “independence from society”47 was impossible to sever from the development of the United States as a market economy, it is not surprising that the current dominant version of individualism is tied to the marketplace and to the national myth of the American dream. Lichterman aptly describes this dominant conception of individualism as entailing “individual hard work and sacrifice in the service of ‘getting ahead.’ ”48 This notion of “getting ahead” is inextricable from the capitalism that has long dominated American culture and is synonymous with making more money and rising in class standing, all of which are tied to power in the United States. Moreover, “getting ahead” implies competition —  getting ahead of someone else — and thus creates a self-interested, anticommunal form of individualism. Ironically, as Walter Benn Michaels points out, this market-based version of individualism situates “individuality as difference within ‘the system’ ”49 and thus could be viewed as, in effect, curbing individuality. This emphasis on and valuing of “getting ahead” as an ideal also applies to the United States as a nation, asserting itself through its rapid de-

18  Introduction

velopment of capitalism and measuring its success in terms of its wealth. More specifically, as Annette Baier notes, from the start the United States as a “new republic was spawning the new commercial and capitalist virtues of individual market enterprise.”50 Given that individual market enterprise subsequently went into even higher gear with the rapid industrialization that characterized America after the Civil War and into the twentieth century, it is fair to say that the American conception of individualism developed alongside the nation’s capitalist expansions. Although, in reaction to the development of capitalism and individualism, nineteenth-century America was the site of a slew of experimental noncapitalist communities, most of these remained relatively small, selfcontained, and short-lived. Another interrelated aspect of American individualism is its link to manhood and the public realm in the formulation of the self-made man. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his influential Democracy in America (1835), “The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely upon his own exertions.”51 Although the term self-made man was coined by Henry Clay in 1832, according to Michael Kimmel, Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790) is often cited as “the first American prototype of the Self-Made Man” — who “derives identity entirely from a man’s activities in the public sphere, measured by accumulated wealth and status, by geographic and social mobility,” and by “individual achievement.”52 Although initially virtue and moral self-discipline were “causally linked” to material rewards, Winfried Fluck argues that this link became “increasingly problematized in the period after the Civil War,” which witnessed a sharp rise in industrialization and materialism.53 Indeed, the measure of the self-made man’s success became more and more tied to wealth and social standing and less and less tied to moral virtue. The ideal of the self-made man thus clearly contributes to the American notion of individualism, which has the result of making American individualism focused not only on the market and issues of wealth and status but also on enforcing a hierarchical opposition between the public and private realms — since success can be proved only in the public sphere associated with men and with capitalism. This overvaluation of the public sphere inherently devalues the private sphere most often associated with women and communal ties, thus further severing American individualism from more communal values linked to community, caring, and nurturing. Valuing the individual need not lead to this highly gendered American capitalist-inspired version of anticommunal individualism, however.

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  19

Historically, Enlightenment philosophy’s championing of the rights of the individual arguably marks a high point for Western and even worldwide civilization whose repercussions are still felt today. As Patricia Werhane notes, this emphasis on individual rights occurred within the context of a notion of “humankind as constitutively social beings.”54 Indeed, the notion of individual rights arguably presupposes a community of individuals. The more contemporary term human rights further accentuates the idea that the development of the philosophy of individual rights concerns human beings in the context of humanity, which cannot be thought outside a social and thus collective context. As Daniel Shanahan points out, the positive side of individualism is that it has fostered “an increasing degree of respect for human dignity and human rights.”55 More specifically, as Kwame Anthony Appiah notes, during the twentieth century, “both Europe and North America” have demonstrated enough concern for “economic and social rights” to “guarantee certain minimum conditions of welfare for every citizen”56 — actions that clearly demonstrate that human rights have a collective aspect. In light of Levinas’s philosophical ideas delineated earlier, acting on a concern for human rights can be interpreted and understood as an acceptance of the responsibility for the other that is the marker of being human and moves away from a purely self-interested, egotistical self. Being human thus entails an individuality that is wedded to others and embedded within a larger collective of human beings — ideas developed within the novels I explore in subsequent chapters. The concept of individual or human rights is thus difficult to envision in a purely individualistic way. Indeed, one of the problems with dominant American conceptions of individualism, according to Shanahan, is that they have “emphasized one side of human experience, individual subjectivity, at the expense of another, pluralistic subjectivity”57 — whereas the two are arguably inextricable. The power that wealth has accrued in the United States and the linkage asserted via the myth of the American dream between individual hard work and perseverance and the acquisition of wealth have increasingly eroded in the United States the importance of the collective (even if lip service continues to be paid to the importance of communities) in dominant conceptions of individual rights or of subjectivity and identity.58 What then gets buried is the idea that, as Appiah explains, the self is “not a presocial thing,” that self-construction is “a creative response to our capacities and our circumstance” so that identity necessarily has both a “personal” and a “collective dimension.”59 Even though community is given short shrift in dominant American conceptions of

20  Introduction

individualism, in practice, communities in all sorts of shapes and forms abound and, as previously mentioned, the current cultural atmosphere is filled with expressions of longing for community. Particularly following the civil rights and New Left movements in the United States, the idea of community has been reinvigorated on both a cultural and a political front. Because these movements were initially community based and remained community operated even after coalitions were formed to create national movements, it became apparent that, as Delanty argues, “community can take a civic and even a radical form” and thus “can have a transformative role.”60 Moreover, the communities that developed around issues such as civil rights, student rights, the Vietnam War, poverty, and, later, women’s rights, gay rights, and ecology in many instances were diverse, going beyond a common identity in terms of geographical location, race, ethnicity, class, gender, or age  — thus demonstrating a version of community as culturally constructed around shared political aims and particular subject positions rather than on preestablished forms of identity. Ideas about community have thus changed, as Delanty notes, to ones that acknowledge that “community is socially constructed” rather than “identified simply with a locality” and is “formed in collective action” rather than as “merely the expression of an underlying cultural identity.” One strand of thinking about community as socially constructed has been associated with communitarianism, which defines community in terms of “shared values, solidarity and attachments” but, arguably, has tended to “offer a conservative vision of society, stressing small groups, voluntarism and patriotism” and appealing “to moral sentiments and civic virtues,” and thus “is clearly not a view of community as an alternative vision of society”61 — with the exception of the more marginal forms of communitarianism associated with radical pluralism and feminism, as exemplified by the work of Young and Mouffe discussed earlier in this chapter. Another problem with much communitarian work, according to Lichterman, is that it tends to assume “dichotomous distinctions between the communal and the individual”; in contrast, work associated with more “radical democratic” views posits the idea of “fulfilling individual potential in a social context” and thus of “a form of political community that emphasizes individual voice without sacrificing the common good.”62 Delanty explains that this latter mode of thinking about community highlights “the connection between community and social movements” in the sense that it stresses the ways in which “people from diverse backgrounds can come together in communal activism united

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  21

by a common commitment and the solidarity that results.” Moreover, this link is most overt in social movements that aim toward and identify themselves with “social transformation” — and thus with agency.63 This book specifically examines the ways in which contemporary American fiction by women not only engages such ideas of communal activism, common commitment, and social transformation but also reshapes them. This reshaping occurs by emphasizing to a much greater extent the potential of local communal activism; by unraveling so completely the distinction between the public and the private spheres that they resituate activism in terms of the very local and of arenas of life not usually associated with activism (since activism has tended to be associated with the public realm); by moving away from organized social movements and positing much more fluid and temporary, but nevertheless activist, communities; and by orienting goals and commitments around specific issues of human survival and justice that require practical means of challenging, in the hope of ending, white male – centered hierarchical sociocultural structures on the level of the material world of everyday existence and not just theoretically. Before leaving the topic of community, however, let me note one additional arena of scholarly work that has examined a particular aspect of the intersections of community and social movements in the United States. A number of scholars interested in the idea of community note that American sociology focused heavily on the study of community during the early part of the twentieth century and then again following Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 launching of the War on Poverty.64 As “the first government-sponsored attempt to involve the poor directly and formally in decision making, advocacy, and service provision in their own communities,” according to Nancy Naples, the War on Poverty “called for Community Action Programs” to be developed.65 Consequently, a need arose for both constructing models of such community-based programs and studying the community-based programs that developed. Since that time, community has been studied systematically within the emerging and overlapping fields of social science known as community development and community organizing, which have since the 1960s found an institutional home in schools of social work, building on the premise that “a group of people working together can initiate social action to improve their life chances.”66 While community development and organizing as programs of social action fall outside the scope of this book, the ways in which the disciplines of community development and organizing have defined and

22  Introduction

conceptualized community within the extensive literature they have produced are helpful to my discussion of notions of community and agency in the novels I examine, particularly since they tend to view community as a potential means of moving toward increased social justice. As Marie Weil argues, “Concepts of community, mutual responsibility, and interdependence should be central if we are to develop a political economy grounded in social justice.”67 Most of the community development and organizing scholarship supports a multipronged conception of community, such as that of James A. Christenson and Jerry W. Robinson, Jr., who define community in terms of “(1) people (2) within a geographically bounded area (3) involved in social interaction and (4) with one or more psychological ties with each other and with the place they live.”68 In addition, the most recent scholarship stresses the need to address issues of race, ethnicity, culture, and gender with respect to community.69 Discussions of community development and organizing overlap in many ways with the ideas of the fiction I analyze in this book. Not only does contemporary community development and organizing scholarship assume that, according to Lichterman, “activism implies a sense of connectedness to others, a sense of obligation,” but it also views activist communities as “purposive, interactive creations rather than [merely] logical responses to self-evident social problems.”70 Communities are a result of individuals exerting agency, although that agency is made possible at least in part by the very idea of community itself — again, the individual and the community are intertwined. Moreover, a good deal of attention has been directed recently to the role of women in community development and organizing in the United States since the mid-1960s, which is useful for understanding the kinds of alternative conceptions of community constructed within the novels by American women that I examine in this book. As Naples’s extensive study of women’s community work both within the context of the War on Poverty and subsequent to its disintegration demonstrates, women “contributed vital paid and unpaid services to their communities,” created “informal social networks” to “fight inequality and discrimination,” engaged in “activism as a central component of mothering and community caretaking,” tended not to see their work as political, “described their commitment to community work as part of a larger struggle for social justice and economic security,” and focused on consensus building.71 While Naples’s study focused on poor and lower-middle-class urban women and thus cannot be generalized to all women, it does indicate that at least these women conceptualized community in ways that intersected with their

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  23

roles as mothers and caretakers and with their positioning within the private sphere in an American culture that associates the political with the public sphere. Research by other scholars supports Naples’s contentions to the extent that they can arguably be generalized to include a larger segment of women activists. For example, Naomi Abrahams argues that her own fieldwork similarly demonstrates that local “community participation is one avenue through which women engage in political and service work for the betterment of themselves, their children, and their communities” and that women view “community and identity” as interdependent.72 Such findings are not consonant with earlier scholarship on community organizing, which tended to stress the public nature of community organizing work and professional, mostly male, organizers. The still prominent Alinsky model of community organizing, for instance, developed by Saul D. Alinsky in his own organizing work beginning in the 1930s and in the books he published from the mid-1940s to the 1970s, “sees the community as part of the market-driven, exchange-based public sphere needing to be organized to effectively compete with the public sphere interests” and thereby “emphasizes self-interest, confrontation, professional organizers, and formal organizations.” In contrast, according to Susan Stall and Randy Stoecker, women-centered models of community organizing tend to grow out of “the expanded private sphere of the neighborhood” and to emphasize “relationship building, coactive power, indigenous organizers, and informal organizational structures.”73 Consequently, women-centered forms of community organizing undermine the traditional distinction between the public and the private spheres and reject the association of politics and activism exclusively with the public sphere — as do all the novels I examine here. Naples’s argument that many women community activists engage in what she calls “activist mothering” even more specifically pinpoints the ways in which their work effectively jettisons the distinction between the public and the private realms. “Activist mothering” redefines mothering in much broader terms that move beyond caring for children within one’s own family and include “all actions, including social activism, that addressed the needs of their children and community,” thus stressing the interrelatedness of “labor, politics, and mothering.”74 As Abrahams similarly notes, “Motherhood is [thus] transformed to include community.”75 Moreover, for lower-class women and women of color, who historically have been “treated as units of labor,” the distinction between the private and the public realms was never instantiated in

24  Introduction

their lives, given that they were active in the workforce and at the same time “raised and nurtured children in extended family networks within communities struggling for survival.”76 Research focused on women’s activism and community practices thus sheds light on an alternative notion of community, which, according to Naples, derives not from pure self-interest but rather from a wish to effect “collective empowerment” and which positions community activism “as a dialectic between ongoing personal and collective experiences of injustice”77 — ideas that inform and continue to be developed within the fiction I analyze. Virginia Held argues that such a view of community places value on “caring work” and “social connectedness” as enabling social cohesion and collective well-being.78 Going one step further, Patricia Hill Collins asserts that “the power of intense connectedness” can “foster a revolutionary politics.”79 Indeed, women activists tend to link the notions of caring and wellbeing with issues of social justice and human rights in a collectivist sense. Both Abrahams and Naples found that the women community activists they interviewed were interested in social justice. More specifically, Naples insists, they strove to organize “collective campaigns for civil rights and economic equality” aimed not only at bettering their own lives and those of the members of their community but also at “enhancing the connections among community residents to sustain the fabric of their communities.”80 This description of women’s communityorganizing work dovetails nicely with my earlier discussion of contemporary ethical theories that elaborate a notion of community grounded in the local arena and in an ethics of care and that envision community as always constructed and fluid. Indeed, the literary texts I examine in this book construct their visions of community at least in part on the basis of both ethical theories, particularly as they intersect with a feminist standpoint, and a history of women’s communityorganization practices in the United States. Although I want to insist on the interconnections between the individual, the community, social movements, and the coalition work required for the construction of activist communities and social movements, scholarly work for the most part discusses them separately; and so I will now turn to the specific issue of coalition.

The novels I analyze in this book envision new forms of community in part by reimagining coalition processes themselves, demonstrating the

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  25

ways in which coalition processes are necessary to create and sustain any collectivity. These texts thus understand community and coalition building as fluid, interconnected activities. In contrast, critical discussions of social movements and coalition politics have tended to assume that coalition work proceeds between already established groups or entities. Moreover, large-scale social movements tend not to be discussed in terms of communities at all, except inasmuch as they reach out to communities, conceived as local and informal and thus as lacking the clout of the more national and public social movements. Characterizations of the various activist social movements of the 1960s in the United States and, more generally, in the West instead emphasize their championing of coalition politics — commonly understood as the combining of “human and material resources to effect a specific change” that cannot be brought about independently as a means of achieving equality.81 While many of their successes can be traced to their adoption of coalition-building strategies, the weaknesses and failures of these movements arguably stem from their particular conceptions and material practices of coalition building. The largest problem to my mind is that these movements have all too often operated on models of coalition that in the end remained hierarchical in structure because they retained the notion of a centered stable subject that was male and gained dominance through processes of othering. Indeed, the ultimate failure or fading of many of these radical coalition movements added strength to and moved forward Western philosophical challenges to the humanist subject and resulted in a cultural rejection of the possibility of assuming large stable common grounds — which has had large consequences for all subsequent political movements. In addition, for feminists, this rejection has been a function not only of the failure of prominent activist movements but also of how these movements marginalized women, particularly from the leadership ranks. For example, as most studies of the civil rights movement in the United States make dramatically apparent, the officers and formal leaders of the leading civil rights organizations were male black ministers who did not allow women into their ranks. However, as the essays collected by Vicki Crawford and her colleagues in the book Women in the Civil Rights Movement indicate, women were not only very active but also highly influential within the day-to-day running of these organizations, as well as in setting the agenda for the civil rights movement and constructing a model of participatory democracy that later student-led political organizations used. The ideals of participatory democracy en-

26  Introduction

tailed a moving away from a dynamic that gives power to the few and functions through the threat of violence and instead involved, as Benjamin Barber explains, “extensive and active engagement of citizens in the self-governing process,” in a direct fashion, “day in and day out, in all matters that affect them in their common lives.”82 As Carol Mueller argues, “The basic themes of participatory democracy were first articulated and given personal witness in the activism of Ella Baker.” Mueller goes on to note, however, that “the sources of ideas that guide the transformation and renewal of societies are often obscured by dramatic events and charismatic leaders that fit the media’s emphasis on conflict and celebrity and the public’s demand for mythic leaders and heroic sacrifice,”83 thus implying that women activists have not been given adequate credit for their contributions either by their own organizations or by many subsequent studies of the civil rights movement. As an anonymous Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee position paper, “Women in the Movement,” presented in November 1964 succinctly articulated, activist women at times were frustrated by the sexism they encountered: “Women are the crucial factor that keeps the movement running on a day-to-day basis. Yet they are not given equal say-so when it comes to day-to-day decision making.” Moreover, the inherent “assumption of male superiority” that women were complaining about is exemplified fully in Stokely Carmichael’s now infamous rebuttal to the position paper when he joked that “the only position for women in SNCC is prone.”84 Nevertheless, according to Belinda Robnett, many African American women did assume positions of leadership within the various civil rights organizations, but as what she calls “bridge leaders” rather than as “formal leaders.” The function of bridge leaders was “to foster ties between the movement and the community” and thereby “to mobilize and sustain the movement,” which thus positioned many African American women out in the field with a lot more power and freedom than they had ever had. Indeed, Robnett makes the argument that the achievements of “the civil rights movement” are attributable to this “division of labor between primary formal organization and bridging organization,” each of which served a crucial function.85 What is interesting about this discussion of women’s leadership roles within the civil rights movement is that it positions these women as connected to and thus able to enlist the people and the local communities, so that activism and coalition work are here grounded in the material and the local — something that the novels I examine insist upon. However, “with the rise of Black national-

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  27

ism, Black women began to experience a decline in their autonomy and free spaces,” which they had cultivated as bridge leaders.86 Indeed the black power movement was more rigidly hierarchical and gendered both in organization and theoretical positioning. For example, the emphasis that Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton place on “self-interest” in their discussion of what they see as “viable coalitions” positions the black power movement squarely within dominant, male-centered conceptualizations of coalition and of American notions of individualism  — which is ironic in light of their call for the need to challenge “Western norms and values.”87 Women within the northern New Left also increasingly felt alienated and exploited in the late 1960s as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) grew by leaps and bounds. As Sarah Evans documents in Personal Politics (1979): “For all its emphasis on personal relationships, on openness, honesty, and participatory democracy, the northern student left was highly male-dominated.” Although the membership of SDS “reflected the ratio of women to men in the student population,” all the public positions were held by men while women remained largely invisible. Moreover, SDS “reinforced the traditional roles” of men and women in society “by building on a competitive intellectual style” that assumed that “intellectual work was primarily a male task.”88 The material experiences of women working for and participating in the civil rights and New Left movements thus illustrate the claims made by much recent feminist scholarship that Western logic derives from a binary and highly gendered hierarchical mode of thought endemic to the major Western philosophical systems that has traditionally opposed man and woman and associated man with intellect and rationality and woman with the material or physical and irrationality.89 Indeed, by the late 1960s, the prominent social movements in the United States, most of which had championed participatory democracy, increasingly showed evidence of reinforcing rather than undoing traditional Western hierarchies and binaries — especially their gendered aspects. In this book, I am arguing that a good deal of contemporary fiction by women responds to this trend by offering alternative models of coalition work. Interestingly, the idea of coalition politics itself has been masculinized not only in its various enactments in the 1960s activist movements, as just discussed, but also in the ways in which it has been theorized in the West within the disciplines of political science, economics, sociology, and psychology. Within political science, for example, coalition theory is a thriving field of study and has since the early 1960s been

28  Introduction

discussed in terms of mathematical models. As William H. Riker asserts in the preface of his groundbreaking book The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962), which is cited in almost all texts that succeed it, using “abstract reasoning” as in the case of “mathematical symbolism” will enable “political science to rise above the level of wisdom literature and indeed to join economics and psychology in the creation of genuine sciences of human behavior”; Riker thus clearly privileges science over wisdom.90 Given that twentieth-century versions of abstract reasoning and modern science have tended in practice to be white-male centered and have been implicated in various forms of domination and power (including the Nazi-led Holocaust), however, championing a mathematical and abstract form of reasoning as the only way to theorize coalition politics seems to suffer from potential weaknesses, to say the least.91 Moreover, although mathematical models can be extremely useful in a variety of ways, they are clearly limited, in light of the impossibility of accounting for all possible variables in a given sociocultural context. The literature on coalition theory tends to gloss over these limitations of mathematical models for their enterprise and, as a result, discusses coalition politics in rather narrow terms. For example, Riker’s adherence to abstract reasoning leads him to construct a model of coalition building that assumes the existence of “a decision making body” and institutions as bases for coalitions and assumes that “rational man wants [. . .] to win,” “to maximize power.”92 Much of the current literature on coalition politics unquestioningly builds on Riker’s work and increasingly utilizes mathematical as well as market models. In contrast, the interest of the fiction I examine in this book lies in exploring and imagining the possibilities of coalition building and community agency on the margins of dominant institutions and principally as a means of surviving and of moving toward new, alternative forms of nonhierarchical justice rather than as a means only of maximizing power. Indeed, these novels seek to reconceptualize power itself in collective rather than individualistic terms, as power with rather than power over. As Jane Mansbridge argues, feminist thinkers and activists reconceived power as “power with” as a means of envisioning “power not only as dominance but also as ‘energy, capacity, and effectiveness.’ ”93 This notion of power with reinvigorates the conception of coalition through rejecting stable hierarchical structures — particularly patriarchal ones that depend on the threat of violence and violence itself (power over) — and reframing power as derived from dynamic, collective interactions. The literary texts I explore also reconceive the notion of justice itself as

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  29

fluid, as always already fully contextualized, as an ever-changing product of social construction, and never simply as a given, transcendent, or universal entity. These novels thus participate in recent discussions of justice that have emphasized the ways in which “justice is inseparable from social practices” and thus “cannot be examined ahistorically, for it changes in relation to changes in power.”94 Indeed, recent scholarship makes clear that the concept of justice is necessarily constructed within historically specific power structures.95 Such conceptions of justice share an understanding that justice is both fluid and socially constructed and that any claims to universality must be understood as “perspectival universality,” according to Milton Fisk, in the sense that “society provides the perspective from which justice is done” and from which “ ‘principles of justice’ are formulated.”96 If justice is understood as inseparable from its sociohistorical context, then by extension injustice is also a function of sociohistorical context. Indeed, as Hendrik Hartog asserts, justice is necessarily “framed by the claim of injustice” within any particular historical context.97 For example, given the centrality of the notion of individualism in the West at least since the Enlightenment, Western notions of justice are arguably heavily individualistic and most often take the form of a rhetoric of equal rights that is difficult to sever from its association with white men. Indeed, as is clear from the ongoing battles in Western democracies to claim equal rights for women and nonwhites, equal rights have not naturally been guaranteed to all human beings and have historically been associated with moneyed white men. Only those human beings recognized as individuals under the law can rightfully make a claim for equal rights within post-Enlightenment systems of justice; and, as history makes clear, all human beings have not always been granted equal recognition as individuals. As Dallmayr asserts, “From the beginning, individualism carried overtones of segregation and willful arrogance” and “a domineering impulse,” especially “human mastery” over nature and the powerless.98 Inevitably, then, conceptualizations of justice in the West remain inseparable from historically specific inequitable power relations that are perpetuated by complex systemic codes as to who counts as an individual under the law. Some feminist scholars have worked to counter the dominant conception of justice by delineating an ethics of care that they claim is more common to the women they interview and that emphasizes “connection, not hurting, care, and response” rather than justice and rights. By locating an alternative mechanism for moral thinking in “the process

30  Introduction

of coming to know others” through “care and connection,” scholars like Carol Gilligan offer a way to begin to rethink issues of justice.99 However, while Gilligan makes clear that the differences she delineates between men’s ethics of justice and women’s ethics of care “arise in a social context,”100 setting up these two ethics in binary terms can limit a full exploration and reconceptualization of justice. As John Broughton argues, “Gilligan’s separation and sharp contrast of ‘male’ and ‘female’ normative ethics and metaethics seems, in her own terms, extremely ‘masculine’ in its emphasis on difference and boundary.”101 However, much contemporary American fiction by women, and in particular fiction focusing on race and ethnicity, tends to seek alternatives to such a duality and to posit an ethics of justice that interweaves care with equality and fairness. Caring is reconfigured in these texts as a function of coalition processes, as a collective endeavor with activist claims, as a mechanism for addressing sociopolitical inequalities. The more communal aspects of these newly envisioned coalitions result in an increased emphasis on nurturing, but a nurturing that is reconceived as a political, critical activity. In this book, I argue that much contemporary American fiction by women offers models of feminist forms of care and nurturing that move beyond the traditional association of care and nurturing with the feminine, private, and therefore devalued realms of emotions and sentiment; indeed, they reenvision emotions and sentiment as potentially critical and political activities.102 Moreover, by borrowing from various hybrid American ethnic cultural traditions, these texts reveal a bounty of other ways of formulating and thinking about care in more collective and activist terms. They reformulate coalition politics by emphasizing agency as collective, as aimed toward survival and alternative forms of justice, and as no longer dependent on centered stable subjects. Such a reformulation is in conversation with and contributes to recent critiques of the humanist subject, as well as to notions of subjectivity as dynamic — as entailing a constant taking up and giving up of various sociocultural subject positions — at the same time that it is also firmly grounded in feminist politics. My location of feminism as offering a way to think about coalition in other than dominant modes, which the literary texts I examine take up, is clearly not arbitrary. Consciousness raising as developed during the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s reflects a tradition of coalition work that has been effaced from or simply ignored by dominant conceptualizations of coalition. Catherine A. MacKinnon describes consciousness raising as a “feminist method and practice” that involves “a face-to

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  31

face social experience that strikes at the fabric of meaning of social relations between and among women and men by calling their givenness into question and reconstituting their meaning in a transformed and critical way.” While varying significantly in member makeup and group dynamics, consciousness-raising groups tended to “value nonhierarchical organization and a commitment to confronting sources of inequality.”103 In addition, consciousness raising involved using the participants’ “own feelings and experiences as women” to explore social inequities.104 Feminist consciousness raising thus conceptualized coalition as a form of communal critique that was not purely abstract but was heavily dependent on material experiences and the realm of emotions. The potential weaknesses of consciousness raising, however, included a tendency to homogenize the group members; to look solely at sexual inequities, rather than to examine the interconnectedness of sex, race, class, sexual orientation, and age; and to overfocus on individual growth — thus reinforcing the Western emphasis on individualism and, by association, the accompanying structures of domination. In response to these problems, more recent feminist scholarship emphasizes what Donna Haraway calls a “response through coalition” that is based on “affinity, not identity” and thus emerges “out of otherness, difference, and specificity” while remaining fully political105 — in the sense of engaging culture and the power relations that create and are perpetuated by the various systems that make up a culture. In slightly different terms, Mouffe argues that political identity is always “something to be constructed, not empirically given” and thus based in commonality, in “an ethico-political bond that creates linkages among the participants.”106 Indeed, the idea of coalition is in the process of being reconfigured by many feminist scholars in terms of “what we want to achieve” rather than “in terms of ‘who’ we are,” as Nira Yuval-Davis puts it, a move that creates space for differences while not losing the idea of a “common political stance.”107 What I want to add to this discussion is a recognition that contemporary American fiction is also actively participating in and adding to this feminist reconfiguration of coalition. Feminist consciousness raising is not the only coalition tradition left out of dominant conceptualizations of coalition. Other forms of coalition linked more closely to community have been created and have thrived in the United States, particularly among segments of the population that have been marginalized economically, culturally, and politically. These instances of community-oriented coalition work include the historical practices of activist mothering in poor urban communities; of

32  Introduction

othermothering in African American communities;108 of the construction and maintenance of extensive immigrant Asian communities that work to uphold versions of filial ties grounded in Confucian tradition; of the ideals of liberation theology that inhere in poor Mexican American communities; and of the struggles by Native Americans to guard a community-oriented heritage by holding on to their own tribal lands, laws, and governing bodies. Indeed, examples of alternative, culturally specific coalition practices that stress collective survival and nonhierarchical notions of justice abound in the United States, supporting my claim that the dominant conceptualizations of coalition in the West have been seriously limited and that other possibilities do exist. The novels I analyze explore these various alternatives in order to imagine new forms of coalition building grounded in community. Within the coalition-theory literature I have surveyed, however, only a handful of articles implicitly points toward issues of difference. The work of W. Edgar Vinacke and his colleagues, for example, describes the differences between male and female behavior in controlled experimental situations that necessitate coalition building. Their findings indicate that “females evidently orient their efforts more toward the mutual satisfaction of the members of the group than towards the goal of winning itself.”109 While acknowledging that other factors affect “negotiation and coalition formation,” these researchers find that “the female pattern may be labeled ‘accommodative,’ marked by a concern for interpersonal relationships, an orientation toward discussion rather than competitive bargaining, and a reliance on rules of fair play to bring about satisfactory outcomes. In contrast, the male pattern is ‘exploitative,’ featured by ruthless bargaining, the exercise of power, and an orientation toward maximizing individual gain.”110 Even more striking are the results of these researchers’ experiments examining behavior of both sexes at different ages (7­ – 8 years, 14 – 16 years, 18 – 22 years): while “girls at all three age levels display the characteristics of accommodative strategy,” boys “appear to change drastically from behavior quite similar to that of the girls to the contrasting strategy which we have called ‘exploitative.’ ”111 However, Vinacke and his colleagues do not analyze the consequences of their findings for the existing models of coalition politics; and, while Jerome M. Chertkoff notes these findings, he argues that “these sex differences are not terribly damaging to the existing theories.”112 In contrast, I see the findings of Vinacke and his colleagues, even if limited to controlled experimental situations, as indicative of potential problems with existing coalition theories. In particular, that boys change

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  33

their behavior, according to these experimental results, raises the possibility that male-centered institutions and social processes intercede to promote and institutionalize a particular version of coalition processes that privileges hierarchy, competition, and exploitation. These results also establish that other processes of coalition building exist that are accommodative rather than exploitative and that these other modes of coalition are associated with women (even if young boys have been found to engage in them), devalued, and effaced from official and serious theoretical consideration — indeed, even the term accommodative acquires an almost passive connotation within this scholarly literature. As Sheila Rowbotham argues, “Once named, historical situations and groups of people can be shuffled and shifted into neat piles, the unnamed cards are simply left out of the game.”113 In the case of the existing field of coalition theory within political science, I am suggesting that women’s particular practices of coalition building are simply left out of discussions. From the perspective of poststructuralism and postcolonialism, Radhakrishnan has similarly argued against conceptualizing coalitions as “opportunistic structures that are to be used and discarded as soon as power is seized.”114 The problem is that, as the Miami Theory Collective aptly notes, “The West [. . .] is marked by a demonstrable paucity of ways to think community.”115 What I argue in this book, however, is that much American fiction by women does offer imaginative alternative constructions of community by borrowing creatively from various ethnically inflected, nondominant versions of communal and coalition work and from certain aspects of ethical theory — particularly in its intersections with feminist ideas and practices. Given that feminism in all its variants is inherently an activist oppositional politics,116 feminists and fiction inflected by feminist ideas and ideals can neither give up the notion of coalition nor embrace a notion of coalition that is grounded in forms of abstract reason and certain humanist notions of the subject that participate in systems of hierarchical binary oppositions that help to create and reinforce male domination. Indeed, the foundation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1965 and the rapid growth of the women’s movement in the 1970s can be viewed as both developments of earlier coalition movements (like the civil rights and New Left movements) and reactions against the male domination and hierarchy that marked those movements. As Evans argues, while these movements provided for women “an egalitarian ideology, which stressed the personal nature of political action, the importance of community and cooperation, and the necessity to struggle for

34  Introduction

freedom for the oppressed,” the increasing “macho stridency” within these movements forced women to create their own movement.117 My research indicates that recent American fiction by women also demonstrates a movement toward the creation and enactment of more accommodative and nonhierarchical notions of coalition. This fiction offers characters who engage in collective political actions that are initiated by common, intersecting subject positions but then move beyond those common points to create something new, so that what the participants have in common serves as temporary grounds from which to create a coalition and trigger certain specific actions. Note that I am emphasizing common, intersecting subject positions rather than common grievances or problems. The notion of common grievances serving as a springboard for community action traditionally defines grass-roots activities and movements. Similarly, support or selfhelp groups are predicated on a common problem, illness, or deficiency. Both grass-roots movements and support groups typically assume a collectivity of unified fixed subjects brought together by a particular set of grievances or problems in order to fix them. The goals of collective action defined in this way are thus limited to remedying a specified ill, and the impetus for the coalition is a function of the individual not being able to fix the problem alone. As Tom Adams explains in Grass Roots, “When ordinary people learn that their grievance is shared but correction unlikely unless they act in consort, they often pick up the challenge.”118 Without denying the potential of common grievances or problems for grounding collective action, I am particularly interested in examining collective action in slightly different terms, as grounded (at least temporarily) not only in common grievances or problems but also within a matrix of historically and culturally specific common, intersecting subject positions.119 So, for example, if women in a lowermiddle-class neighborhood band together to petition the school board to create a full-day kindergarten program to replace the existing half-day program in the local elementary school, it is vital to focus not merely on their common aim, full-day kindergarten, but also on their positions as women who may differ in many ways but who are all caught within an economy that requires that they work to make ends meet financially but does not pay them well enough to afford child care; within a global economy that requires people to move to where the jobs are so that extended families within a given geographical area are no longer the norm; within a culture that still assigns child-care responsibilities to women, and so on. Such a shift in focus reveals that subjects are

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  35

themselves always subject to complex sociohistorical forces and thus are neither unified nor fixed, and that collective actions are a function of temporarily shared subject positions as much as of shared immediate goals. Emphasizing shared culturally constructed subject positions allows for the potential of change that goes beyond finite, definable aims. Moreover, such a reformulation retains sight of the differences between those who participate in coalitions rather than homogenizing them, by highlighting the multiple, ever-changing subject positions that subjects forever negotiate and by simultaneously envisioning common grounds by emphasizing not universal grounds for collective action but rather the specific subject positions at which composite subjectivities intersect. Viewing intersecting subject positions as the temporary grounds for coalition redirects the potential goals of collective action to more than just fixing a problem. Rather, the goal becomes the construction or reconstruction of new less oppressive subject positions and the creation of new notions of agency itself. While grounding coalitions in the precarious interstices of dynamic subjectivities might seem too unstable if serious, concrete, material work is to be done, those today committed to progressive change do not have much choice. This is particularly true for feminists of all stripes when retrenchment is widespread — often under the guise of progressivism. Feminists cannot allow the productive discussions during the 1980s and 1990s generated from the acknowledgment and analyses of differences to lead to divisions that result in an overall halt to widespread progressive changes. Differences need not entail opposition and binary logic, as the fiction I analyze makes clear. Similarly, challenges to the humanist autonomous subject and to the forms of agency, community, and coalition attached to it need not entail the death of the subject, the community, agency, and coalition politics. While it is unthinkable and unwise at this point to go back to unexamined and often dangerous universalist grounds for building coalitions, coalition building is still critical to sociocultural change and thus must be rethought, reimagined in terms of community and in terms that are much more local and temporary. Such alternative conceptions of coalition building are necessary in order to negotiate strategic alliances across differences to address the injustices that continue to proliferate despite past changes; and this book argues that a good deal of contemporary American fiction has taken up this challenge. Although some would resist the notion of local temporary coalitions as incompatible with the need to address large-scale systemic problems,

36  Introduction

on some level such a reaction stems from an inability to escape a kind of binary thinking. Conceptions of the local and temporary need not be limited to exactly where I am standing and to a fleeting or split second. Many possibilities exist between such extremely constrained notions of the local and temporary set up in opposition to that which is global, universal, fixed, timeless — all constructed categories. That local and temporary are relative terms is precisely what makes them useful in the attempt to rethink agency, community, and coalition in nonmonolithic and nonuniversalized terms. Moreover, such relativity still leaves open the possibility of large-scale action but in a much more self-conscious, historically and culturally specific, and dialogic manner. Such a reconceptualization of agency, community, and coalition politics needs to emphasize both connections and diversity, both commonalities and differences in political stances, as they impact a variety of lived subjects’ positions. “Collective action cannot occur in the absence of a ‘we,’ ” as Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani remind their readers.120 The crucial caveat, however, is to acknowledge this “we” as constructed, to avoid reifying and universalizing this constructed “we,” and to maintain a dynamic dialogue among the various different subject positions that make up this never fixed “we,” particularly since different subject positions exist in relation to each other within an ever-changing matrix of power relations. What much of the recent fiction by American women analyzed in this book has in common is depictions of characters with different pasts and different race, ethnic, and class positions acting collaboratively on the basis of specific, temporary intersecting subject positions (which differ from novel to novel) connected to a common history of oppression by the dominant culture (which also differs from novel to novel). Moreover, all the novels illustrate coalition processes that are accommodative rather than exploitative and, indeed, that are aimed at resisting and moving beyond specific forms of injustices perpetrated by exploitative racist and sexist cultures. These novels construct characters that are enabled through active acknowledgments of the oppressive subject positions they share, while not obscuring the positions they do not share, and thus can move beyond oppressive subject positions to create new, more liberating and active subject positions. Although these coalitions are local and temporary, they nevertheless lead to concrete acts that affect the characters’ material existence. A form of communal and collective agency thus results that depends on neither fixed subjectivity, nor hierarchical structures, nor totalizing metanarratives. The following chapters explore the different approaches taken by a variety of American

Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  37

novels by women published at the end of the twentieth century — Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998) — as each mines a different American ethnic tradition within the context of feminist and ethical theories and practices as a means to rethink community and coalition and to offer new hybrid versions of more communal forms of agency.

38  Introduction

Chapter 2 Choosing Hope and Remaking Kinship Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

F

ocusing on Amy Tan’s incredibly popular The Joy Luck Club (1989), this chapter turns to a specific analysis of contemporary American fiction by women who draw from particular ethnic American traditions to reimagine dynamic forms of community and coalition building within the landscape of late twentieth-century America. While the first highly acclaimed and widely read text by a Chinese American woman in the wake of the civil rights and women’s movements is arguably Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976), a book that addresses the challenges of developing an identity and sense of self for Chinese American women, I have chosen Tan’s novel because of its much more developed and prominent engagement with notions of community. Most specifically, Tan’s novel offers a vision of individual agency that gestures away from American adherence to a self-interested, market-driven notion of individualism and anchors itself firmly in interdependence and community derived from a specifically female Chinese American perspective — constructed within the particular hybrid sociocultural context and lived experiences of Chinese women immigrants and the daughters they bear and raise in the United States. By rejecting both the opposition between the individual and the community and the equation of the individual and individualism that typically underlie conceptualizations of agency within the American context, Tan’s novel opens up a space for thinking about agency in Chinese American – inflected terms that value and, indeed, assert the necessity of the material and psychic support that communities and families provide.1 The novel builds upon what Daniel Shanahan describes as the general tendency within Asian cultures in general to “exhibit patterns of behavior, goals, and norms that contrast sharply with the individu-

alistic heritage of the West,” particularly in the emphasis they place “on affect — the emotions and attachments that tie one to people, entities, and institutions.”2 In addition, The Joy Luck Club explores the ways in which the more specific Confucian-derived Chinese valuing of “collective well-being [ . . . ] over self-interests”3 are translated and revised by Chinese American women. Through its focus on four mothers born in China (Suyuan Woo, Anmei Hsu, Lindo Jong, Ying-ying St. Clair) and their four American-born daughters (Jing-mei “June” Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, Lena St. Clair), the novel negotiates an alternative model of agency inflected by the particular experiences of first- and second-generation Chinese women immigrants to the United States and the ways in which they have negotiated aspects of Chinese and American culture to create their own hybridized cultural traditions. Bringing together the mothers’ imported traditional Chinese beliefs and values, especially with respect to family and filial responsibility; the American dream upon which the United States’ status as an immigrant nation depends; the realities of contemporary American existence for its racially marked immigrants; and the specific forms of sexism structured into the Chinese, American, and Chinese American cultural contexts allows for the construction of a new notion of agency that revises all these elements in terms of their interactions with each other. Working simultaneously at the levels of form and content, Tan’s novel offers its own fragmented but carefully organized structure as one means to illustrate the interdependence of the individual and the community and thus the communal aspects of agency. Indeed, the novel takes the form of individual stories that enter into dialogue with and depend on each other on the basis of spatial proximity and that together present a whole that is greater than its parts but that nevertheless depends on those parts.4 The bulk of my discussion, however, focuses on how the San Francisco Joy Luck Club — created by the mothers but also experienced by the daughters — serves as a model for the innovative form of individual agency dependent on community that the novel offers. More than a mere club, the Joy Luck Club becomes an emblem of the mothers’ fierce will to survive physically and psychically in a land that is foreign to them, of their recognition that their individual survival and control over their destinies in America requires communal support, and of their need to retain a sense of hope for the future. Moreover, the Joy Luck Club provides for both mothers and daughters a communal space

40  Choosing Hope and Remaking Kinship

within which to negotiate hybrid individual identities that will enable agency. Tan’s novel is not just a simplistic feel-good novel as some critics have claimed, however. Such a reading requires overvalidating the resolution that the last story offers and seemingly erasing the novel’s emphasis on culturally specific forms of oppression. Indeed, as Melanie McAlister argues, such a reading derives at least in part from many readers’ and reviewers’ wish to insist that “Tan’s novel offers a ‘universal’ narrative, despite its seemingly exotic content.”5 In contrast, I want to focus on how the novel presents the construction and maintenance of a positive form of community as fraught with difficulties and at the same time of vital importance for the women’s survival and growth as racially marked women negotiating two radically different cultural traditions. Not only does Tan’s novel portray communities as potentially oppressive, but the novel also depicts the characters’ abilities to build and sustain a supportive culturally hybrid community as remarkable, given the deep wounds they each carry but cannot voice and the bitter conflicts between the mothers and their daughters. As Wendy Ho succinctly explains, because all the stories “confront personal and communal oppression,” they accordingly involve “painful, complicated excavatory work” so that the novel is just as much about “ruptures and contradictions” as about forming links and bonds.6 Of particular interest is the novel’s highlighting of the ways in which communities of women, typically associated with the realm of the home, are all too often complicit with patriarchal systems of power — particularly within the context of Chinese culture. Many of the mothers’ past traumatic experiences in China derive from the actions of women upholding the Chinese male-dominated status quo. In “traditional Chinese society,” as Ho notes, women were “confined to the private sphere where their virtue, honor, and chastity could be controlled and preserved” through means that “permitted the psychic and social abuse of women, an abuse in which women sometimes took part.”7 For example, when Lindo is only two years old, she is promised in marriage to the son of a wealthier family and, consequently, her family begins to treat her as if she “belonged to somebody else.”8 After her family is forced to leave the area following severe flooding, at the age of twelve Lindo moves in with her in-laws, who treated her like a servant as she is taught to be an “obedient wife” under the strict tutelage of her future mother-in-law (50). An-mei’s beautiful mother, who was married to a scholar but wid-

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club  41

owed at a young age, is dishonored after a wealthy man’s second wife, in an effort to pacify his sexual appetites, tricks An-mei’s mother into sleeping in his bed. There he rapes her, after which her family disowns her and bars her from their home; she is thus forced to become one of the man’s concubines (266 – 267). In both cases, women collude with the Chinese patriarchal system by asserting the only power they have — the power to regulate other women — so that in these cases communities of women function as a means of upholding a system that is oppressive to women. Given the mothers’ traumatic experiences in China at the hand of a deeply misogynist culture, the difficulties they face dealing with their Americanized independent-minded daughters are not surprising. What is surprising, however, given their harsh experiences in China, is the mothers’ understanding that other forms of nonmisogynist and nonpatriarchal communities are possible and their insistence on working to create such an alternative. That the locus for The Joy Luck Club’s revaluing of human interdependence — which grounds the novel’s revision of agency — lies in the life stories of eight Chinese American women and thus in realms that have traditionally been silenced and devalued is indicative of the radical nature of the novel’s exploration. Indeed, the focus on the four mothers’ difficult life experiences in China and then as immigrants to the United States and on the four daughters’ experiences as second-generation Chinese American girls and then women places attention upon areas of life conventionally associated with the private side of the Western binary opposition between public and private life, in which the public holds greater status because of its association with politics and with white upper-class men in the United States, and in which the private is often devalued because of its association with women and the realm of nurturing and emotions.9 However, in the wake of the women’s and civil rights movements, the realm of the political has expanded to include experiences previously associated with private life. The 1970s feminist slogan “The personal is political” exemplifies the sea change that has since reverberated in every corner of American culture, whether in the form of questioning, transformation, or resistance. Not only does Tan’s novel focus on women’s so-called private lives, but it also pays particular attention to the positive possibilities that inhere within familial structures and relationships and the cultural traditions that govern them. This attention to familial structures is crucial to the novel’s development of an alternative model of agency. Although the text makes clear that familial structures can be restrictive, as the moth-

42  Choosing Hope and Remaking Kinship

ers’ China experiences demonstrate, Tan’s novel also makes visible and places value on the potential of the interdependence that is the hallmark of family life and that women have learned to value as a consequence of the nurturing work they have tended to be assigned within the family in patriarchal cultures. As Joan Tronto notes, humans are clearly “interdependent beings,” given that “all humans need care” — which she defines as encompassing “attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion, meeting others’ needs” — at various points in their lives. Consequently, care not only is “a central but devalued aspect of human life” but also very much needs to be understood “as a political ideal,” “as a value that should be made more central in our constellation of political concerns.”10 One means of doing so, as Alison Jaggar explains, is to reformulate care as simultaneously “critical” and “nurturant.”11 In order to gain public currency, care needs to be reconceptualized in terms that refute and move beyond the classic hierarchical oppositions between public and private, reason and emotion, individualism and dependence, and men and women in which the latter term has consistently been relegated to a position of inferiority. By foregrounding the processes of caring with which families tend to be involved, The Joy Luck Club marks interdependence as necessary to the survival of its women characters and to their development as fully fledged agents within a contemporary American cultural landscape in which they are marginalized on several counts. The intricately orchestrated, fragmented form of the novel illustrates the interdependence that the novel as a whole champions. The Joy Luck Club’s structure includes four named sections, each of which contains an italicized introduction that resembles a fable, as well as four stories narrated in the first person. A character’s name and a title label each story. The first and final sections focus on the four mothers’ stories and the second and third sections focus on the four daughters’ stories. With the exception of Jing-mei Woo, whose mother has died and who thus narrates her mother’s as well as her own stories, all the women narrate two stories. While each story exists independently, in the sense that it is self-sufficient and readable on its own, the arrangement of the stories next to each other and in groups within sections and their overlaps in terms of characters, situations, and thematic elements create a dialogic relationship among the stories that demonstrates in structural terms the interdependence between the individual (the individual story) and the collective (the collection or, in this case, the novel as a collection of stories).12 The novel’s dialogism thus derives from the spatial posi-

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club  43

tioning and proximity of the stories to one another and not from the literal telling of a story by one character to another — as Marc Singer notes, “None of the novel’s sixteen tales are ever spoken or delivered to any other character.”13 Furthermore, this dialogism highlights the oral quality of the women’s life stories — in the sense that they are lived but never recorded in written form — and thus links their stories to the myriad stories internationally that have been effaced because they belonged to those on the margins of the dominant group and have thus never been deemed important enough to record by the dominant group, which historically has had greater access to and control over writing and publishing.14 By making space for seven distinct narrators and the life stories of eight women, Tan’s novel gives voice to a number of Chinese American women characters in two different generations, whose voices and individual histories represent ones that have until very recently remained untold. Indeed, “the long neglect and invisibility of Chinese women’s diverse experiences, histories, and standpoints”15 globally has its own particular history within the context of Chinese immigration to the United States. Given the various “Chinese Exclusion Acts, which were in force between 1882 and 1943” and which “banned the entry of certain groups of Chinese immigrants to America (notably women),”16 relatively few Chinese American women entered the United States. Because “the number of Chinese women in the United States did not approach equality with Chinese men until 1954” and because of the entrenched racism and sexism of American culture that went virtually unchallenged on a national level until the 1960s and 1970s, the relative paucity of Chinese American women’s voices or writing in the United States until relatively recently is not surprising17 — indeed, as previously noted, Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1976 The Woman Warrior is arguably the first best-selling text by a Chinese American author. Within the context of this relative absence or silence of Chinese American women’s voices until the mid-1970s, the stories offered by Tan’s novel also become acts of “selfassertion” and “defiance.”18 The stories function as “a claiming of political and social agency”19 by and for its multiple Chinese American narrators. In addition, by using multiple narrators whose life stories remain distinct, the novel ensures that the individual women and their particular experiences are not collapsed into some sort of stereotypical or true Chinese American woman — indeed, many differences surface among the women in each generation and among the women of different generations — and yet allows for the narratives to enter into dia-

44  Choosing Hope and Remaking Kinship

logue with each other on the level of form and to illustrate the varied texture of Chinese American women’s lives.20 Moreover, The Joy Luck Club’s splintered narration provides its narrators with a form of agency grounded in the collective, in the sense that each voice and life story is strengthened by all the others, so that the novel’s form reinforces the kind of agency it explores and offers to its readers.21 The novel’s emphasis on the value and necessity of interdependence in order to envision a form of individual agency that is attainable by all Americans who do not fit the dominant white upper-class male profile and yet who make up an ever-growing segment of the U.S. population goes far beyond the text’s structure and is particularly evident in its presentation of the American incarnation of the Joy Luck Club. Although Suyuan Woo creates the Joy Luck Club in China and, after immigrating to the United States, bases the San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club on the earlier one, so that the two share certain characteristics, the latter club is constructed differently and serves different functions. With her husband away fighting in the war and finding herself in the difficult and potentially traumatic position of being alone with two small children in Kweilin before the Japanese overrun the city, Suyuan initiates the first Joy Luck Club, inviting three other young women to join her in a ritual of weekly gatherings aimed at raising their depressed spirits (10). The women eat delicacies and play mah jong to ward off the “despair” (11) that inflects their lives as a consequence of the war. The four women choose to cultivate luck through their weekly mah-jong game as a way of holding on to hope and creating joy out of that hope: “That hope was our only joy” (12).22 By choosing hope, the women assert themselves as active agents rather than passive victims, indicating not only that hope is necessary for survival but also that hope is a choice. Rather than focusing on the negative aspects of their lives in the face of war, the women choose to look forward by constructing for themselves a communal space within which for a limited time they allow themselves hope and the joy that comes with it. The Kweilin club is short-lived, however, in that the Japanese soon overrun the city as expected; Suyuan is forced to escape the city in order to avoid execution as the wife of an officer and she never again sees the other three women. In contrast to the Kweilin club’s temporary status, the San Francisco Joy Luck Club is established in 1949, two years prior to Jing-Mei’s birth (6), and is still going strong in the present of the novel, set in the late 1980s — with Jing-Mei now thirty-six years old (14). Not only has the United States – based club lasted thirty-eight years, but it also includes

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club  45

many more participants than did its antecedent in China. Although the San Francisco Joy Luck Club also begins with four women, it includes their families from the start. Moreover, it takes on characteristics and functions that correspond to its location in the United States and that address its participants’ positioning within American culture. As she had done in Kweilin, Suyuan chooses the other three women who make up the Joy Luck Club on the basis of affinity and empathy. All four women are experiencing similar situations and life trajectories as recent Chinese immigrants. Although the four women’s lives in China differed in many ways, they all come from middle- to upper-class backgrounds and have been thrust into the lower class in the American context because of their lack of language skills and their alien cultural and racial status as Asians. What binds these four particular Chinese immigrant women most strongly, however, are the “unspeakable tragedies” they suffered in China, as well as the “hopes they couldn’t begin to express in their fragile English” that Suyuan immediately recognizes in “the numbness” she reads in their faces (6). Empathy, “the ability to ‘feel into’ someone else’s experience,”23 draws them together and creates a connection between them. These women are thus brought together in part by the painful histories of oppression they share but cannot voice — their unspeakable pasts link them — and in part by their shared hopes for the future in their adopted country. Indeed, given the traumas they have all endured in China, the four women’s ability to shape a new form of community for themselves in their adopted country speaks to their remarkable resiliency and to their need to imagine a future for themselves and their children. The formation of the Joy Luck Club in America thus functions as a vehicle for these women not only to survive but also to control their fates in the foreign land they have chosen as the place to secure their hopes for the future. One of the chief attractions of the United States for immigrants is its dominant national myth of the American dream, with its assurances that social mobility is possible, that individual hard work and perseverance will result in material success; and the novel’s four mothers pin their hopes for the future of their families, and in particular their daughters, on an American culture in which, as the italicized introduction to the novel’s first section proclaims, “nobody will look down” on their daughters (3). Although the mothers very quickly understand that access to the American dream is difficult for Chinese immigrants like themselves, they nevertheless refuse to adopt the skepticism of their daughters and to different degrees continue to defiantly choose hope. As

46  Choosing Hope and Remaking Kinship

Jing-mei asserts, her “mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America,” always optimistic about the future (141). In contrast, Jing-mei admits that she herself has no such illusions (154). The gap between the hope of the first-generation immigrant Suyuan and the lack of hope of her second-generation daughter appears odd at first glance, especially given the harshness of Suyuan’s past in China in comparison to Jing-mei’s American life. Given the novel’s association of hope with choice, however, Suyuan’s choice of immigrating to America and thus of America as the locus for her hopes exists in contrast to Jing-mei’s status as an American-born Chinese American who did not have to make the kinds of choices her mother had to make but who as a result does not have the kinds of hopes her mother has. In light of this difference between the two generations, which is present in some form in all four mother-daughter pairs, the Joy Luck Club performs different functions for the mothers and the daughters. For the mothers, it serves as a familial space devoid of the restrictions imposed on such spaces in China in which they can freely enact and revise their (American inflected) Chinese customs without their being considered foreign, whereas for the daughters it is a place that is simultaneously foreign and familial. The Joy Luck Club as a familial entity is of particular interest, in that it retains the traditional Chinese emphasis on the family and kinship but in a significantly revised form. As Peter Ching-Yung Lee notes, traditional Chinese “social organization centered around family and kinship” and thereby placed a “great emphasis on mutual dependence rather than individual independence.”24 However, this mutual dependence was imbedded at least since “the first century B.C.” within “patriarchal power.”25 Most scholars agree that the centrality of the family within Chinese culture derives from the incredible influence of Confucian principles upon Chinese society for over two millenniums.26 Confucianism places great value on “the principle of mutuality.”27 Of key import is the “affectionate concern with the well-being of others,” as well as the family as the locus or foundation for the enactment and development of that mutuality and concern.28 Indeed, “the supreme virtue of jen, meaning ‘humaneness’ and ‘benevolence,’ ” is central to Confucianism and “enkindles the interrelated values of filial piety, respect and loyalty.”29 However, Confucianism is also a “rigidly authoritarian,” “totalitarian,” and “hierarchical system,” with “filial piety” as “the principle instrument through which it was established and maintained.”30 Until the eruption of revolutionary movements during the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century shook China’s very foundations and “overturned centuries-old

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club  47

feudal structures,” Chinese culture remained for centuries based upon the Confucian ideals of “loyalty and subordination,” including that of wife to husband.31 As a result, “class structure was rigidly set” and the “rights of women and children were minimal” at best.32 Women’s inferior status within traditional Chinese culture is particularly evident in the historically prevalent misogynistic “practices of footbinding, concubinage, female slavery, and female infanticide.” However, the “establishment of a Republic in 1911 – 1912” not only dissolved the emperor’s “absolute authority at the state level” but also “was accompanied by a displacement of patriarchal authority on the familial level,” which in turn led to the establishment of schools for girls and of “women’s suffrage societies.”33 Nonetheless, despite progressive legal reforms and public acknowledgments concerning women, change within Chinese familial and ideological structures has been slow. As Amy Ling notes, “In practice, backed by centuries of history and tradition, the old ways die hard.”34 Moreover, according to Wei-Ming Tu, even “the modern intelligentsia has maintained unacknowledged, sometimes unconscious, continuities with the Confucian tradition at every level of life.”35 As a consequence, aspects of the traditional subordination of women within the family continued and arguably still continue to survive within Chinese culture despite the shift first to a republic and then in 1949 to a Communist system. The mothers’ stories in Tan’s novel indicate such a persistence of the old customs, leaving critics like Patricia Chu frustrated with the mothers’ depictions of the China of their youth in terms that seem to hark back to a prerevolutionary China rather than to what was at that time “a country in which modern and traditional elements co-exist[ed]” and in which “the oppressive family system Tan describes in her novel was being questioned on a national level by Chinese reformers.”36 As I will subsequently argue, part of this discrepancy has to do with the Americanization of the mothers, which heavily colors the stories they tell about their pasts in China. In addition, I would argue that the changes brought about by the revolutions and shift to a republic do indeed appear in the mothers’ stories but on a more implicit level. That each of the mothers in different ways challenges and escapes her oppressive situation indicates an atmosphere conducive to such assertions by women even if the stories paint their families as steeped in tradition. Arguably, the mothers depict themselves as revolutionaries in their refusal to play by the rules that condone women’s oppression and in their choices to walk away from

48  Choosing Hope and Remaking Kinship

the families and structures oppressing them. Moreover, as Eddie Kuo argues, “Geographical and social mobility tend to weaken kinship ties” and, along with “new economic structures” that create jobs for women, result in more “symmetrical and reciprocal” relationships between family members.37 In the case of the four Chinese mothers, immigration to the United States cuts them off not only from their biological extended families but also from the sociocultural constraints attached to those genealogical ties. In addition, their immigrant status as low-paid workers right alongside their husbands, while problematic in terms of the economic exploitation both the women and the men have to endure, has the potentially positive side effect of loosening the gender hierarchies that delimited their lives in China. The Joy Luck Club itself can be read as a potential outgrowth of the revolutionary atmosphere and spirit that characterized the China of the mothers’ childhood and early adulthood. For the Chinese immigrant mothers and their families, the Joy Luck Club performs a revolutionary function as it becomes a mechanism for enabling a negotiation of Chinese and American cultural structures — both of which the novel depicts as in process — as well as the creation of altogether new ones.38 Indeed, the Joy Luck Club allows for a radical reformulation of the family that continues to value the family and thus does not break totally from certain Confucian ideals but moves away from authoritarianism and dependence on genealogy. To a certain extent, then, the novel supports Walter Slote’s contention that “the Confucian family is gradually modifying and adapting itself to an increasingly egalitarian perspective” even as “the substance of Confucianism, particularly in terms of interpersonal relationships and ethical values, is still alive and flourishing.”39 While the four families that make up the Joy Luck Club have no biological relationships to each other, consisting instead of what Ho calls an “extra-familial social network,”40 they construct an alternative extended family in which kinship derives from similar circumstances, proximity, friendship, support, and nurturance rather than merely from genealogy and in which gender roles deviate from the particular patriarchal structure that dominated the mothers’ lives in China. Marina Heung notes that the mothers’ stories of their pasts in China indicate a system in which “blood ties” are often “replaced by a network of alternate affiliations”41 — for example, Lindo is sent to live with her future in-laws when her family is forced to move as a result of massive flooding; An-mei’s mother is banished by her family after she is tricked into becoming a wealthy man’s concubine; and An-mei chooses to break

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club  49

with her family in order to go live with her mother. But the Joy Luck Club does more than sever ties to genealogy in that it also severs ties to a hierarchical and patriarchal power structure by imagining an alternative family structure that all of its participants help to shape and that distributes power more symmetrically. Although a number of scholars have criticized Tan’s novel for relying on biologism, as exemplified by statements like “Your mother is in your bones!” (31), I would argue that the dominant role that the Joy Luck Club plays in the lives of all four Chinese American families indicates that Tan’s novel complicates and attempts to move beyond any absolutist dependence on biological kinship.42 That the children refer to the Joy Luck Club adults other than their own parents as Auntie and Uncle, for example, reinforces the notion that the club functions as an extended family that does not depend solely on biological ties. Perhaps the most overt illustration of how the Joy Luck Club members function as family, as a collective of people who share and foster each other’s hopes — even beyond death — lies in the plan hatched by Jing-mei’s three aunties after her mother Suyuan’s death to send Jing-mei to China to meet her twin half-sisters, whom her mother searched for all her life after last seeing them on the road out of Kweilin during the Japanese invasion. The mothers’ sense of hope appears to be a hybridized version of hope that combines aspects of a traditional Chinese belief in fate and of the hope on which the notion of the American dream depends. According to Patricia Hamilton, an “Eastern world-view dictates that fate can be manipulated in order to bring about good effects and to ward off bad ones,” so that fate contains “a participatory element.”43 Moreover, this participatory element arguably found validation in the turn-of-thecentury revolutions that led to the establishment of a republic. Once in the United States, the mothers further revise the Chinese notion of fate they have internalized by emphasizing its participatory element in accordance with the more individualistic underpinnings of the American dream. For example, when Lindo tells of how she escaped an arranged marriage in China without shaming her family, the story takes the form of an Americanized assertion of individual identity that makes possible an intricate manipulation of her fate. Lindo reports that, upon looking at herself in a mirror, she saw her strength and understood that she had her own “thoughts inside” that others could neither see nor “ever take away” from her (51). Although, as Chu notes, the novel provides no sense of how Lindo would have developed this strong individual identity or how she could have “survived the sudden independence for

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which she had never been prepared,” given the depiction of “a fictional Chinese world where both individual justice and systemic social change seem impossible,”44 this need not denote an inherent weakness of Tan’s novel. Instead, I read Lindo’s story as demonstrating how she as a Chinese American has constructed a sense of hope that borrows from both her Chinese heritage — the traditional notion of fate and the postrevolutionary belief in change — and her new American culture and that she utilizes to translate her past to herself and to her daughter as they both work to construct Chinese American identities with agency. Structurally, as Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong notes, the mothers’ “stories about old China are ‘framed’ by reference to the present time of America,” which overtly points to the retrospective aspect of the stories.45 Indeed, generally speaking, according to Yuan Yuan, “all memories are [necessarily] socially and culturally reconstituted within a specific historical and cultural context” and entail “preserving, revising, erasing, and recovering past memories [ . . . ] depending on the specific purposes of recollection and the present position of the recollecting subject.”46 To some extent, all the mothers’ stories about their harsh lives in China are colored by a revised, retrospectively imposed notion of hope, particularly in their positioning of the mothers as heroines of their destinies, albeit to different degrees in each story, and thus as agents manipulating difficult circumstances to their own advantages rather than as victims of those circumstances. As Heung puts it, the mothers engage in “rewriting stories of oppression and victimization into parables of selfaffirmation and individual empowerment.”47 Recognizing the stories as parables rather than as realistic renderings makes clearer the ways in which the mothers strategically alter their stories in order to give voice within the context of their relocation to the United States not only to the oppressive and at times tragic events of their pasts in China but also to their trajectory away from those oppressive conditions. These stories in many ways are designed to justify their immigration to the United States and their positions as Chinese Americans. That this process of strategic translation of the past through a present Chinese American lens is taken up to some degree by all four mothers further indicates the ways in which their individual agencies are products of the community they have built for themselves in the form of the Joy Luck Club, a community that continually negotiates aspects of the cultures of their birth and adopted nations. While many critics and readers focus on the Americanization of the daughters, I am thus arguing that the mothers’ stories also indicate that

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they themselves have become Americanized.48 Indeed, first-generation immigrant Asian women in general have little choice but to engage in “renegotiating their identities as women, wives and mothers” if they are to survive in America, given that the cultural and social landscape they find upon arrival differs from the one in which they have functioned up to that point.49 In Tan’s novel, the Joy Luck Club performs the dual role of providing for the mothers a place to hold on to elements of Chinese culture and of allowing a safe space to negotiate between the Chinese and American cultures. Many aspects of the workings of the San Francisco Joy Luck Club provide evidence of such an active pro­cess of negotiation. That the club involves the women’s husbands and children attests to their positions as immigrants with no biological extended family in the United States and thus with the possibility to reformulate the family in terms other than what they experienced in China. Not only is it practical to bring husbands and children along when the club meets, since there are no relatives to keep the children and feed the husbands, but also, for psychic and practical reasons, each family needs an alternative form of extended family in order to survive successfully within a country in which ethnic and racial minorities tend to be marginalized. Indeed, men and women alike must engage in the “daily negotiations of psychosocial and cultural life” made necessary by their positions as Chinese immigrants and the “inequitable political and economic systems they face” as a consequence.50 As Yen Le Espiritu argues, within a “hostile environment, the act of maintaining families is itself a form of resistance”;51 but Tan’s novel takes this notion a step farther by depicting how the Chinese immigrant mothers actively and creatively reconfigure the family itself to meet their own needs and those of their families given their particular situation. Although Joy Luck Club evenings include lots of Chinese food, the women playing mah jong for small sums of money, and early on, as Jingmei recalls, the women wearing “funny Chinese dresses” (16), the weekly rituals also increasingly include American elements. Most overtly, the four women and their husbands turn to investing in the stock market as a means to achieve joy luck. As An-mei explains, Jing Mei’s mother was too skilled at mah jong, which took the element of luck out of the game, so instead they decided to play the stock market so that every one could “win and lose equally” (18). While the notion that the stock market is a game of luck rather than skill serves as a humorous jab at contemporary American capitalism, the characters’ decision to play the stock market is nevertheless a choice to participate in the American

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economy in a distinctly Western, American way and thus to become American at the same time they seek to hold on to elements of their Chinese culture — bearing in mind the earlier discussion of the participatory element contained in Eastern notions of fate. Moreover, the link they establish between the stock market and a sense of hope situates that hope firmly in the United States and its promise to immigrants that they can make a better life for themselves and their families if they believe in and work hard enough within the context of its capitalistic economic system — of which the stock market is such a powerful symbol. That they all meet to review the stocks they own and to vote on which stocks they should buy and sell each week before the women play mah jong and the men play cards further situates the Joy Luck Club within the American context of democratic decision making. The use of the American stock market and democratic voting as vehicles to the Chinese concept of joy luck thus exemplifies the cultural negotiations that take place within the Joy Luck Club, which exists as a dynamic entity that makes such negotiations possible. That both wives and husbands play the stock market together indicates that the need for joy luck is no longer relegated to the women as it was in the Chinese version of the club. As ethnic immigrants to the United States, the women and men are on equal ground in terms of their precarious positions as racialized aliens in a foreign land and of their need for hope in order to survive both physically and psychically  — thus breaking down “traditional Asian patriarchal authority.”52 Indeed, the fathers are no longer “omniscient, omnipotent, and protective” or “feared and distant.”53 Although the mothers still cook while their husbands discuss stocks, indicating a division of tasks at club meetings, the fathers and mothers nevertheless hold more symmetrical positions in terms of power within the club — as becomes evident when they all vote on the stocks, with men and women alike each having one vote and thus sharing equal power over the voting (17 – 18). Playing the stock market as a group provides the wives and husbands with a form of equalizing collective joy luck. Indeed, the collective aspects of the Joy Luck Club derive from its members’ specific situation as Chinese Americans, which necessitates the construction of new ways of approaching their lives since the beliefs and customs neither of China nor of the United States speak directly to their circumstances as Chinese immigrants to America. In response, they revise both the traditional Chinese emphasis on “the group rather than the individual,” particularly its notion of “mutual obligation within a vertical power hierarchy,”54 and American

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club  53

notions of democracy and individualism to create a form of democratic community that emphasizes the group without denying the individual and mutual obligation without a context of vertical power hierarchy. That this increased power symmetry among the men and women occurs within the context of the Joy Luck Club as an extended family but not necessarily within the individual nuclear families — for example, the novel depicts Ying-ying as silenced by her white Irish American husband who consistently speaks for her (108)55 — positions the club itself as enabling an alternative power structure at least in part because it eschews the patriarchal logic of both Eastern and Western forms of the family. The Joy Luck Club functions as a mechanism for producing something new, for “the making of Chinese American culture — the ways in which it is imagined, practiced, and continued,” which Lisa Lowe argues “is worked out as much ‘horizontally’ among communities as it is transmitted ‘vertically’ in unchanging forms from one generation to the next.”56 Indeed, in contrast to many critics’ reading of Tan’s novel in terms of vertical or generational cultural transmission, my discussion emphasizes the novel’s depiction of the horizontal or communal creation of a dynamic Chinese American culture through the Joy Luck Club. While the Joy Luck Club is a dynamic entity in that it revises its own rituals to fit the circumstances of its participants, it also provides a sense of stability in that the same adult members stay at its core throughout the thirty-eight years of its existence, and the pattern of its rituals stays virtually intact even as the children come and go and the specifics of the rituals alter over time. Rituals are vital elements of community, according to Michel Maffesoli, in that it is “through the variety of routine or everyday gestures [that] the community is reminded that it is a whole.”57 The ritualistic aspects of the Joy Luck Club are clearly inflected by its members’ Chinese heritage, in that these aspects demonstrate a holding on to the Confucian valuing of “social harmony” derived from “ritual performance,” in the sense that “to perform ritual is to take part in a communal act to promote mutual understanding.”58 When at the age of thirty-six Jing-mei goes to a Joy Luck Club gathering following her mother’s death, she is taken aback initially that no one talks about her mother (17). Indeed, the others, including her father, observe their usual rituals, which anchor all of them in a realm that is both familiar and familial. However, Jing-mei also notices that the rituals contain a certain flexibility, adapting to changes that circumstances bring forth. Although the women play mah jong as they always have, for example,

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Jing-mei now sits in her mother’s seat at the table (21). Rather than the Chinese style dresses they wore when they first arrived from China, now the women wear “slacks” and “bright print dresses” (16). This idea of sameness coexisting with difference marks the success of the Joy Luck Club as a model of community that offers a space for difference and change at the same time its continued presence and adherence to ritualized processes allow for stability. Not only do the women adapt to the loss of one of their members by accepting Jing-mei in lieu of Suyuan, but they have also from the start adapted to their differences from each other. As they play mah jong, for instance, the women speak “half in broken English, half in their own Chinese dialect” (23 – 24). Although the different Chinese dialects separate the women, English allows them to communicate; and, more crucially, the existence of a space in which they all accept that combination of what differentiates them and what brings them together creates an environment based on affinity and caring that nevertheless embraces differences and changes. Although technically the club is a construction that exists only insofar as its members continue to meet and to view the club as an entity, the Joy Luck Club’s function as an alternative extended family structure provides it with a psychological and cultural being for all its participants, parents and children alike. Indeed, all family and community structures are constructed, and their status as stable entities exists in relation to recognition by the dominant cultural apparatuses. Denied substantial recognition by the dominant American culture, the Joy Luck Club’s founding members assert a communal form of agency by mutually constructing and validating a familial structure that meets their specific needs, particularly in terms of accepting their differences deriving from their lives and positions in China and of joining forces on the basis of the present similarity of their positions as Chinese immigrants to the United States. By anchoring a familial, communal structure in affinity and friendship rather than in biological ties, the club functions as a distinct example of Ray Pahl’s argument that friendship is becoming “an increasingly important form of social glue” that is “taking over the social tasks, duties and functions from [traditionally, biologically defined] family and kin.”59 By forming the Joy Luck Club and then keeping it going, its members choose to orient themselves toward the future; they choose both the dynamism and the joy that comes with such hope. For the daughters, the Joy Luck Club functions differently, although it is also central to their lives. Essentially born into the Joy Luck Club

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as an already established entity, the daughters take for granted the community and extended family that the club provides for them as well as its existence as a bridge to their Chinese heritage. As second-generation immigrants and consequently more Americanized than their parents, the daughters view the club from the perspective of both outsiders and insiders. In slightly different ways than their first-generation immigrant parents, the daughters “find themselves caught between two worlds. Their racial features proclaim one fact — their Asian ethnicity — but by education, choice, or birth they are American.”60 As outsiders vis-à-vis the Joy Luck Club, the daughters position themselves within the dominant American culture and see their elders and their rituals as foreign, as other, thus indicating their internalization of the Western self-other binary in which the Western is privileged over all other cultures. More specifically, as Ho notes, “Embedded in American mainstream discourses and institutions” are “certain stereotypical and racist views of the Chinese” that the daughters have internalized and that lead them to want to “assimilate into white America.” This assimilation process includes the daughters’ tendency to view their mothers “in terms of an ‘American mindset’ ” that positions their immigrant mothers “as ‘other,’ as ‘outsider,’ as ‘intruder,’ ”61 which leads to bitter conflicts between the mothers and daughters. Indeed, the daughters often assert themselves as Americans (and implicitly as superior) in contradistinction to their parents, whom they view in racialized terms. For example, when Rose’s mother notes that her daughter’s new boyfriend, Ted, is American rather than Chinese, Rose responds sharply, “I’m American too” (124). Moreover, Jing-mei admits that as a child she “imagined Joy Luck was a shameful Chinese custom” (16), thus highlighting not only her internalization of American xenophobia but also her distance from her Chinese heritage. As Lindo puts it most succinctly, what the mothers want for their children is “the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character,” not realizing that “these two things do not mix” (289). Indeed, the mothers find themselves unable to create “an American version of the ideal Chinese daughter,”62 given that material and cultural circumstances are intricately tied to cultural character. Immersed in American culture and having never lived in China, the daughters cannot help but adopt American attitudes: Ying-ying refers to her daughter Lena’s “proud American way” (274) and Lindo notes that on the “inside” her daughter Waverly “is all American-made” (289). Moreover, the mothers’ own characters slowly evolve as a function of their new lives in America, as becomes evident in

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the Americanization of the stories they tell about their pasts in China (as discussed earlier in this chapter). As much as the daughters claim themselves to be American, however, their “physiologically marked bodies” mean that they are nevertheless forced to negotiate “the hybrid, contingent operations of race and ethnicity in daily life.”63 Moreover, their life circumstances include a Chinese American immediate and extended family — the latter in the form of the Joy Luck Club — that surrounds them with Chinese customs, foods, stories, and points of view even though they at times try to escape it. Indeed, the Joy Luck Club provides the daughters with a community steeped in Chinese traditions, although these are inflected by its members’ situation as immigrants to the United States. A gap does exist between the Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters with respect to Chinese language and culture — as evidenced by the mothers’ recognition that their Americanized daughters do not understand joy luck (31). More insidious is the daughters’ tendency to view their mothers as more Chinese and less educated than themselves on the basis of their own mastery of English in contradistinction to their mothers’ difficulties with the language, thereby instantiating Ho’s claim that “the English language can become a race and class signifier.”64 As they develop into adulthood, however, the daughters come to understand and internalize elements of Chinese tradition. For example, when Waverly brings her fiancé, Rich, to dinner at her parents’ home, she sees clearly the faux pas he makes as a function of his ignorance of Chinese customs: not only does Rich take large first helpings of each dish and refuse seconds, but he also inadvertently criticizes Waverly’s mother’s cooking by adding soy sauce to the serving dish she has claimed has “no flavor” (197). Waverly cringes because she understands the complex “Chinese cook’s custom” of making “disparaging remarks” about the food she has prepared (197), which everyone is supposed to counter vehemently. Moreover, she feels the insult to her parents when Rich not only addresses them by their first names but also mispronounces their names, calling them Linda and Tim rather than Lindo and Tin (198). Similarly, Jing-mei understands that Chinese mothers like her own show their love differently than do most American mothers, for example, through “stern offerings of steamed dumplings, duck’s gizzards, and crab” (227); and, when Rose asserts that she feels “hulihudu” and that things around her are “heimongmong,” she acknowledges that these words are untranslatable, referring to “sensation[s] that only Chinese people have” (210) — thus counting herself among Chinese people.

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As these examples demonstrate, the daughters’ position vis-à-vis the Chinese culture in which they participate via their parents and the Joy Luck Club is not only that of outsider but also that of insider. Raised in America but also in the midst of the Chinese customs that the Joy Luck Club enables the four families to keep alive, these grown daughters have had to create a new, dynamic Chinese American character that acknowledges, negotiates, and builds from both American and Chinese cultural traditions and perspectives — and, to a certain extent, so have their mothers. I stress the role of the Joy Luck Club rather than simply that of the individual mothers or parents because, whereas the novel foregrounds the tensions between mother-daughter pairings that in many ways lead the daughters to reject their Chinese heritage, the Joy Luck Club is presented in a positive light as an enabling presence throughout the text. As a communal entity and force, it distances the Chinese traditions in which its members engage as a group from individual mother-daughter struggles. Not only does the Joy Luck Club immerse the daughters in Chinese cultural practices, albeit adapted to the American context, but it also provides the daughters with Chinese-born elders (except for Ying-ying’s husband, who is Irish American) and with American-born friends whose circumstances are similar to their own, all of whom can help the daughters negotiate identities since they all live to a certain extent caught between two worlds. Although in time the daughters are careful about what they tell each other so that it does not come back to haunt them (28), since their mothers talk and brag about their children to each other, the daughters nevertheless share aspects of their lives with each other based on their similar positions as second-generation Chinese American girls and then women. Indeed, the intersection between gender, ethnicity, and race becomes a locus of difficulties for all the daughters, and the Joy Luck Club gatherings become a space within which they begin as young girls to discuss their various problems from the specific position they share while their mothers play mah jong and their fathers play cards. Although the specifics differ drastically, the bond between the daughters, like that between their mothers, revolves around unspeakable experiences and feelings connected to their positions as women marked by a Chinese heritage. While the daughters’ lives in America seem liberated in contrast to the ghastly experiences of their mothers in what they depict as a more overtly hierarchical and paternalistic China, the daughters nevertheless experience subtle forms of sexism inflected by racism, as well as inferi-

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ority complexes — to the extent of “internalized self-hatred”65 — that derive from those experiences. Although Lena seems pleased that women often tell her they find her “ ‘exotic’ ” (170), she also verbalizes all of the daughters’ insecurities when she admits to worrying that her American boyfriend — later her husband — “would tell me I smelled bad,” to which Rose responds that “thoughts” like those are “commonplace in women like us” (169). Even Waverly, the most assertive and outwardly successful of the daughters, admits to “self-loathing” (194). In all these instances, the daughters demonstrate that they have internalized the dominant American culture’s racist equation of physiological difference with inferiority. Indeed, according to Sue Hum, Western forms of racism involve a process of positing “racial and ethnic bodies” as “not just different” but specifically “different from white bodies” and consequently inferior.66 Perhaps in order to better assimilate into the dominant white culture and to move away from their Chineseness, which they seem to imagine in static terms and to associate with their mothers, some of the daughters choose to date and marry white American men. Their fears of their mothers’ reactions further signal these daughters’ tendency to posit Chinese and American as irreconcilable opposites, again as a result of internalizing the Western tendency to think in terms of fixed binaries. Rose recalls, for instance, her mother’s disappointment when she dated and then married the non-Chinese Ted (123). For her part, Waverly fears telling her mother that she and Rich have decided to marry, because Rich is a redhead and she believes she can predict her mother’s negative comments (193). The uncertainty and fear that suffuse the daughters’ experiences with love relationships are thus inextricable from their complex racial, ethnic, gendered positioning; but, as a counterbalance, the Joy Luck Club offers them a familial, familiar, nurturing space within which they can negotiate their difficult positions as Chinese American women. As adults, however, the daughters no longer actively participate in the Joy Luck Club gatherings; and, consequently, they not only see each other infrequently but also make little use of this community with which they grew up and with whom they share so much. Indeed, the novel depicts the adult daughters as overly individualistic, keeping to themselves and eschewing the community that the Joy Luck Club offers, and as suffering from a lack of confidence and self-worth. In their efforts to claim themselves to be Americans, they have embraced the American valuing of a self-interested, anticommunal form of individualism in their daily lives and have separated themselves too much from the community

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of Chinese Americans with whom they share strong affinities. Alone outside this community, and the support and possibilities it offers, the daughters tend to exist in a kind of stasis. They are stuck in positions of ambivalence with little hope for movement forward and development as individuals with agency. Part of the problem is that the daughters mistakenly equate their Chinese heritage with their mothers. Consequently, their American-style rebellions against their mothers include a rejection of their Chinese heritage and thus of part of their own identity. The daughters do not understand that their mothers have internalized the traditional Chinese Confucian belief in “education as character building”67 and act accordingly. The mothers in Tan’s novel rule the home forcefully and take seriously their duty to bring up their children with a strong Chinese character at the same time they work to give them all that America has to offer.68 For the daughters, however, this emphasis on a Chinese cultural character they do not understand feels like authoritarianism, one of the things their own mothers had themselves rebelled against in China. Indeed, as previously discussed, communication between the mothers and daughters is difficult not only because of generational conflicts but also because of an interlinked cultural and language gap: as Jing-mei recalls, her mother’s explanations of Chinese customs or even games like mah jong did not make much sense, as each literally spoke a different language (23). Moreover, as a child, Jing-mei misunderstands and finally rebels against her mother’s attempts to turn her into a child prodigy. Suyuan’s belief that Jing-mei could become a prodigy derives from a combination of the Chinese / Confucian faith in educability and the American belief in the self-made person, which Jingmei does not share. Rather than attempt to negotiate an understanding with her mother, however, Jing-mei decides to stop trying, justifying herself by claiming, “I won’t be what I’m not” (144). Similarly, Waverly quits playing chess, even though she excels at the game, in order to punish her mother for supposedly taking credit for her wins and showing her off (187); when she begins to play again, however, Waverly loses the “feeling of supreme confidence” (189) with which she had always played and which she does not understand derived in part from her mother’s unshakeable belief in her. Neither Jing-mei nor Waverly can bear the kind of hope their mothers carry for them, which translates into the mothers’ huge time and emotional investment in their daughters’ accomplishments. In contrast to the traditional Chinese / Confucian family in which “the primary emotional tie was between mother and son,”69 Tan’s novel depicts a gendered shift

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in the mother’s primary attachment from son to daughter. This shift is in keeping with the mothers’ movement away from a patriarchal, hierarchical familial model in their shaping of the Joy Luck Club and their hopes for their daughters away from the particular oppressions they were made to suffer as women in China. Unable to analyze or understand the cultural bases of their mothers’ actions and of the tension between themselves and their mothers, however, both Jing-mei and Waverly choose to separate themselves from both their mothers and the Chinese heritage they associate with their mothers. Sadly, the result is that they choose to isolate themselves from the community of Chinese Americans that make up the Joy Luck Club and the nurturing space from which they could negotiate Chinese American forms of identity and agency. With the other two daughters, Lena and Rose, this double rejection of their mothers and Chinese culture takes the form of marrying white American men, although ironically this move actually links them to their mothers in terms of the patriarchal oppression the daughters experience in their marriages — albeit in a fashion different from their mothers’ experiences in China. Lena’s marriage to Harold is based outwardly on equality, which they put into practice by splitting all of their expenses evenly, but Lena slowly recognizes that this so-called equality masks a very real form of patriarchal oppression. Although they both work long hours at the architectural firm she encourages him to launch shortly after they become involved and although he successfully uses her ideas for the firm, he does not make her a partner and so continues to make much more money than she does (172 – 173). Harold’s notion that keeping their finances separate will ensure their love thus proves a sham, since he has engineered a relationship in which he has the economic power in the household, given his significantly larger salary, which he then uses to procure other forms of power. For example, while it initially appears fair that Lena should pay a smaller percentage of the mortgage on the house they buy, given her lower earnings, as a result she owns a smaller percentage of it and, on the basis of his larger share, Harold has greater say in decisions about the house (175 – 176). Consequently, Lena is thrust into a more dependent position. She justifies her tacit acceptance of this position by attributing it to love (174). In many ways, this surrendering to him plays into the stereotype of the submissive Chinese woman, which is ironic given Lena’s choice to distance herself from her Chinese heritage and which thus points to similarities between Chinese and American constructions of femininity. The inequity of the situation comes to a head when Lena’s mother,

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Ying-ying, comes to visit and points to the word “ ‘ice cream’ ” on the list affixed to the refrigerator of purchases Harold has made during the week. Since Harold and Lena have agreed to split expenses only of the items they share, Ying-ying stands up for her daughter when she asserts that Lena neither likes nor ever eats ice cream (177) — something that Harold seems not to know about her. Ying-ying’s experience with patriarchal inequities back in China, where she was married to a man who cheated on her, enables her both to recognize the oppressive aspects of Lena’s marriage and to push Lena into asserting herself, into acting on her own behalf. Indeed, after her mother goes up to bed, Lena finally speaks up and tells Harold that she hates the way they “account for everything” (179) and wants a change. When shortly thereafter the wobbly guest-room bedside table collapses, sending a vase of flowers crashing to the floor, Lena asserts that she “knew it would happen.” Yingying’s response, “Then why you don’t stop it?” (180 – 181), clearly addresses Lena’s failure to do something about not only the table but also, more importantly, the aspects of her marriage that prove oppressive and thus affirms support for Lena’s newfound voice within her marriage. Rose’s marriage is more overtly inequitable from its inception. In response to their parents’ disapproval of their interracial relationship, not only had Rose and Ted clung to each other but also Rose admits to playing “victim to his hero” (125). Neither seems to notice the Orientalist aspect of positioning Rose as the weak, victimized woman; indeed, Ted places Rose within one of the prevalent American stereotypes of Chinese women, which Ling refers to as the fragile “China Doll: demure, diminutive, and deferential [ . . . ] devoted body and soul to serving [‘her man’].”70 As Rose understands in retrospect, they become addicted to the roles they have chosen. Their whole relationship thus relies on her dependence on Ted and his making all the decisions (125 – 126). Ted holds power within American culture based on his position as a successful white doctor with a wife who depends on him completely. After Ted loses a big malpractice suit and no longer feels all-powerful, however, he begins to blame Rose for never making decisions and, thus, taking no responsibility or blame for anything (126); eventually, he demands a divorce. Accepting the position of victim and dependent thus backfires on Rose when Ted can no longer play the hero. Years of living in her husband’s shadow leaves her with no sense of self and thus points to the oppressive quality of her marriage. Moreover, having never made decisions, Rose becomes overwhelmed when faced with “too many choices” (214). When she talks about her

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impending divorce with her Joy Luck Club peers, her confusion is reflected in the “different story” (210) she tells each person. Although Waverly and Lena stick up for her and blame Ted, Rose initially chooses to isolate herself rather than make use of the supportive community that these women represent. Unable to make a decision with regard to signing the divorce papers Ted has sent her, Rose again chooses the passive victim position by staying in bed and taking sleeping pills (215). After learning from Ted that he needs the divorce papers signed immediately because he wants to remarry, however, Rose finally chooses to face the situation head on. Moreover, she unconsciously heeds her mother An-mei’s advice to “speak up for yourself” (216), something An-mei understands only too well, given that her own mother had no voice — as third concubine to a man who initially raped her as a means of obtaining her as a concubine — and could assert herself only through suicide. Having experienced patriarchal oppression themselves, Waverly, Lena, and An-mei all recognize it when they see it; and they function here to collectively provide Rose a supportive space within which to assert herself as a subject capable of constructive agency.71 Facing up to Ted, Rose refuses to sign the divorce papers and instructs him to wait for the papers her own lawyer will serve him; asserts that she intends to keep the house she loves; and justifies herself by telling him in person that he cannot just discard her. Rose thus forces Ted to view her as a subject with agency rather than as a victim or a shadow and thereby drastically changes the power dynamics between them. Indeed, she reads the power that her words have in his “confused, then scared” eyes (219). In the case of all four daughters, movement forward involves an assertion of agency dependent on some reconnection to the Chinese American community — although the degree to which this happens differs. Since arguably Lena and Rose have distanced themselves most fully from their Chinese American extended family and from their Chinese heritage, the reconnections that the novel depicts for them remain small, limited instances. Consequently, their acts of assertion remain first steps that open up possibilities for further agency. For Lena, her mother’s visit provides such an instance of reconnection. During the episode in which Lena defends her mother’s claim that she (Lena) has never liked ice cream, for instance, Lena reports that Harold looks taken aback as if she “too, were speaking Chinese” (177), thus linking herself not only with her mother but also with the Chinese part of her identity. Moreover, the collective claim by mother and daughter about the ice cream creates a bond between the two that in and of itself serves as an act of assertion

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and, subsequently, emboldens Lena not only to “cross out ‘ice cream’ ” on Harold’s list of purchases but also to question openly the basis of their marriage (179 – 180). For Rose, the reconnection with her Chinese American family and heritage comes from conversations with Waverly and Lena about her marital problems and from her mother’s encouragement that she express herself, as well as her thinking of herself as Chinese when she makes use of Chinese words to describe her condition (210), all of which allow her to assert herself as agent rather than victim when discussing the divorce with Ted. The novel thus presents Lena and Rose as beginning to assert themselves as agents in order to deal in different ways with marriages that have included structures of patriarchal oppression, which in turn offers hope for their futures as agents; in both cases, agency is triggered by the support they receive from members of their immediate and extended Chinese American family. In the cases of Waverly and Jing-mei, who have retained closer ties to their Chinese American families, the novel depicts much stronger reconnections to these families and their heritage and a higher degree of agency — but, in the cases of all four daughters, individual agency is overtly linked to the individual’s position within and dependence on a nurturing community. The only one to remain unmarried and working close to her parents’ home, Jing-mei has more contact with her immediate family and consequently with members of her extended Joy Luck Club family (223). Marrying a Chinese American and then raising a Chinese American child as a single mother similarly keeps Waverly in closer contact with her immediate and extended family. For example, Jing-mei and Waverly both attend the Chinese New Year dinner that Suyuan hosts, which brings together a number of members of each of their immediate families and thus also of their extended Joy Luck Club family. Although Waverly has remained more connected to her Chinese American family and heritage because of her personal circumstances, the friction between herself and her mother creates an unease toward her Chinese heritage that parallels that of the other daughters. Consequently, as with the other daughters, the novel depicts the rapprochement between Waverly and her mother and between Waverly and her Chinese heritage as intertwined. Arriving one day to vent her anger at her mother but finding her asleep on a couch, Waverly is stunned to see her formidable mother-opponent looking not only “frail, guileless, and innocent” (199) but also “powerless” (200). Although when

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Lindo awakes, the mother-daughter battle resumes, Waverly begins to understand what she “had been fighting for: It was for me” (203) — for an identity separate from and yet accepted by her mother. This recognition allows Waverly to separate her Chinese heritage from her mother. Indeed, Waverly and her white fiancé, Rich, choose China as the destination for their upcoming honeymoon (204), indicating Waverly’s wish to connect more firmly with the part of her that is Chinese. This choice to go to China denotes not only Waverly’s assertion of herself as a subject with agency but also hope with regard to the future. Tan’s text even hints that Lindo may accompany the couple to China, a likelihood that Waverly envisions simultaneously as a disaster waiting to happen and as a utopian resolution allowing them — Chinese-born Chinese American mother, American-born Chinese American daughter, and white American son-in-law and husband — to leave their “differences behind” (205). This double vision of her trip to China if her mother were to come along demonstrates Waverly’s recognition that her individual relationship with her mother is not synonymous with her Chinese identity. She now can separate out how she would hate spending three weeks with her mother from how “perfect” it would be to sit “side by side, [ . . . ], moving West to reach the East” (205). The novel here emphasizes China and its heritage rather than genealogy as establishing a positive, forward-looking link between Waverly and her mother. Both mother and daughter work actively to negotiate a space not only for a better mother-daughter relationship but also for each to help the other engage in the ongoing work of identity formation. When Waverly insists that her mother have her hair done for the wedding at the chic boutique she frequents, she is stunned by the hairdresser’s assertion that they look so much alike. Although Lindo notes to herself in a critical tone that Americans tend to talk to their reflections rather than to each other, her American side surfaces when she and Waverly examine their images in the mirror to judge the hairdresser’s claim (290 – 291). Lindo sees that Waverly has “the same eyes, the same cheeks, the same chin” (303) as herself, thus reinforcing their genealogical tie, but she also knows that Waverly does not look completely Chinese. Even more striking is Lindo’s admission that, when she went back to China after many years, the people there “knew my face was not one hundred percent Chinese” (305). This acknowledgment that neither mother nor daughter can pass as Chinese in China highlights not only that there is no such thing as an authentic Chineseness but also that Chineseness is a fluid construct that is contextual and at the same time connected to

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certain physiological characteristics. As Hum argues, “Embodied enactments of Chineseness shift according to locale” at least in part because “physiologically marked bodies exhibit posture and movement that are environment specific.”72 What connects mother and daughter is thus not merely genealogy but more crucially their positions as Chinese American women who must continuously negotiate identities for themselves that are neither Chinese nor American but, rather, necessarily hybrid. This process — moving past individual mother-daughter conflicts and thus severing for the daughter the linkage of mother and Chinese heritage in order to negotiate a healthy Chinese American identity that enables agency — is complicated for Jing-mei by her mother’s death. Made to take her mother’s place at the Joy Luck Club mah-jong table after her death only amplifies Jing-mei’s equation of her mother with Chinese culture. Indeed, the cultural gap that separates her from her mother becomes overt when she talks with her three Joy Luck Club aunties about the trip they want her to take to China to meet her half sisters, for which they have handed her a check for $1,200; indeed, Jing-mei notes the parallels between her aunties and her mother, as well as between herself and her aunties’ daughters. Most forcefully, Jing-mei sees not only her aunties’ “generosity” and “loyalty” (30) but also their fear when she acknowledges she does not know very much about her mother: she reminds them of “their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America” (31). Despite her fears however, Jing-mei chooses to do her part in the Joy Luck Club aunties’ plan to complete their friend’s “unfinished business” (5), a plan based upon a notion of and made possible by the women’s collective agency.73 That this plan feeds off and continues the hope that has sustained the mothers indicates that Jing-mei is also choosing hope in its Chinese American inflected form constructed by these immigrant mothers. Jing-mei’s trip to China with her father to meet her mother’s twin daughters from a previous marriage not only brings to fruition Suyuan’s dream of finding the twin girls but also functions as a means for Jingmei to explore the Chinese side of her Chinese American identity, which she has suppressed for years. This suppression is rooted at least in part in her own reductive association of Chineseness with things her mother did to embarrass her — such as haggling in stores or wearing strange combinations of colors (307) — suggesting that she has internalized a static notion of an authentic Chineseness with clear Eurocentric and,

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indeed, racist overtones. Her trip to China educates her into a broader and more fluid notion of Chineseness. Although she recalls her mother’s assertions that being Chinese “is in your blood,” Jing-mei’s feeling upon her arrival in China that she is “becoming Chinese” appears connected not to some biological imperative but rather to an emotional reaction to her cultural surroundings, to the place itself (306).74 Moreover, Jing-mei’s notion of becoming Chinese indicates a process rather than a being and thus reinforces the novel’s overall insistence on identity as always in process and as necessarily culturally mediated rather than dependent solely on genealogy or biology. Jing-mei feels more connections with her Chinese heritage when physically in China and at the same time remains aware of her foreignness despite her direct genealogical ties to China, including overt racial markers imprinted on her physique. As Hum argues, “Chineseness cannot be delineated neatly within biological origins or geographical borders” and “is not a natural, static condition”; rather race and ethnicity are always “dependent on temporal and spatial contingencies.”75 That Jing-mei remembers her mother telling her that she was tall like her grandfather, who was said to have “Mongol blood” (312), further highlights the hybrid quality of Chineseness even before Americanness is thrown into the equation. By demonstrating that there is no such thing as an authentic Chineseness, Tan’s novel makes space for her women characters to take control of the construction of their own hybrid Chinese American identities. In addition, the novel presents China itself as a dynamic rather than a static entity. The China Jing-mei encounters on her trip differs in many ways from the China depicted to her by her parents, which was based on their memories of pre – World War II China and colored by various revisionist impulses. Most significantly, since her parents’ emigration, China has experienced a political shift to communism, has developed technologically, and has had to develop trade with the West in order to participate in an increasingly global economy. Consequently, Jing-mei must readjust her simplistic notions of China as the antithesis of the United States when she notes that the city of Guangzhou does not look much different from many American cities — which does not coincide with her American-inflected idea of “communist China” (318). Her subsequent discovery that the high rises coexist with tiny shops and bamboo scaffolding and that her hotel room offers both a minibar containing American sodas and shampoo with “the consistency and color of hoisin

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sauce” (319 – 320) forces her to view China as a dynamic culture that is itself negotiating — much like Jing-mei herself — its own cultural traditions with those it has inherited from the West. When Jing-mei finally meets her twin sisters, she is initially startled that they do not look like their mother. However, she notes in them something familiar, which triggers a recognition of the part of her that is Chinese: “It is so obvious. It is my family” (331). When minutes later she examines the Polaroid picture her father takes of her with the twins, Jing-mei notes that “together we look like our mother” (332). Although many scholars have criticized the ending of The Joy Luck Club for depending on what David Li calls a kind of “chromosomal trope of cultural reproduction,”76 I would argue that Tan’s novel as a whole presents a more complex picture of cultural reproduction that places emphasis on the family over and above genetics. Indeed, the entire novel stresses not only the role of the family in cultural production and reproduction but also the dynamic possibilities of conceptions of the extended family with ties based on friendship, empathy, and care. Jing-mei’s recognition that her family — and not just her mother — represents the part of her that is Chinese indicates a more inclusive notion of family that pushes beyond mere genealogy despite her subsequent reference to blood ties. What connects Jing-mei to her half sisters is not just a common genetic pool but, more crucially, their shared pain of having lost a loving mother. Furthermore, they share their mother’s Chinese-inflected valuing of family, which she put into practice as she raised her Chinese American family in the United States and, simultaneously, continued to search via letters for her twin daughters in China. That their resemblance to their mother occurs only when they appear together on the Polaroid is a function not so much of genetics but rather of their meeting’s representing Suyuan’s dream of bringing together the children of her two different marriages and lives in different geographical spaces and cultural traditions. For Jing-mei, meeting her half sisters provides her with a closer connection not only to her mother, about whose past life and pains she knew so little, but also to her Chinese cultural heritage.77 Having flown halfway around the globe to China, Jing-mei locates the part of her that is Chinese in her family; but, as the novel makes clear throughout its pages, her family includes not only her immediate nuclear family but also an extended family: her two half sisters in China and the members of the Joy Luck Club at home in San Francisco. Moreover, her extended family connects her to the part of her that is Chinese precisely because it

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is the site of the production and reproduction of ever-evolving Chinese cultural traditions. Tan’s novel depicts all four mothers and daughters as actively negotiating their identities as Chinese Americans in order to assert themselves as subjects with agency, albeit in different ways and to differing extents. Although part of that process of negotiation occurs on the level of mother-daughter relationships, what ultimately reconnects the mothers and daughters are not their genetic ties but rather certain parallel experiences as women marked by their Chinese heritage — particularly experiences of patriarchal oppression within familial relationships, racially marked oppression within American culture, and the difficult negotiation of a Chinese American identity.78 Moreover, the parallels between the four mother-daughter relationships and the existence of the Joy Luck Club as a community that encompasses and at times helps to negotiate these relationships highlights an interdependence that extends beyond the mother-daughter relationships. The Joy Luck Club thus participates in what Chu describes as a tendency within Asian American writing to invent “a subject who combines independence, mobility and outspokenness with a deep sense of affinity with familial and communal others.”79 The novel’s positioning of the four mother-daughter relationships within the larger context of the Joy Luck Club community not only shifts attention away from an exclusive focus on the mother-daughter dyads but also offers a larger, more dynamic familial structure that does not depend solely on genealogy and thus offers the flexibility that Chinese immigrants and their descendents require if they are to create communities to sustain their Chinese heritage while living in the United States and within the context of American culture.80 For example, Jing-mei’s reconnection with her mother through her meeting of her twin half sisters and with her Chinese heritage through both her physical trip to China and her understanding of the function of her family as a bridge to her Chinese heritage occurs as a consequence of the existence of the Joy Luck Club. Without the caring, interdependent relationships that the Joy Luck Club provides for the mothers, Suyuan’s search for her daughters would most likely have died with her own physical death. Not only do the Joy Luck Club aunties know of Suyuan’s relentless quest — which she had not shared with either her husband or daughter — but they organize the meeting between Jing-mei and her twin half sisters by writing to the twins in Chinese (something Jing-mei cannot do) and raising the money

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club  69

necessary to send Jing-mei to China. The aunties’ assertion as Suyuan’s friends-sisters and their collective agency in making Suyuan’s wish come true, as well as Jing-mei’s assertion of self and of individual agency in undertaking the trip to China, thus both depend on the Joy Luck Club as a collective entity with collective agency that makes possible individual agency. As Chu notes, The Joy Luck Club is “a novel whose multiple narratives construct both mothers and daughters as Asian [more specifically, Chinese] American subjects”;81 but I want to add that this construction occurs crucially within the context of a dynamic, extended family-community. Through its depiction of the Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan’s novel offers a useful model for reimagining agency at the turn of the twenty-first century within the context of the United States as an immigrant nation that is growing increasingly multicultural. This multicultural aspect of the United States creates not only tensions but also the possibility of coalition building to deal with those tensions and of creating new frameworks out of the various traditions brought to this country in order to negotiate an ever-changing contemporary culture.82 The Joy Luck Club borrows the Chinese valuing of the family and its relationships of interdependence but alters traditional Confucian notions of the family to get rid of the hierarchies of power and dependence on patrilineage that structure them. Through a more symmetrical distribution of power, the Joy Luck Club retains different roles for its various members while simultaneously rejecting a hierarchical structure. For example, although the mothers cook the meals for the club gatherings and play mah jong while their husbands play cards after the meal, the mothers share with their husbands an equal, democratic voice and vote in Joy Luck Club decisions. Moreover, the club values but does not privilege blood ties; indeed, the novel depicts a number of connecting threads between the various members of the Joy Luck Club, with the primary ones being a function of their positions as first- or second-generation Chinese immigrants to the United States. Positionality and affect rather than blood ties prove to be the real glue between Joy Luck Club members, even between mothers and daughters. Moreover, the characters’ sense of hope, derived from a blend of the Chinese notion of fate and the American dream, both of which contain and celebrate a participatory element, provides the impetus for their developments as agents within the context of the collective. Although some critics have objected to the novel’s ending as overly utopian, I see this utopian ending as serving the vital function of con-

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solidating its hopeful evocation of an alternative form of familial community as necessary both for the characters’ survival and for their assertion of agency. Indeed, the novel offers an alternative model of kinship based on affinities deriving from specific cultural positioning, which creates a familial community that values caring interdependence as politically efficacious in that it makes possible the negotiation of collective identity and agency and in turn of individual identity and agency within the context of the collectivity. Tan’s novel thus offers a vision of Chinese American women characters who are contributing to what Ho calls “an American culture-in-the-making”83 through their active construction of alternative, hybrid forms of identity and agency that emphasize the interconnectedness of the individual and the collective.

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Chapter 3 Negotiating Collectivities Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven

T

his chapter further explores alternative models of kinship as an avenue for reimagining community and the possibility of agency begun in the discussion of Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Like Tan’s novel, Barbara Kingsolver’s two-novel set, The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), offers alternative nonhierarchical familial communities that respect but do not privilege blood ties as positive, forward-looking means for individuals to survive and build lives in late twentiethcentury America. However, compared to Tan’s, Kingsolver’s novels allow for a much more developed examination of the workings of class in contemporary America and of how class intersects with issues of power and agency. Moreover, the novel set addresses issues of multiculturalism very differently than does Tan’s novel. While Tan’s novel focuses on firstand second-generation Chinese Americans and the difficulties faced by immigrants and their American-born children, Kingsolver examines the tension between white America and Native Americans. Because Native Americans did not immigrate to America but rather made up its indigenous population prior to European colonialism, the dynamics of their position within the United States and their relationship to the dominant white American culture is markedly different than it is for most immigrants. In addition, while Tan’s novel focuses on the hybridity of its Chinese American characters, who must continually negotiate their Chinese heritage and their adopted American culture, Kingsolver’s novels focus more specifically on hybridity and diversity within deliberately constructed familial communities. My choice to write on these two novels by Kingsolver stems from my interest in the ways in which they set out to explore how people of diverse ethnicity, race, gender, class, nationality, sexual orientation, geo-

graphic origin, and age might form familial communities to enable individual and cultural survival in light of their common humanity. Unlike the other novels in this study, however, both the writer and protagonist of this two-novel set are young white women, which might make these texts an odd choice — especially since they engage issues surrounding the Cherokee tribe. The authors of the other three novels in this study not only focus specifically on Asian American, Mexican American, or African American communities but also identify as and are identified as belonging to the ethnic racial group about which they write. Although her great-grandmother was Cherokee, Kingsolver neither identifies herself nor is identified as Native American; she grew up in a white family in predominantly white rural Kentucky and explains in a 1992 interview that her “Cherokee great-grandmother was quite deliberately left out of the family history for reasons of racism and embarrassment about mixed blood.” Kingsolver’s statement makes clear, however, that she is extremely aware of and interested in exploring the workings of racism and the power and function of erasure; and, in the same interview, she asserts herself as a deliberately “political writer.”1 In choosing to engage the Cherokee tribe’s attempts to counter the cultural genocide visited upon it since the beginning of European colonization of America, Kingsolver risks accusations of ethnocentrism and of engaging in processes of colonization herself; however, she takes this risk in order to imagine a more diverse and hybrid community that nevertheless does not erase specific cultures. White scholars working within the field of Native American studies have found themselves in a similar double bind; as Arnold Krupat notes, while he and other white scholars like himself “take seriously the advice of many Native scholars that if America is to survive, it had better learn something from the Indian,” they nevertheless at times find their “attempts to learn categorized [by Native scholars] as intellectual tourism, cultural imperialism, or the imposition of an unjust burden on the Indian.”2 I want to argue not only that Kingsolver takes seriously the idea that it is in America’s interest to “learn something from the Indian” and chooses to take the risk of at times falling into “intellectual tourism” or “cultural imperialism,” but also that taking such a risk and even falling into colonizing traps may be necessary to reach beyond the status quo and imagine something new. Indeed, not taking the risk may be the irresponsible choice, in that it inevitably leaves the status quo intact. An analysis of any number of novels by writers who identify them-

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selves as and focus on Native Americans — Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995) would have been a particularly apt choice — would contribute to this project by highlighting the potential contributions of Native American notions of community to the process of reconceiving notions of community, coalition, and agency. A novel like Solar Storms explores, for example, what Jace Weaver describes as the importance of community linked to “collective survival” that “cuts across various Native worldviews,” and a notion of “the ‘wider community’ that includes all the created order” and is “characterized in kinship terms”3 — but so do Kingsolver’s novels. While Kingsolver may at times “idealize the Cherokee” and their traditions, as Kathleen Godfrey contends,4 such idealization or romanticization may be inevitable when tied to the political impulse to highlight aspects of a culture that might be mined in order to transform American culture for the better. Moreover, as Paula Gunn Allen points out, “Politically conscious, romanticizing stances [also] characterize much of the work of contemporary Indian writers,” given that they, like white writers, get “trapped in the Romantic Fallacy” of “the noble savage convention.”5 The problem with positioning the Indian as noble savage, as Philip Deloria explains, is that it “both juxtaposes and conflates an urge to idealize and desire Indians and a need to despise and dispossess them,” thus reflecting the “intertwined history of European colonialism and the European Enlightenment”6 — a history that is shared by Native and all other Americans “after five hundred years of contact.”7 In other words, I am suggesting here that all writers who recognize and seek to depict the “living resources in indigenous societies,”8 whether these writers are Native or white Americans, may have a tendency to romanticize these societies precisely because of the desire to give voice to their positive resources. In addition, the particularly fraught history of ongoing colonization of indigenous people in America has given rise to a political stance of nationalism and separatism among some Native Americans that finds its way into a good deal of the fiction written by and focusing on Native Americans. In Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s terms, “Indians must be seen as Indians, not as ethnic individuals in America.”9 Such a stance conflicts with the basic premise of my project, which explores the variety of ways in which hybrid communities are being created in the United States and situates these as marking a hope for the future. Although a novel like Hogan’s Solar Storms does not promote separatism per se and does focus on the communal aspects of indigenous culture, it also asserts certain

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tribal nationalistic concepts — particularly when the Native activists use “tribal/national sovereignty” as “a legal and political category”10 to stop the building of a dam that, by diverting the waters that shape their tribal lands, is changing indigenous ways of life. Moreover, Hogan’s novel tends to downplay notions of hybridity — even if many of its characters are of mixed blood — in order to highlight indigenous culture. When it does portray hybridity, it does so in a negative light by highlighting mixed-race individuals as the products of rapes and as haunted by the history of a violent ongoing process of colonization and genocide. Given my interest in this project in exploring the positive possibilities of the mixing of cultures to produce new, stronger, and more just nonhierarchical conceptions of community and more communal forms of coalition practices and agency, novels such as Solar Storms, while wonderful and engaging in myriad ways, may ultimately not prove as fruitful to analyze as Kingsolver’s novels, even with the latter’s flaws with respect to romanticizing or idealizing the Cherokee (which I will not overlook in my discussions), since these novels highlight the positive potential of hybridity in multiple ways. The Bean Trees, the first book in Kingsolver’s two-novel set, explores the creation of alternative communities and extended families through alliances with other individuals based on ties such as socioeconomic positioning, gender, motherhood, cultural heritage, and geographical proximity. Its sequel, Pigs in Heaven, more fully takes on the complex dynamics of communal versus individual survival and justice by bringing to the forefront questions of class and race, as well as of cultural history, heritage, and survival, that are only touched upon in the first novel. The two-novel set thus addresses the relationship between the individual and the community on both micro- and macrolevels and, in the process, offers a version of agency that creatively negotiates the interests of the individual and the community in terms of survival and justice. Viewing community as necessary without privileging community over the individual, this form of agency requires coalition efforts among individuals and communities in order to account for and address the complex workings of class, gender, race, and ethnic cultural heritage. Agency becomes conceptualized and actualized in Kingsolver’s novels as a process of ongoing negotiation that requires stitching together a patchwork of interests and traditions in ways that both respect those interests and traditions and rewrite them by forcing them to enter into dialogue. In the world of Kingsolver’s novels, the individual has

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little agency outside communities — imagined in terms of alternative extended families — yet processes of community and coalition require individuals: in short, the individual and the community are represented as inextricably interconnected. Of the novels I examine in this book, Kingsolvers’ address perhaps most extensively the workings of class in contemporary America, focusing on how class dynamics intersect with gender, race, and ethnic culture. This class analysis leads not only to a critique of the American ideal of self-interested individualism, particularly in the ways in which it has increasingly come to be defined almost exclusively in terms of the marketplace, but also to the construction of an alternative model of the individual within and as a function of community. By advocating a philosophy close to that of Emmanuel Levinas in his assertion that “being is [necessarily] exteriority,” always a “being for the Other,”11 these two novels emphasize that identity and community are mutually constructive. Although Levinas as a European philosopher and his ideas might at first glance appear a dubious fit with an American novel addressing questions of ethnicity and race, his philosophy’s highlighting of the basic responsibility for the other that characterizes humanity and thus links all human beings has proved useful in particular to critics exploring issues of otherness — especially among feminist and postcolonial critics. Countering the dominant market-inflected notion of individualism, which posits the individual as an autonomous free agent whose success in life is measured in terms of gains in material wealth, Kingsolver’s novels offer a conception of the individual not as “a pre-social being” but rather as “shaped in participation in community” and as having a stake in the collectivity in terms of the common good.12 Simultaneously, the novels reject a notion of community as static and as already given and instead posit community as a process of construction by individuals actively coming together at the level of everyday life. As Gerard De­lanty argues, “Participation in many kinds of community requires highly individualized egos who are willing consciously to support collective goals and values.”13 Such a notion of community as dynamic process also stresses an element of choice rather than simply social assignation —  thus signaling, in Maurice Blanchot’s terms, a shift from a socially “imposed” to an “elective” community.14 Indeed, Kingsolver’s texts reconceive agency as a function of this interrelationship between the individual and the community. Human beings do act in her fiction, but the

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agency they possess “grows from communal resistance”;15 as such, it is a form of dynamic agency that is communal, directed toward collective aims, and utopian in impulse. Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven thus participate in and contribute to a reconceptualization of community as a process always in flux, as encompassing a shifting set of variables, and as intricately connected to issues of social justice that themselves must be reformulated. In the novels, justice emerges as fluid, socially constructed, and clearly linked to historically specific inequitable power relations. Consequently, notions of justice, as well as of community, need to be reconsidered in other than their dominant incarnations. To that end, the novels’ explorations of the roles and possibilities of community carry a feminist inflection, embracing the processes of “nurturing, consensus decisionmaking, and collaboration” over “the goal of winning” and emphasizing a “holistic approach” that addresses “emotional, spiritual, and intellectual needs — and strengths” — on an even par.16 Indeed, historically, “community work has always played an important role within the feminist movement in this country [the United States],” not only within the “more recent feminist movements” but also in the earlier “abolitionist movement, the suffrage movement, social settlements, and the progressive movement.”17 Moreover, also in keeping with recent feminist scholarship and debates, Kingsolver’s novels — particularly Pigs in Heaven  — examine how the variables of race, ethnicity, and cultural history always inflect conceptions of community. Pigs in Heaven explores Cherokee notions of community that tend to conflict with the American ideal of self-interested individualism in its emphasis on individual material wealth and resultant devaluation of community. The two novels thus negotiate the variables involved in constructing and sustaining community, with an emphasis on gender and class in The Bean Trees and on racial and ethnic cultural heritage in Pigs in Heaven, in order to offer more communal forms of agency aimed at achieving greater social justice in terms of more caring, accommodative social practices. More specifically, the novels reformulate community in terms of an extended family, thereby effectively invalidating the traditional opposition between the public and the private spheres. As Edward Blakely notes, “The community as a human institution (much like the family) represents a genuinely viable alternative for social interaction and problem solving.”18 This notion that community functions like family is taken up by Kingsolver’s novels and developed to offer community as a dynamic form of extended family that involves continuous negotiation

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among individuals whose networks of subject positions include ones that they share and ones that differ, and that makes possible constructive interdependence. Both novels reveal the twentieth-century American notion of the nuclear family as neither ideal nor accurately mirroring the actual shape of many families in the United States at the close of the century, especially among the poor and the various ethnic groups that make up an increasingly high proportion of the country’s population. In particular, Kingsolver’s novels focus on the high number of female-headed households and the correlation between those households and poverty in an economic system that, more than ever before, requires people to relocate away from extended family to find employment and to acquire more education and/or job training but that does not provide affordable health care or child care on a sliding scale. According to Steven Pressman, in the United States “poverty has increasingly become feminized — women are much more likely than men to be poor.”19 In 1980, the approximate time of the novels, 18 percent of “all families with children was headed by a single woman” in the United States and, of those female-headed households, 36.7 percent fell below the poverty rate. Although this figure seems high, many researchers agree that poverty figures in the United States are extremely conservative, given the way in which the United States calculates poverty using an “absolute standard” with “a specific dollar amount that a family of a particular size and composition must have to avoid poverty” rather than “the relative standards employed by the European Commission and the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] and most of the nations of western Europe.”20 Relative standards are based on “median adjusted family or household income, after taxes within a country for a specified year.”21 The disjunction between these two ways of calculating poverty becomes evident in that the “dollar levels” of the American absolute standard fall “far below half the median income of similar families,” so that, if the United States moved to the “relative standards used in the other Western industrial nations,” the poverty count would “probably increase [ . . . ] considerably.”22 Presumably, then, much more than 36.7 percent of singlemother households in 1980 were poor, in the sense of making do with earnings well below the median income for such families. As Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, which reports on her undercover experience in the workforce posing as an unskilled worker with no advanced education to see if she “could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every

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day,” not only do “child care and transportation problems” often get in the way of “punctuality, cleanliness, cheerfulness, obedience” — all “traits deemed essential to job readiness” — but also “wages are too low and rents too high” for a single unskilled worker, much less a single mother with children, to survive. Indeed, she ends the book by insisting that, in contradistinction to the American ideal to the effect “that ‘hard work’ was the secret of success,” her own attempt to make it as a single, unskilled woman worker demonstrates that “you could work hard — harder than you ever thought possible — and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty.”23 Ehrenreich’s comments sharply indict the American dream, which continues to dominate both as an ideal and as a way of condemning those who cannot live up to it. In light of the concrete situation of single, unskilled mothers in contemporary America, Kingsolver’s fictional protagonist, Taylor Greer, finds that she must participate in alternative communities in the shape of extended families if she is to survive; and the two-novel set explores ways of rethinking family and kinship to make possible not just survival but a good and just life in a more collectivist sense. Moreover, the novels’ investigation of alternative communities in terms of extended family looks to and borrows from various models of and ways of thinking about community inflected by class, gender, race, and ethnic heritage as a means of constructing its own composite, utopian model. In particular, Pigs in Heaven explores ways in which Cherokee conceptions of the relationship between the individual and the community can offer an alternative base from which to rethink those crucial concepts.

The Bean Trees addresses all these issues on a relatively micro level, with the emphasis placed on its protagonist, Taylor Greer. The action begins with Taylor leaving home and her beloved mother and heading west in a dilapidated Volkswagen bug in order to experience more out of life than her rural Appalachian community can offer. Like her mother before her, Taylor chooses to resist the conventional cultural scripts offered to her that emphasize maternity but not necessarily the promotion of nurturance and just social relations. On the one hand, this road-trip-west scenario exemplifies the individualistic quest so prominent in much American literature, particularly an earlier version of individualism tied to geographical mobility and self-reliance; she even renames herself Taylor in place of Marietta, an assertion of control over her selfhood. On the other hand, Taylor does not remain alone for very long and her aims

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very quickly veer from individualistic ones, indicating the impossibility or absurdity of the purely individualist quest given the individual’s physical positioning within society and the material needs of human beings — which for most people at the turn of the twenty-first century are provided by others for a monetary cost (since few people are totally materially independent from society in the present-day United States, except perhaps in the more remote areas of Alaska) — and given the responsibility that human beings have for each other when they exist in close proximity to one another.24 In a dark, lonely Oklahoma parking lot “in the middle of a great emptiness that according to the road signs was owned by the Cherokee tribe,” a tearful woman hands Taylor a child wrapped in a blanket and begs her, “Take this baby,” adding right before driving off, “There isn’t nobody knows it’s alive, or cares. Nobody that matters, like the police or nothing like that.”25 Stunned and stumped by this event, Taylor proceeds to care for the child, who turns out to be a Native American girl. Having left Kentucky in part because “barefoot and pregnant was not [her] style” (4), Taylor ironically becomes the de facto mother of a toddler in an instant. Taylor’s decision to keep and mother the child is not so much an intellectual as an empathic one. Derived “from the German Einfülung, which literally means the ability to ‘feel into’ someone else’s experience,” empathy “connects one person to another” through an active process of “integrating what we know with what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.”26 It is a deeply human and humane process, in the sense that, as Levinas argues, being human is inextricable from “love of the other, responsibility for one’s fellowman.”27 When Taylor first bathes the child in a motel bathroom and finds “bruises and worse” under her diaper, empathy and a sense of responsibility draw her to the little girl, “poor thing” (31), who has already lived through sexual abuse, and also to the wishes of the unknown woman who seemed to count on Taylor to protect the child. Moreover, the little girl herself “attached itself to [Taylor] by its little hands like roots sucking on dry dirt” (29), a gesture that speaks of the child’s own survival instincts and one that Taylor cannot simply ignore: the child needs to be cared for both physically and psychologically, and Taylor is the only one at hand to do so. In other words, Taylor becomes the little girl’s mother through the care she gives her, in the sense that “care is at the core of what family members owe one another, and generally of what they wish to provide one another.”28 Although she is not related to the child by blood — the dominant means by which family is defined in the United States — a broader human fa-

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milial tie draws Taylor to care for the child. Taylor’s goal becomes not just individual survival but the survival of herself and the little girl. As bell hooks argues, empathy consists of a connection that can potentially “promote recognition of common commitments, and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.”29 Agency in this specific, local case thus becomes linked to a form of communal (mother and child) survival sparked by a gender-inflected human empathy, and it takes a pragmatic form: concrete, material actions. Moreover, mothering thus becomes redefined in broader terms as agency, as caretaking practices that extend beyond the nuclear, biological family. One slightly odd aspect of this turn of events in Taylor’s life is that she never even thinks about locating the child’s family. Presumably because of the evidence of sexual abuse, Taylor takes literally the woman’s words that “there isn’t nobody knows it’s alive, or cares” (24). However, she does not even wonder whether the woman might not have been in her right mind and come to regret her rash actions, imagine an extended family that might care for the child, or think about the child’s link to a specific Cherokee tribe and culture. On the one hand, she is very young and arguably naive, which might explain why she instantaneously becomes emotionally attached to the child with little consideration of consequences. On the other hand, one could view the situation as reflecting general American assumptions about bad mothers and more specifically, in this case, bad Native American mothers. As Cook-Lynn argues, however, even an abusive Native mother has “civil rights. Human rights”; she should not be “condemned” in a simplistic manner. Instead, CookLynn calls for the recognition that “the welfare of tribal children is dependent upon the welfare of tribal parents” and that, given the history of “colonial tyranny,” the “childbearing Indian woman” cannot be held solely “responsible for the fragmentation of the social fabric of Indian lives.”30 Allen similarly attributes the “destructive” actions of too many Native women to “the exigencies of a history of invasion, conquest, and colonization whose searing marks are probably ineradicable.”31 But Taylor does not make the connection between the tearful Cherokee woman who hands her the child and “the compounded impact of genocide, colonialism, forced cultural assimilation, economic dependence, and racism.”32 Indeed, Taylor does not think about the Cherokee woman at all, seemingly erasing her from her consciousness in a clearly colonialist gesture of which she appears unaware. Instead, she directs her empathy solely at the abused child — a choice that comes back to haunt her. Taylor thus thinks about the child in a very individualistic way; although

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she empathizes with the child, Taylor views her as a lone individual for whom she must care rather than as part of a community that might miss her. In order to achieve the joint survival of herself and the baby girl she has been handed, however, Taylor immediately starts reaching out to others and forming communities wherever she goes33 — rugged individualism not being particularly practical for a poor single mother in contemporary America. Again, these communities are achieved in great part on the basis of empathy and a sense of responsibility for others. Moreover, the connections she makes are almost exclusively with other women of the lower class who value nurturing, which points here to a conjunction of subject positions — based on gender, class, and value structure — that makes possible certain forms of collaborative activities among otherwise different human beings. Recognizing on her first night with the child that she could not very well sleep in her car as she had planned, Taylor banks on the empathy of the old woman at the motel desk, especially once Taylor finds out that the motel is family operated. Taylor approaches the woman on the basis of what Joan Tronto describes as “the values of caring — attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion, meeting others’ needs.”34 Laying out her predicament, Taylor asks for the woman’s help in terms of the child’s welfare: “I can’t really afford to pay for a room, and I wouldn’t even bother you except I’ve got a child out in that car that’s wet and cold and looking to catch pneumonia if I don’t get it to bed someplace warm” (29). Moreover, Taylor’s request includes a sense of responsibility and of the give-and-take that make communal living possible: “I’ll take anything you’ve got, and I’ll clean up after myself, and tomorrow morning I’ll change every bed in this place” (29). Mrs. Hoge, the old woman, allows Taylor to stay the night, and Taylor ends up staying on at the motel for a time, earning some money changing beds. Taylor attributes Mrs. Hoge’s determination “that I should stay for a while” to the fact that Mrs. Hoge’s “fondest wish was to have a grandbaby” and Turtle (the name Taylor gives the child) is the next best thing (48). This first instance of community building following Taylor’s receiving Turtle thus depends on the mutual needs of and benefits yielded by all those involved: Taylor provides Mrs. Hoge with a baby to nurture, as well as with some cleaning help, and Mrs. Hoge provides Taylor with lodging and a means of earning some money. Indeed, a healthy, functional community — whether temporary or long lasting — requires that all its members contribute to and gain from it on a variety of levels. Although on a relatively local

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and limited level, Taylor and Mrs. Hoge’s communal arrangement exemplifies the notion that, if communities are to engage in developing “a political economy grounded in social justice,” “mutual responsibility” and interdependence are absolutely necessary.35 Once she arrives in Tucson, Taylor finds she must again connect with others in order to ensure that she and Turtle make ends meet and create a life for themselves in an entirely new place that is miles away from family — which in Taylor’s mind is equated solely with her mother, in accordance with American notions of kinship that equate “family” with “biological parents and their children.”36 In effect, Taylor must construct from scratch an extended family, a community that can sustain her and Turtle.37 However, she initially resists such a move, demonstrating that she has internalized American ideals of individualism as entailing that the individual make it on his own (the masculine pronoun here intentionally highlighting the male centeredness of this ideal), which she struggles to negotiate with the realities of her life with Turtle. She asserts that, “in Tucson, it was clear there was nobody overlooking us all. We would just have to find our own way” (63 – 64); but she is unable to sustain a life for herself and Turtle alone with little money, “no job, and no prospects” (66). She is very quickly forced by necessity to make connections with and learn to live communally with others. Nevertheless, it takes some time before she is able to imagine family in ways that break from the conventional picture of “family on a TV commercial” with the mother “reading magazines for child-raising tips and recipes” and the father “coming home grouchy after a hard day’s work” (113). Ironically, Taylor’s own childhood and family bore little resemblance to the TV family: her spunky mother raised her alone and supported them financially by cleaning houses. Such a disjunction between Taylor’s internalized ideals and her lived experience with respect to family points to the gaps that exist between American cultural ideals — in this case with respect to “the primacy of the blood relation [and of the nuclear family] in definitions of kinship and the family”38 — and the material realities of everyday life for many Americans. Taylor’s first attempt at making it alone in Tucson quickly hits some barriers. She and Turtle move into “the Hotel Republic, which rented by the week” and had a prostitute “who hung out” nearby in the evening (64). This less than ideal lodging epitomizes Ehrenreich’s point that “starting conditions are everything,” in the sense that, “if you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week.”39 Almost out of

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money, Taylor takes a job at Burger Derby, where she had been eating daily, earning “three twenty-five an hour. Plus your meals” (68). With no money in hand and the wages she anticipates receiving extremely low, Taylor cannot afford child care and so she resorts to leaving Turtle at Kid Central Station, the free babysitting service at the local mall — the only hitch being that “you have to go and check in every two hours, to prove you’re still shopping,” which entails making quick dashes to the mall during breaks via the “number five bus” (69). The sheer absurdity even on a purely logistical basis of this child-care arrangement points to the novel’s critique of an economic system that fails to provide for the needs of its workers. Indeed, in this case, the system is providing child care not for its workers but for its consumers — to allow women to shop more freely and buy more products.40 In addition, Taylor recognizes from the start that “Kid Central Station was not doing Turtle any good” developmentally (90), given that, when Taylor picks her up after work, “Turtle would be sitting wherever I had set her down that morning” (89). As Ehrenreich, among others, points out, “Most civilized nations compensate for the inadequacy of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidized child care, subsidized housing, and effective public transportation. But the United States, for all its wealth, leaves its citizens to fend for themselves.”41 In slightly different terms, Harrell Rodgers, Jr., argues that, “to really eliminate poverty, America needs a comprehensive and thoughtful family policy,”42 one which would take into account the circumstances of single mothers like Taylor. Taylor quits her job after six days, following an argument with the manager over the “cotton-polyester” uniform that had to be dry-cleaned: “Three twenty-five an hour [ . . . ] and you’re supposed to pay for dry-cleaning your own shorts” (90). The total lack of understanding in American culture of the inadequacy of minimum wages is epitomized in the absurdity of choosing a dry-clean-only uniform for a low-wage job, given that dry-cleaning is relatively expensive. Taylor’s reaction indicates that she has quickly become conscious not only of class inequities but of the specific fate of lower-class single mothers who must balance their dual needs to care for their children both psychologically and physically and to earn a living in order to provide that care. The setbacks she experiences have a positive effect, however, in that they push Taylor into more considered action to ensure her own and Turtle’s survival. She begins to scan the newspaper want ads for work and a better place to live. The second roommate ad she answers proves a hit on multiple levels: “Within ten minutes Lou Ann and I were in the

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kitchen drinking diet Pepsi and [ . . . ] had already established that our hometowns in Kentucky were separated by only two counties, and that we had both been to the exact same Bob Seger concert at the Kentucky State Fair my senior year” (96). They thus share not only a place of origin but a certain cultural history and even a language: as Lou Ann tells Taylor, “You talk just like me” (102). Taylor and Lou Ann are both lower-class single mothers transplanted to Tucson with no immediate biological family in town, and this conjunction of shared subject positions and circumstances makes them a good match with respect to joining forces to survive. Given that most American low-wage earners can “get by” only “by teaming up with another wage earner, [usually] a spouse or grown child,”43 single mothers need to find alternative ways to survive. Taylor’s solution is to split costs and responsibilities with another single mother. Taylor also takes a job at Jesus Is Lord Used Tires, the shop into which she had stopped upon her arrival in Tucson with two flat tires. The owner, Mattie, had immediately befriended Taylor and Turtle — giving them coffee and apple juice — and had agreed to keep the car until Taylor could afford to replace the tires, all gestures indicating a caring sensibility, a willingness to reach out to fellow human beings experiencing difficulties. Taylor admires Mattie from the start, having “never seen a woman with this kind of know-how,” given that back home “in Pittman if a woman had tried to have her own tire store she would have been run out of business” (59). Mattie is vital to Taylor upon her arrival in Tucson, constituting the only friend Taylor had “that didn’t cost a mint in long distance to talk to, until Lou Ann of course” (104). Given that, according to Ray Pahl, “friendship presupposes a form of community,” 44 Taylor’s friendship with Mattie initiates Taylor’s creation of a supportive community in the new city to which she has moved. Following the Burger Derby fiasco, Mattie’s caring friendship takes the form of offering Taylor a job. Not only is Mattie a “patient and kind” employer, but also Taylor slowly comes to understand that Mattie’s kindness is much farther reaching than she had initially imagined. Indeed, Mattie’s house serves as a sanctuary for political refugees from South and Central America: “There was another whole set of people who spoke Spanish and lived with her upstairs for various lengths of time” and usually “were brought and taken away by the blue-jeans priest in the station wagon” (105). Working for Mattie thus provides Taylor with not only a means of earning her livelihood but also a view into a broader, multicultural sense of social justice and of acting communally in the interest of

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safeguarding and bettering specific people’s lives. While Taylor’s understanding of ethnic and cultural diversity does not crystallize until the end of the second novel, Pigs in Heaven, her education with respect to those issues begins through her association with Mattie and proximity to the refugees housed by Mattie. While Taylor stabilizes her life by linking up with others — particularly lower-class, nurturing women — to ensure her and Turtle’s physical survival, the process of reshaping her thoughts about family and of envisioning her new group of friends as a community that functions as an extended family takes longer. If, as Pahl argues, friends are “taking over various social tasks, duties and function from family and kin, simply out of practical necessity,”45 given the geographical mobility that characterizes contemporary culture, then the very idea of kinship may need to be reimagined in other than biological terms. Although the novel moves toward such a reimagining of kinship in terms of caring communities, Taylor has difficulties getting past the dominant conceptions of kinship and family she has internalized. When she becomes aggravated at Lou Ann, for example, Taylor exclaims, “It’s not like we’re family, for Christ’s sake. You’ve got your own life to live, and I’ve got mine” (114). By the end of The Bean Trees, however, Taylor accepts the community that she has helped to create and that she is a part of as an alternative family. She slowly learns that blood is not the only or “even the main way” to kinship (299). Indeed, the novel radically reconceptualizes kinship and family as a function of communal responsibility, caring, and experiences rather than of blood ties. In time, Taylor begins to understand family in terms of people who have “been through hell and high water together” and “know each other’s good and bad sides, stuff nobody else knows” (309). This aspect of Kingsolver’s novel is radical in that it not only emphasizes that “relationship is the basis of family life”46 rather than genealogy but also redefines “the family as a social construct, whose structure, boundaries, and character can change over time.”47 In its exploration and reimagining of family and kinship through Taylor’s story, The Bean Trees challenges the “cultural image of family in the United States [ . . . ] of a heterosexual couple, their offspring, and relatives by blood or marriage” that continues to dominate despite the “variety of family forms” that characterize American culture at the turn of the twenty-first century.48 Although it may be temporary, home for Taylor becomes “that house where we live with Lou Ann and [her baby son] Dwayne Ray” (311) and family includes not only Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray but also

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Mattie; the lesbian next-door neighbors, Virgie and Poppy, who often babysit the children; and Estevan and Esperanza, a refugee couple from Guatemala staying temporarily with Mattie. The novel thus extends the traditional notion of family to include people in relationships that involve reciprocal care rather than those related solely on the basis of blood ties. The Bean Trees emphasizes that such an inclusive notion of family allows for diversity and difference, which makes possible the construction of new kinds of families and communities at a time in which the United States is becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial. Indeed, the novel includes a large number of multiethnic and multiracial relationships: the Southern, white Taylor has a “Cherokee great-grandfather” (261), mothers the Cherokee Turtle, and begins to fall in love with the Guatemalan Estevan; the Southern, white Lou Ann’s ex-husband was Mexican, her new boyfriend at the end of the novel is African American, and her brother is married to an Eskimo woman; and Mattie’s extended family is made up of refugees from South and Central America. Such diversity makes necessary new models of community and family, since the existing, dominant models are Eurocentric and grounded in mostly patriarchal forms of genealogy; and Kingsolver’s novel offers a new model. Taylor explains this new kind of community and family to Turtle in terms of wisteria vines, which can “thrive in poor soil” because of the rhizobia that “live in little knots on the roots” and “suck nitrogen gas right out of the soil and turn it into fertilizer for the plant”: “The rhizobia are not actually part of the plant, they are separate creatures, but they always live with legumes: a kind of underground railroad moving secretly up and down the roots” (305). This image of fertile interconnection from the plant world aptly encapsulates the novel’s presentation of a revised notion of community and family that stresses the benefits of diversity and reinterprets kinship ties in terms of mutual life support rather than of genealogy. As Jim Wallis asserts: “Multiculturalism adds to community [ . . . ]. It is a benefit, not a barrier, to real community.”49 Moreover, the novel’s use of the term underground railroad to describe the interrelation of the wisteria and rhizobia connects this new vision of family and community to a specifically American history of multiracial communal action constructed and performed in the name of social justice; and Mattie’s work with the 1980s Sanctuary Movement in the United States functions as a contemporary link to the nineteenth-century Underground Railroad. Crucially, the novel emphasizes the reciprocal nature of Mattie’s work

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with the Central and South American refugees. Not only does she provide the refugees with a temporary home, but they in turn provide her with a family — again, a family conceptualized in terms other than the traditional. Taylor observes on Mattie’s living-room wall “pictures of Mattie flanked by other people, all of them dark and shorter than herself,” and children’s drawings filled with guns and “huge bullets,” and she remembers Mattie telling her that “she had ‘something like’ grandchildren around” (197), all of which point to a notion of family that is inclusive, multicultural, and continuously in flux. This notion of flux is connected to the novel’s reconceptualization of family away from an exclusively genealogical definition, as well as to its emphasis on a revised notion of community that stresses caregiving, friendship, and survival. The kind of extended family Taylor helps to construct in Tucson develops out of the formation of a community of individuals grounded in mutual caregiving on both a physical and psychological level; but this community continually shifts as individuals move geographically and as needs change, so that in turn the extended family created through communal practices also shifts. Although families defined solely in terms of blood ties typically experience geographical, generational, and personality dislocations, the grounding in genealogy in the West is so inextricable from notions of ownership that the idea of the family related by blood stays intact regardless of the interactions or lack thereof among the family members — for example, American inheritance laws remain grounded in ideas of ownership tied to genealogy. Given “the prevailing patrilineal character of the family” in the West,50 characterized by the transmission of property to male offspring, family has tended to be conceived in terms that are highly male centered and that secure the ownership of property through culturally enforced male lines of biological descent — via overt or covert ownership of women and children. If the family is redefined in terms of actual, active, reciprocal relationships rather than of genealogy, however, then ownership fades from the scene and family becomes a dynamic rather than a static entity. More­ over, gendered hierarchy also fades and the family becomes more egalitarian. The communities in The Bean Trees are made up of individuals who differ in all sorts of ways but who form voluntary connections in order to ensure their mutual survival in an American culture that retains traditional ideals at a time when the cultural landscape has changed and is continuing to change drastically. More specifically, single women (whether unmarried, divorced, or widowed), and particularly single

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mothers, and international refugees have no place in traditional notions of the American family and thus the novel’s characters must create new forms of community and family to sustain themselves. The novel’s characters understand such communities and families as necessarily in flux, given their voluntary natures and their lack of legal recognition, and yet they place high value on the relationships they form. Indeed, relationship rather than ownership dominates the novel’s presentation of Taylor’s new extended Tucson family, and this shift consequently radically alters conceptions of family. By reconceptualizing family in terms of relationships characterized by friendship and community and by notions of reciprocal care rather than simply in terms of blood ties, the novel also asserts more agency on the part of family members in that they choose to create and sustain families rather than merely being passively attached to them on the basis of genealogy — and of legal definitions that stress genealogy — and the ownership that derives from such ties. Although the choices the novel’s characters make to create and sustain families are necessarily always circumscribed by concrete material and social circumstances, forming supportive friendships and communities always entails will and work. Consequently, not only does the novel emphasize caregiving rather than genealogy as the hallmark of family ties, but it also makes clear that processes of caregiving entail individual agency directed toward collective survival and well-being. As Lou Anne aptly observes near the end of the novel, “Everything you ever get is really just on loan,” but “you’d just as well enjoy it while you’ve got it”; even “your kids aren’t really yours, they’re just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you’ll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece” (310). In jettisoning ownership, family becomes more precarious, as Lou Anne’s last point indicates; but the flip side of this precariousness is the openness to alternative figurations of family that accompanies giving up claims of ownership and a hierarchical structure, and the sense of hope that such openness enables. In other words, while a more fluid notion of family is clearly less stable, that very fluidity creates the possibility of a utopian space that can be continuously refashioned to meet the needs of individuals and communities within their specific sociocultural contexts. This shift to a more inclusive and multicultural conception of community and family characterized by flux is further evidenced in Taylor’s relationship with Estevan and Esperanza, who, for a short time, also become part of Taylor’s extended family. Not only does Taylor befriend

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the Guatemalan couple she meets through Mattie, but she also learns about their harsh life in their violence-torn homeland, which resulted in their cherished baby daughter, Ismene, having been taken from them forcefully “in a raid on their neighborhood” (183). Knowing and feeling their painful past — “All of Esperanza’s hurts flamed up in my mind, a huge pile of burning things that the world just kept throwing more onto” and that included “a child that looked just like Turtle” (189) —  creates a bond of empathy between Taylor and the couple that results in brave acts and sacrifices on all of their parts for each other. Although they differ in national, ethnic, cultural, racial, and political positioning, Taylor and the couple find themselves in a location that is foreign to them and in which they have no biological familial ties and thus must construct new forms of community and family. Moreover, all are parents who have been placed in precarious positions and, as a result, possess a particular understanding of what it means to love and care for a child and the psychic consequences of the loss of the child, especially to the mother. Estevan and Esperanza’s child was kidnapped and they can do nothing to recover her because they must also protect others within their union: they have been forced to choose “the lives of those seventeen people over getting [their] daughter back” (184). For her part, Taylor was handed a child out of the blue whom she has grown to love but to whom she has no legal claims. Although their situations are different and they cannot completely understand each other’s culturally specific plights, Taylor and the Guatemalan couple not only feel empathy for each other but also act on that empathy. Indeed, for empathy to have any power out in the world, according to Martha Manning, “empathic ‘feelings’ ” must be translated into “empathic ‘actions’ ”: “Without an action component, empathy, in most situations, is little more than a nicety.”51 The empathy that Taylor, Estevan, and Esperanza feel for each other does provide them with power, in the sense that it enables them to act as agents and allows them to choose to perform acts that have positive concrete material consequences for all of them but, at the same time, puts all of them at risk vis-à-vis the U.S. legal system. Their caring behavior toward one another thus results from acting upon feelings of empathy, thereby demonstrating the potential of empathy when it is tied to a sense of communal responsibility. Indeed, Taylor manifests not only a sense of communal responsibility but also a growing sense of social justice when she volunteers to drive the Guatemalan couple to their next safe haven in Oklahoma, regardless

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of the risks inherent in harboring illegal aliens — “five years in prison and a $2,000 fine for each illegal person” (246 – 247) — and deliberately casts aside her growing romantic feelings for Estevan out of respect for Esperanza and all she has already suffered. As Taylor tells Mattie, she is willing to risk driving them to Oklahoma not only because “Estevan and Esperanza are my friends” but also because “if I saw somebody was going to get hit by a truck I’d push them out of the way. Wouldn’t anybody?” (252). On the one hand, Taylor’s willingness to act on behalf of Estevan and Esperanza exhibits the key attributes of “modern conceptions of friendship [ . . . ] fidelity, solidarity, and trust.”52 On the other hand, her actions appear to derive from something more primal than friendship, from something like what Levinas calls “the prior nonindifference of one for the other” that he insists is the hallmark of being human.53 Taylor feels a communal spirit based on the empathy she feels for Estevan and Esperanza that pushes her to act. As is the case with all the positive relationships depicted in the novel, however, the relationship between Taylor and the couple is a reciprocal one; they in turn choose “without hesitation” (264) to help Taylor in a way that also involves personal and legal risks. Not only do Estevan and Esperanza risk discovery as illegal aliens in the United States when they volunteer to help Taylor adopt Turtle legally, so that the child cannot be taken away from her, but they also place their emotions at risk — especially Esperanza, who has already attempted suicide — by spending more time with Turtle. Esperanza is drawn to Turtle, who looks so much like her lost child that Esperanza “fell back against the seat” and “looked blanched” (125) when she first laid eyes on Turtle. On the car trip to resolve the adoption, Taylor begins to worry as she notices that “Turtle and Esperanza were becoming inseparable” (275): “Turtle was calling Esperanza ‘Ma’ ” (256), sitting “on Esperanza’s lap, playing with Esperanza’s hair and trying on Esperanza’s sunglasses [ . . . ] playing a clapping game” (265). Taylor here demonstrates that she is still caught up within a narrow conception of family that remains tied to ownership and limited to the nuclear family in that she wants to be Turtle’s sole mother and wants to adopt her legally in order to ensure that connection. At the same time, however, Taylor finds herself drawn to the alternative family the four of them become as they travel and aid one another. All four individuals become increasingly “attached” (272) as they journey to achieve some sort of closure through acts of mutual assistance and support; they develop a

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kinship based on proximity, empathy, and affection, as well as on the pain of loss and potential loss. When Taylor fails to find traces of Turtle’s family in Oklahoma, she asks Esperanza and Estevan if they would be willing to pose as Turtle’s parents and give her up for adoption to Taylor; they immediately agree, willing to risk much to help Taylor and Turtle remain together. As Taylor had been informed by the sympathetic Tucson social worker, the cornerstone of this type of legal adoption — of a Native American child by a white parent — must include “the written consent of the child’s natural parents” or “nearest living relative” (240) and must “name [Taylor], specifically, as the new guardian” (241). Unbeknownst to Taylor, her need for written consent by a parent or relative in order to adopt Turtle derives from the passage by the U.S. Congress of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). In response to “concern [ . . . ] about the historical experience of American Indians and Alaska Natives with the country’s child welfare system,” the ICWA provides tribal jurisdiction over adoptions involving Indian children and specifies that “public agencies are to give preference to members of the child’s extended family or tribe and other Indian families.”54 (Because the narrative does not examine the cultural implications of Taylor’s deception of the authorities during the adoption process until Pigs in Heaven, I will also hold off on that discussion until I turn to a close analysis of that novel.) At this point in The Bean Trees, the focus of the narrative and the diverse characters is to make the adoption possible so that Taylor and Turtle are not separated; the emphasis zeros in on the mother-child bond, to the exclusion of all other factors. Crucially, Esperanza and Estevan are of Mayan descent and thus racially can pass reasonably well as Cherokee in the eyes of the white official who formalizes the adoption. Although Estevan insists that Cherokees do not look like Mayans, he admits to Taylor that a white person or perhaps even a Cherokee might not know that. Indeed, when the foursome drives through the Cherokee Nation, all but Taylor “fit right in” and “looked like everybody else, including the cops” (274). Because the dominant American notion of family remains grounded in blood ties, Esperanza and Estevan have no difficulty posing physically as Turtle’s parents; they look like a natural family. Ironically, the ease with which the couple passes as Turtle’s Cherokee parents implicitly challenges the anchoring of notions of family in nature and biology as problematic, as well as points to the difficulty white Americans have in reading race other than in generalized, imprecise ways. Because whiteness remains

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the privileged race in the United States, all nonwhites are positioned as racial others and tend to be categorized in ways that emphasize particular overt physical characteristics (especially skin color and facial features) and that efface differences among those placed within a given category. The category Native American, for example, includes people from varied geographical locations and with different histories and cultural traditions, but these differences are obscured by the generalized category that effectively defines the people so categorized solely in terms of their physical traits. However problematic the passing of Estevan and Esperanza as Turtle’s parents remains, since it goes against tribal wishes and the ICWA, it does function on one level as a caring, reciprocal, communal act that involves both risks and gains for all the adults involved. The falsified adoption is carried off according to a communally devised script and with communal actions that go beyond that script. Indeed, at the signing of the documents, “Esperanza was sobbing” and Taylor understands that “this was no act” (283); however, Esperanza’s supposed willing release of the child to Taylor — “We will know she is happy and growing with a good heart” (288) — has a cathartic effect for Esperanza, who leaves the office with “her face changed. It shone like a polished thing, something old made new” (290). The results of their actions are thus multiple, in that Taylor legally adopts Turtle while Esperanza works through the pain of losing her daughter in Guatemala by being given the chance to physically give away a child she loves to a loving parent. As a community and an extended family, the four very different individuals are able to take action in the world in a way they were not able to do as lone individuals. Although Taylor grieves after having to leave Estevan and Esperanza at the “cheery-looking” Oklahoma church (292) serving as a sanctuary for political refugees, the temporary community and extended family they formed benefited all of them in both physical and psychological ways. They epitomized the kind of “fully functioning communities [ . . . ] in which there is an appreciation for the capacity of the whole” and in which “members share a sense of solidarity, significance, and security.”55 Moreover, Taylor has others to turn to for support, as evidenced by her phone calls to her mother and to Lou Ann and by her having a “home” to head back to at the end of the novel; that is the beauty of the diverse extended ever-evolving family to which Taylor belongs. Taylor’s experiences living communally with others have taught her the value of a more fluid and diverse notion of family. Although she explains the adoption to Turtle using possessive pronouns that indicate

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an adherence to notions of ownership — “That means you’re my kid [ . . . ] and I’m your mother” (311) — Taylor at the same time begins to let go of individual ownership as she accepts the positive aspects of having multiple women help her care for and mother Turtle. For Turtle, the impact of this extended family is evidenced in her calling “every woman Ma something” (256) while at the same time Taylor remains “the main ingredient” (312) in her life. The Bean Trees thus champions alternative communities and families without erasing the individual, maintaining an organic balance between the two; these new forms of communities and families enable individuals to function as agents in a culture that retains multiple power inequities.

Pigs in Heaven continues the exploration begun in The Bean Trees of alternative conceptions of community and family, in terms of both justice and survival, but moves from the micro- to the macrolevel in its scope. Most specifically, the second novel pays much greater attention to the ethical conflicts generated by the competing claims of the individual and the community, particularly when the variables of ethnic and racial culture and cultural history are taken into account. Although the communities and extended families to which Taylor and Turtle belong in The Bean Trees are for the most part interracial, they are not multicultural — in the sense that they are racially and ethnically integrated but do little that “affirms the positive value of distinctive racial and ethnic communities.”56 In contrast, Pigs in Heaven foregrounds the need to address issues of multiculturalism and carefully examines the ethical and practical conflicts and possible compromises that a serious affirmation of distinct cultures entails. In addition, this sequel novel places even greater emphasis on the failure of versions of individualism that privilege self-interest over the interests of the collective and on the absolute necessity of community for agency to occur in an American cultural landscape that has become increasingly complex and that remains riddled with social and power inequities. The shift from The Bean Trees’s primarily first-person narrative from Taylor’s point of view — with the exception of the second chapter, a limited-third-person narrative focusing on Lou Ann — to Pigs in Heaven’s third-person narrative that moves its focus from character to character immediately announces the latter novel’s more emphatic critique of the dominant American ideal of individualism that positions the individual as an autonomous self operating within and according to the values of

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the marketplace. This narrative alteration no longer privileges Taylor’s viewpoint and instead lays different characters’ stories side by side with ostensibly equal validity and weight — although, clearly, Taylor’s story still dominates the book and Taylor remains the protagonist, especially for any reader familiar with The Bean Trees. The narrative thus affirms multiplicity without getting rid of the individual, in the sense that the text gives voice to a number of individuals but emphasizes both the interconnections between them and the ways in which they each contribute something to a story that becomes increasingly collective. Indeed, through its offering of multiple narrative perspectives, the novel works to construct a version of the individual that is inextricable from the community. On the level of plot, Pigs in Heaven also shifts gears rather drastically by throwing into question the previous novel’s happy ending, the successful adoption of Turtle by Taylor. In blunt terms, Taylor’s use of deceit to secure her adoption of Turtle comes back to haunt her. As a consequence of an odd series of events, in which Turtle witnesses a man fall into a hole at Hoover Dam and as a result makes possible his rescue, Turtle and Taylor are invited to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show.57 Annawake Fourkiller, a Cherokee lawyer who sees the show, decides to investigate how the white Taylor managed to sidestep the Indian Child Welfare Act and “adopt an Indian kid without tribal permission” (66). Although Taylor’s first response to Annawake’s inquiries is to flee and, in so doing, to reclaim self-interest and a very limited notion of family as ideals to justify her actions, she eventually finds (again) that she cannot survive physically or psychically by herself as a lower-class single mother. Given her marginal position within a culture that values material success and the nuclear family and the various constraints she faces as a single mother with little money, no college degree, and no marketable skills, her attempts to assert herself as an autonomous agent fail miserably. Moreover, the novel insists on making Turtle’s status as a Cherokee take center stage; and a drama unfolds that pits individual care and love against tribal heritage, individual survival against tribal survival, and individual justice against community justice. When Annawake and Taylor confront each other about the adoption, they speak from positions that appear incompatible, since they are presented in a way that quickly becomes framed as an agonistic battle of words: Taylor privileges “Turtle’s best interest” (96), whereas Annawake champions “the tribe’s best interest” (97).58 Taylor predicates her defense on the specific situation: “I didn’t take Turtle from any fam-

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ily, she was dumped on me. Dumped. She’d already lost her family, and she’d been hurt in ways I can’t even start to tell you without crying. Sexual ways. Your people let her fall through the crack and she was in bad trouble” (95 – 96). Like most Americans, Taylor here demonstrates a lack of understanding with respect to the impact of the history of European colonialism on indigenous tribal societies. She is unable to see the larger picture, to see Turtle’s abuse as a consequence of “the ravages of colonization” and “enforced poverty and despair”59 rather than as an individual aberration. Her individualistic framework further surfaces when she claims individual ownership of Turtle — “Turtle is my daughter” (96) — as a consequence of her mothering of the girl. Although Annawake acknowledges that Taylor seems to be “a good mother” (97) to Turtle, she nevertheless insists on the reciprocal needs of the Cherokee Nation and its people, arguing that it is a catastrophe “for a tribe to lose its children” (96) — an assertion of community ownership. She thus emphasizes “the importance of community” to the “collective survival” of the tribe.60 In addition, Annawake asserts that Turtle “needs her tribe,” needs to know “where she comes from, who she is” (97). Initially, the novel thus presents the conflict between Taylor and Annawake, between individual and community-tribal needs, as one that is “not resolvable without remainder,” in the sense that both arguments are ethically sound and that choosing one will not negate the supporting arguments of the other.61 However, I read the novel as attempting to move past these binary choices that necessarily entail a remainder, something I will return to as my discussion proceeds. Panic-stricken that Turtle will be taken from her, Taylor gives up her extended family in Tucson, which now also includes an extremely caring live-in boyfriend, Jax, and runs away, leaving no forwarding address. She chooses a narrow, individualistic version of self-preservation. Although Jax generously attributes her behavior to the “Mama Bear” (107) syndrome, to an instinctive response to something “getting between a mother bear and her cub” (106), the novel seems also to link her flight to a forgetting of all she has learned during her time in Tucson about the necessity of community and extended family in order to survive in today’s America, particularly as a poor single mother. As statistics bear out, “the poverty rate for female-headed families is [not only] extremely high” but disproportionately so when compared to the population at large: in 1980, 13 percent of the U.S. population fell below the poverty line while 36.7 percent of female householders fell below the poverty line.62

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When Taylor’s mother, Alice, herself a single mother, flies out to Las Vegas, to which Taylor has initially run away, to provide help to her frightened daughter, she quickly recognizes that “somebody ought to go talk to them [Annawake and the Cherokee Nation]” and volunteers to do so herself; as she tells Taylor, “I understand why you ran [ . . . ] but I think there’s another way to handle this” (219). Alice’s words indicate that she understands not only the need to face problems head on rather than run from them but also the value of community in times of difficulty. Indeed, the novel’s first chapter offers Alice’s memories of her childhood years “on the farm during the Depression, along with dozens of other people who showed up at Minerva’s [her mother’s] door once they’d run out of everything but relatives”: “Those times made bonds among people” (9). While Alice heads to Heaven, Oklahoma, to reconnect with a cousin she has not seen since those Depression years as a first step in trying to work through Taylor’s problem with the Cherokee Nation, Taylor chooses to keep running. Taylor runs all the way to Seattle, Washington, where she struggles rather unsuccessfully to eke out a living to support Turtle and herself. Having cut herself off from all those who care for her, Taylor seeks to make it on her own through hard work and perseverance as the American ideal of individualism promises she can; indeed, success in the United States has tended to be tied to both “individual achievement” and “economic autonomy.”63 As Taylor insists, “I should be able to keep a roof over my own head. If I work at it” (311). Although she manages to find a job, the low wages barely pay enough to cover the rent, utilities (the electricity at one point gets cut off), food (often just peanut butter, given that her budget calls for “one dollar a meal for the two of us” [310]), and clothing and leave nothing to cover child care. Indeed, Taylor’s experience of feeling “defeated” by all the costs (258) is in line with those of many poor Americans. According to the findings of Rodgers’s extensive study of poverty in the United States, “Over half (55.1 percent) of all poor households report” experiences such as “loss of utilities in the past year” and “food shortages over the last four months.” Moreover, like many Americans “identified as poor,” Taylor is “impoverished for a relatively short period of time” and, consequently, never receives welfare.64 Because she has to make do with a low-paying job but cannot afford child care and has no extended family in town, Taylor is at first forced to depend on Barbie — a young woman whose ambition is to be just like the doll — to babysit Turtle while she works; but Barbie proves not to possess a communal spirit and eventually runs

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out on them, taking with her the little cash Taylor has saved. Unable at that point to “work out the baby-sitting,” she is forced to quit her job as a handicapped-access van driver for a lower-paying one in a department store — there, at least initially, she can bring Turtle along to work. Eventually, however, she is asked not to bring her child into the store and must leave Turtle out in the car while she works, which makes her feel “like a murderer” (371). Simply put, Taylor quickly finds that the American ideal that “if you can dream it, [ . . . ] you can be it” (268) does not seem to include her. Instead, the concrete world she inhabits entails “working yourself for all you’re worth to get ahead, and still going backwards” (318).65 As Jax tells her in a telephone conversation, “The great American cultural myth” of “Horatio Alger is compost [and . . . ] no longer applies to reality” (311). Consequently, Taylor begins better to understand what she has left behind in Tucson, where she was also poor but had Jax to split the rent with, “Lou Ann always around for baby-sitting” (310), and Mattie as an understanding employer. This growing recognition of the bankruptcy of the dominant American rendition of individualism that values self-autonomy and self-interest for a woman in her position and of her desperate need for the community and extended family she has left behind comes to a head in a telephone call to her mother in which Taylor acknowledges that “just [Turtle] and me isn’t enough. We’re not a whole family” because “it doesn’t give you anything to fall back on” (371). What Taylor yearns for is not the traditional nuclear family but rather the nontraditional extended family to which she belonged in Tucson, a family of individuals who choose to mutually care for one another and who aim for a collective sense of well-being over and above self-interest. However, the final decisive moment with respect to giving up her individualistic flight comes when Taylor learns from the pediatrician she is forced to seek out that Turtle’s chronic stomachaches have been caused by an intolerance to lactose that “between sixty and ninety percent” of nonwhites suffer from (376). Taylor is astounded to learn that milk is not “the great health food” promised by all those TV commercials filled with “perky” people, although she is forced to acknowledge her own racial blind spots when the African American pediatrician gently asks her, “Who do you think makes those commercials?” (377). This information about her own general lack of knowledge with respect to nonwhites and about Turtle’s specific lactose intolerance seals Taylor’s fate, in that she is initially “paralyzed by the memory of Annawake Fourkiller’s final warning, in Tucson, before she drove away: ‘I bet [Turtle] hates milk’ ”

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(377), which ended a tumultuous conversation in which Annawake insisted that Turtle “needs to know” she is Cherokee and that “there are a lot of things she’ll need growing up that [Taylor, as a non-Cherokee,] can’t give her” (97). This milk incident makes vivid for Taylor her ignorance about what being Cherokee means and entails. Particularly in the case of an interracial adoption like this one, treating the adopted child “as-if-begotten” proves highly problematic.66 Rather than continuing to ignore or efface the racial differences between herself and Turtle, Taylor finally accepts responsibility for addressing those differences, which she understands will entail reaching out to the Cherokee Nation. With her eyes finally open wide, Taylor makes the decision to go back and talk to Annawake and the Cherokee Nation, even though she is afraid of losing Turtle. Her love for Turtle and her concern for her best interest prove greater than her fears, as she begins to understand not only that she cannot care for Turtle alone but also that even the extended family of Tucson is in some ways not extended enough, given the absence of Cherokees within its folds. What Taylor has refused to hear until this moment is that Turtle’s racial and ethnic difference cannot be ignored. As Annawake warns in a letter Jax reads to Taylor over the telephone, “Soon she’s going to hear from someone that she isn’t white,” including “ugly names connected to” (187) her “racial identity” (188): “What does she have that will see her through this into a peaceful womanhood?” (189). Annawake’s position is that Turtle needs to develop a specifically “Indian identity” (187) — which Taylor cannot provide for her — to equip her to deal with an American culture that remains racist. Turtle will not have “the option of whiteness” (356) that Taylor will always have in a country in which whiteness remains the accepted norm and the carrier of privilege, notwithstanding the increasingly multiracial makeup of the population. The novel personalizes the problems a Native American child is likely to have after having grown up in a white adoptive family in the story of Annawake’s twin brother, Gabe, who was adopted by a white Texan family and now spends most of his time in jail; in Annawake’s words, he “was stolen from the family and can’t find his way home” (75). This story serves to justify the ICWA’s mission “to protect the interests of the Indian community in keeping its children” (81) as a means of countering the previous situation in which “so many Indian kids were being separated from their families and put into non-Indian homes,” which Annawake terms “a wholesale removal” (95).

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Of particular interest to my argument, the emphasis of the ICWA’s mission and Annawake’s arguments is not so much on race in and of itself as on “the collective right of tribal survival” and on “Indian culture and its preservation through families and children.”67 The ICWA itself thus recognizes and legally supports an alternative notion of kinship and community grounded not in racial or biological genealogy but rather in a specific, communal cultural heritage and history. Annawake further notes that the Cherokee are “not into racial purity” and have “been mixed blood from way back” (354). The novel thus highlights a notion, supported by Native American scholars such as Weaver, that “simple essentialized identifications based on race are not adequate” and that “what matters is one’s social and cultural milieu, one’s way of life.”68 While ethnicity and race remain salient factors in the cultural heritage and history of Native Americans, both the congressional act and Kingsolver’s novel focus on the issue of community rights and ultimately champion practices that reinforce multiculturalism rather than assimilation. Indeed, Pigs in Heaven depicts Cherokee identity as a function of the history of U.S. “policies of conquest, genocide, and assimilation”69 with respect to the Cherokee people, as well as the Cherokee people’s cultural traditions. With respect to the latter, the novel focuses most specifically on the ways in which, as Thomas Mails’s extensive study of the Cherokee indicates, Cherokee cultural traditions value “shared responsibility” and a sense of “harmony and peace” achieved through collective practices and rituals.70 Although Kingsolver’s novel clearly idealizes the Cherokee community that Taylor and her mother encounter, choosing not to address “the fragmentation of the social fabric of Indian lives”71 that has all too often resulted from a history of ongoing colonization, I would argue that this idealization has a strategic narrative and political purpose, as it attempts to show how particular attributes of Cherokee traditional structures and values might serve as models for constructing a new vision of community and agency in America at large. I thus think it too simplistic to accuse Kingsolver, as Godfrey does, of having fallen “victim to a common rhetorical strategy in her portrayal: idealization” because, “while Kingsolver’s utopian vision provides an alternative to Anglo individualism, it also plays on stereotypes.”72 Rather than merely playing unthinkingly on a stereotype, Kingsolver’s novel acknowledges the positive potential of an aspect of the traditional Cherokee worldview. So, the novel’s idealization of the Cherokee both participates in a form of colonization in its stance of authority and control over the ma-

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terials presented and, at the same time, affirms Cook-Lynn’s contention, stated earlier, that “there are living resources in indigenous societies.”73 I am thus situating Kingsolver’s idealized portrayal of the Cherokee as heeding Allen’s injunction that progressive activists need to recognize that American Indians are “carriers of the dream” they “claim to be seeking.”74 Because such dreams are necessarily utopian, however, they entail a certain amount of idealization that, while problematic in their erasure of material problems, is necessary to any attempt to imagine a better world. Consequently, the novel depicts the Cherokee tribe almost solely in terms of the “positive interpersonal relationships, individual security, and collective solidarity” traditionally associated with Native American people, marked in particular by a “respect for the autonomy and worth of every individual,” balanced with an insistence on “each person’s contribution to the well-being of the whole.”75 Such collective solidarity is reflected in Annawake’s conception of the Cherokee “family” as “a color, a notion as fluid as river” (289), an idea she has difficulty explaining to non-Cherokees like Alice and Taylor. Pigs in Heaven depicts the Cherokee community of Heaven, Oklahoma, in utopian terms as an extended family, in the sense that “all these people are related somehow” (235) and “don’t distinguish between father, uncle, mother, grandmother” (362), so that “the child is part of something larger, a tribe” (429). The tribe is thus organized into a weblike structure of caring interdependence that privileges collective over individual interests; as Annawake explains, “It’s the most natural thing in the world to ask for help if we need it” (293). The novel thus highlights the traditional valuing of what CookLynn calls “special tribal care-taking obligations.”76 Although the tribe values each individual, it acts on the motto “Do right by your people” in contradistinction to the dominant American motto “Do right by yourself” (112). The community functions not only as a mechanism to enable the dayto-day caring for the individual and the collective but also, crucially, as a means of securing a historically grounded cultural identity. The fear of losing members of the tribe through adoption and geographical relocation rests in a fear of losing the Cherokee culture itself, which exists most tangibly through collective memory. Having left his home on the reservation following a series of family tragedies, Cash Stillwater —  with whom Taylor’s mother, Alice, eventually has a romantic relationship —  recognizes that “everyone back there remembers” his early years and

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“the trouble with moving away from family” is that “you lose your youth entirely” (146). This story of the loss of one’s past echoes the potential loss of Cherokee cultural identity if the community disintegrates. Having almost been wiped out as a result of the human “holocaust” (357) engendered by the 1838 Trail of Tears dislocation of the Cherokee people, Annawake explains to Alice, “We need to keep what’s left of our family together” (357). Indeed, Annawake summarizes for Alice and the reader the history of her tribe’s forcible removal from “the Southern Appalachians” (358) by marching the Cherokee people west to what is now Oklahoma, during which process “about two thousand died in the detention camps” and “a lot more than that on the trail” (359).77 This history of dislocation is vital to the Cherokee people, who “can never forget the Trail of Tears,” as Weaver explains, “not because of some genetic determinism but because its importance to heritage and identity are passed down through story from generation to generation.”78 Moreover, Annawake’s reference to the Cherokee people as a “family” offers a much broader conception of family. Although this Cherokee notion of family includes certain genealogical aspects similar to those of traditional Western conceptions of family, it extends genealogy significantly beyond the nuclear family, encompassing quite distant relations, and focuses most specifically on cultural bonds. Such an extended notion of family has its roots in Cherokee traditional culture, which was made up of seven clans inherited through the mother, each of which “was in all respects considered to be one family.”79 Indeed, Alice finds that she belongs to the bird clan and to the tribe, given that her Grandmother Stamper is listed in “the Index for the Dawes [Census] Rolls” (348), which at the turn of the century listed the names of all the members of the Cherokee Nation in order to give each an allotment of “land from the tribal domain.”80 However, the novel makes clear that, while genealogy can make one a “Cherokee legally,” much more is required to make one a Cherokee “culturally” (355), including a certain communal mind-set and way of life that are historically and culturally aware. Although Alice and Taylor can legally become Cherokee by enrolling themselves in the Cherokee Nation, they still cannot provide the cultural know-how that Annawake argues Turtle needs to navigate life as a Cherokee within a still-racist America. However, Alice goes beyond inserting herself within the Cherokee Nation on a legal basis. As Sugar Hornbuckle’s visiting distant cousin, Alice is included and participates in Cherokee culture and, in the pro-

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cess, begins to understand its distinctive nature. Not only is she set up on a blind date with Cash, which positions her as a possible partner for him and thus accepted on some level by the tribe, but she also is invited to a stomp dance. This invitation is noteworthy, given that, as Deloria notes, Indian tribes began in the early 1970s to assert an increasing adherence to “ethnic separatism” by “closing many powwows and gatherings to non-Indians” and shutting out the non-Native hobbyists who enjoyed going to powwows as a means of escaping their culture for a time.81 In her preface to the 1992 edition of The Sacred Hoop, however, Allen rejoices over “the swelling numbers of participants” in Indian powwows, which she attributes to “a new willingness among a number of tribes to accept the participation of mixed bloods.”82 Not only does Allen praise tribes that reject separatism, but her comments also appear to invite others — and in particular people who have a kinship relationship to those tribes — to experience Indian cultural traditions that she depicts in her book as having much to offer America. Although the novel idealizes Alice’s experience of the stomp dance, it seems to do so in the spirit of Allen’s invitation. The novel seeks to position her as other than a run-of-the-mill hobbyist or tourist who will then return, refreshed by the foreign experience, to her own unchanged life within the dominant culture: “It’s the first time she has witnessed an Indian spectacle [ . . . ] that had nothing to do with tourism. This is simply people having a good time in each other’s company, because they want to” (342). Godfrey argues, however, that Kingsolver undercuts her novel’s critique of American racism through the “ethnocentric rhetorical devices” of “idealization of the other in order to censure the dominant culture” and via the depiction of Alice “playing Indian.”83 While Alice does idealize the Cherokee culture and while her participation in the stomp dance can certainly be read as “playing Indian,” I want to suggest that idealizing and participating in a different culture’s tradition need not necessarily be objectifying, exoticizing, imperialistic gestures, although they certainly can be. As Deloria himself explains in his extensive historical analysis of Americans’ obsession with Indians, playing Indian within the context of powwows at times has produced positive progressive results in that, for some, “the sensual sociality of dance and song led” them “to think about themselves and their world in ways that challenged the verities of everyday life” and “reflected the optimistic notions of tolerance and community.” For those who embraced such “a multicultural ideal — an egalitarian blending of sameness and differ-

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ence,” according to Deloria, their experiences of playing Indian helped them develop progressive “insights into society and culture that charted their personal and professional lives.”84 Pigs in Heaven does not present the Cherokee stomp dance and its Cherokee participants as merely an idealized spectacle in the sense of its being consumable; rather the novel’s idealized depiction of the stomp dance emphasizes the ways in which ritual can function as a means of holding a community together through concrete, lived cultural traditions. Although the stomp dance is a ritual cultural event, for example, the Cherokees who attend are not exoticized; indeed, the narrative depicts them in terms that could just as easily be applied to other people living in 1980s America as they arrive in their trucks, with the teenagers wearing jeans and either Keds or “complicated athletic shoes” (335) — even the medicine chief wears “jeans, a hat and plaid flannel shirt” (336). Moreover, Alice does not so much play Indian — in the sense of allowing “the Anglo to experience two identities” that remain separate85  — as attend a social event to which she has been invited and participate in a ritual that is foreign to her but in which she is included as a human being among other human beings. What Alice responds to is this sense of inclusion that derives from the Cherokees’ valuing of relationships: as Allen notes, “Belonging is a basic assumption for traditional Indians [and . . . ] relationship is taken as fundamental to creaturely existence.”86 Indeed, Alice’s experiences are life altering, since they result in her decision to remarry and stay on the Cherokee reservation to live out her life. The novel thus situates the stomp dance as a microcosm for reflecting the ideals of the Cherokee culture, and as such its depiction is necessarily idealized. Of particular relevance is the emphasis on Cherokee “dance rites” as “social and communal” and as representing “the action of a group, not an individual.”87 Traditional stomp dances were revived by the Cherokee early in the twentieth century and encompass both “a social affair” and a ritualized spiritual ceremony: “The dance ground represents in the Cherokee mind the ancient town sacred square, and the sacred fire serves as the center and focal point for all activities.” This fire is used “to call on the Great Spirit in prayer”; consequently, stomp dances begin late in the evening, since “God can see the fire more plainly at night.”88 Moreover, as Cash informs Alice, the fire is “as old as the Cherokee people”: “Someone carried this fire over the Trail of Tears” and “someone carries off the embers in a bucket at the end

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of each ceremony and keeps them alive until the next monthly dance” (333). The fire thus symbolizes the continuity of the Cherokee people and culture, and the stomp dance functions as both a celebration of this people and culture and a means of perpetuating them. The event begins with rituals consisting of “the ball game, the medicine taking, the smoking of the pipe, and the speeches,” which are followed by the dancing; and the overall emphasis is on “harmony and peace” and friendship.89 The spiritual and communal aspects of this event infect Alice, as “old and young” (341) dance together and she begins to feel “entirely alive” (342) and “completely included” (344). Her “aloneness” vanishes as she experiences herself “inside” (345) the group of people dancing; Alice feels as if she simply is as she dances. Having spent a good deal of her life with only a daughter as family, Alice is overwhelmed by the possibility of a nurturing community and extended family that the Cherokee tribe offers. Indeed, as a poor single mother and thus relatively powerless within the dominant culture, Alice does not fit neatly into the category described by Deloria as hobbyists, who were for the most part while males and whose playing Indian depended on “asymmetrical relations of power” in which they held the power.90 Moreover, the romantic relationship that develops between Alice and Cash also throws her life upside down, in that he is not like any man she has known in the past: “In her life she has experienced neither men who talk a lot nor men who cook” (381). She finds reflected in Cash’s attitudes and behavior the Cherokee values of community, caring, and harmony. Kingsolver’s novel thus offers the Cherokee conception of community and extended family as an alternative to the privileging of the autonomous, self-interested agent that characterizes dominant versions of American individualism. While Godfrey denounces Kingsolver’s utopian idealization of the Cherokee because it “plays on stereotypes of American Indians as being close to nature and communal,”91 I am suggesting that Pigs in Heaven does not so much play on stereotypes as point to the possibilities that accompany a worldview that values the collective and conceives of the individual as inextricable from the community. Moreover, the novel does not simply present possible alternatives to American individualism in the form of Taylor’s constructed Tucson community and extended family and of the Cherokee notion of community as extended family. The conclusion of Pigs in Heaven offers a more complex, multicultural vision of community and extended family that depends on coalition work and involves compromise. This ending bal-

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ances the needs of the individuals involved and of the Cherokee tribe, as well as the demands of genealogy and of caring nurturing. The tribal court is faced with the “conflicting considerations” (428) of “keeping the child [Turtle] in her own culture, and not disrupting her attachment to a non-Cherokee mother” (429). Rather than choosing between the tribe and Taylor, however, Annawake steers the court toward a resolution that attempts to reinstate Turtle within the Cherokee tribe — as the ICWA mandates — while not depriving her of “the only mother she’s known for the past three years” (428). At Annawake’s instigation, the tribal court awards joint custody to Taylor and Cash Stillwater, after it is found that he is Turtle’s biological grandfather, with the proviso that “the two custodial parties are willing to cooperate” (431) and able “to come up with a plan fairly soon that places Turtle here on the Nation at least three months out of the year” (430).92 What this court decision asks for is an openness to a much expanded notion of extended family that crosses cultures and makes room for connections based on caring, on genealogy, and on shared cultural heritage. Initially, Taylor remains reluctant, tied to more limited notions of family, as is clear when she anticipates “a life of sharing Turtle with strangers” (431). As she drives over to Cash’s cabin along with all the Cherokees who had gathered in the tribal courtroom, however, she slowly begins to understand that “from now until the end of time she is connected to this family that’s parading down Main Street, Heaven” (434). The novel thus presents a vision of extended family as a patchwork of cultures. Meredith Sue Willis notes that the ending “gives the youngest generation a combination of heritages” and establishes “community [ . . . ] as dynamic, as part of an ever-weaving web of tradition” that is “flexible enough to make a place for everyone.”93 Such flexibility reflects critic Robert Allen Warrior’s point that “the success or failure of American Indian communal societies has always been predicated not upon a set of uniform, unchanging beliefs, but rather upon a commitment to the groups and the groups’ futures.”94 Indeed, the resolution the court offers with respect to Turtle in the form of joint custody demonstrates a flexibility that is committed to a future aimed at championing simultaneously the best interests of the tribe, of the relationships at stake, and of all the individuals involved. Moreover, the structure of joint custody in this case necessitates the formation of a multicultural extended family. The new family structure that the novel offers goes beyond Taylor and Cash’s joint custody of Turtle, however, and pushes toward even greater interconnectedness. To begin with, Cash asks Alice to marry

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him, which would mean that Turtle “could still be seeing her grandma when she comes [to the Cherokee Nation] for the summers” (431); and Alice agrees once Cash shatters his TV screen with a bullet in order to satisfy Alice’s injunction that “I don’t want another husband that’s glued to his everloving TV set” (432). Indeed, Cash’s peculiar act of love — the smashing of the TV — illustrates the give-and-take that new notions of family necessitate and makes it possible for Alice to rethink her future. Similarly, Taylor’s acceptance of a new kind of extended family that values both the individual and the community is further evidenced in her decision, which she shares with Turtle, to “tell Jax we want him as your official daddy” (434). Both Taylor and her mother thus move away from a notion of individualism that views the individual as autonomous, self-interested, and effectively separate from others and toward a valuing of the individual as a part of an extended family that includes other cultures and men. However, some critics have castigated the novel’s ending. Maureen Ryan, for example, views the ending as “seditious” in its “privileging of family values” in ways that compromise its presentation of “nontraditional families” and “the injustices of our society.”95 Similarly, Kristina Fagan chastises the novel’s ending for achieving “racial and national harmony [ . . . ] within the limits of romantic love and the family” and thus as “too perfect,” and as “a sidestepping of the complications of native-settler relations” through “individualizing this utopian racial harmony.”96 While the ending of Pigs in Heaven is definitely utopian and does include turns of plot that could be termed “contrived,”97 I would argue that formulating positive alternatives to dominant conceptions requires a leap into the realm of utopia. Blaming the novel for not being “realistic”98 enough ignores the potential of utopia to offer alternatives that move significantly beyond the already known and already experienced. As Robert Schehr argues, “Without some conceptualization of utopia, without the cultivation of alternative perceptions of reality, society would be dead”99 or at least stagnant, and there would be little motivation for agency. In slightly different terms, Patricia Hill Collins argues that there is value in “moving beyond critique and crafting something new.”100 Moreover, the kind of utopia represented by Kingsolver’s ending is not as traditional as critics like Ryan and Fagan make it out to be. Because the novel reimagines the family as an extended, multicultural web of associations that does not depend solely on biological ties and is con-

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tinuously being reworked, the whole conception of family values shifts away from its dominant American incarnation, which remains tied to the notion of a static, biological nuclear family that is racially homogenous. Indeed, the novel creatively engages the possibilities that open up by acknowledging and validating what Katarina Wegar calls “the marvelous human capacity to feel and create kinship”101 — even across cultures. For example, Wei Ming Dariotis argues that “the recognition of the Other as kin” makes possible “the stripping away of stereotypes, which so firmly establish ‘Otherness’ and deliberately disallow the possibility of kinship.”102 In addition, as a work of fiction and not a sociological text, the novel necessarily develops individual characters and stories to address larger issues. However, focusing on individual characters and stories does not necessarily result in the individualization of which Fagan accuses it. Indeed, the novel champions the notion of a dynamic, community-oriented, multicultural extended family to its last page, so that its focus on the local does not negate the broader implications of the specific resolution it offers. Although Alice’s marriage to Cash, who happens to be Turtle’s grandfather, might seem overly contrived and to a certain extent does reaffirm the family as defined by genealogy and legal contracts (the marriage license, in this instance), it nevertheless also participates in the novel’s affirmation of extended family as a web of relationships that include biological and cultural ties; ties based on caring, nurturing, and love; ties that derive from the needs of survival; and combinations thereof. Yes, life is usually messier and problems do not generally get resolved as nicely as in the ending of Pigs in Heaven, but that is exactly why utopias are necessary: to offer a sketch of what things could be like if humans were willing to rethink certain of their ideas and learn to work in more cooperative ways with one another. In other words, the particular resolution of the novel serves not as a paradigm to be emulated in its details but rather as one example of the possible ways that community and family can be radically reimagined to make possible forms of agency that value collective interests and derive from the anchoring of the individual within the collective.

Kingsolver’s two-novel set, The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, thus explores the problems with the American ideal of individualism that champions autonomy and self-interest, particularly for those who do

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not belong to the dominant group of white upper-class males, and attempts to offer alternative constructions of community and family that promote and value caring interdependence and multiculturalism while not negating the individual but rather reconceiving the individual as a function of and contributor to the community. The emphasis rests on the individual within the community, with community reconceptualized in terms of a radically expanded notion of extended family. As with a number of late twentieth-century American novels by women, these two novels offer versions of community that champion “the ideal of local affiliation and multiculturalism” and stress the need for “diverse arrangements for nurturance and mutual aid.”103 In both novels, individual physical and psychological survival proves impossible without the support of a community. The late twentieth-century American cultural and social landscape, as painted by Kingsolver, continues to privilege the autonomous self while making such autonomy accessible to few, given the vast gaps created by inequitable relations of power. Moreover, these inequities continue to follow axes of gender, class, race, and cultural heritage, with upper-class Anglo-American white men retaining positions of dominance. But Kingsolver’s novels illustrate ways in which communal forms of power — power with rather than power over — can be achieved among the powerless within the current configurations of power by capitalizing on the rapidly changing demographics of the population and configurations of families within the United States. Taylor needs others in order to survive as a poor single mother of a Cherokee girl; and she connects with others based on her specific situation, the individual needs of herself and of Turtle, and the needs of others — including, in particular, the cultural needs of the Cherokee Nation. Moreover, the connections she makes with others are always reciprocal, so that she is able to fulfill her needs while fulfilling the needs of others. The novels thus reconfigure the individual as inextricable from the community and vice-versa, which in turn allows for new conceptions of community, family, and agency. This reconfiguration of community, family, and agency derives in large part from the novels’ adaptation of Cherokee ideals and tribal structures that value and emphasize “social responsibility,” “belonging,” and “relationship”104 without erasing the Cherokee Nation’s cultural specificity. Indeed, Kingsolver’s novels reimagine American notions of both community and family in terms of an extended family that remains dynamic, resembles a web or patchwork of associations, includes ties based on both genealogy and caring nurturing, promotes multicultur-

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alism without eradicating differences, requires ongoing coalition work, works toward justice, and aims for individual and communal survival. Agency depends on participation in and dependence on such revised, reinvigorated versions of community and extended family within the world of Kingsolver’s two novels.

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Chapter 4 Collective Liberation and Activism via Spirituality Ana Castillo’s So Far from God

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hile this chapter continues the exploration of creative ways of rethinking kinship as a means of creating alternative forms of communities and communal agency, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993) subverts more extensively than do the novels discussed so far the traditional dichotomy between the private familial and the public community, as it offers activist communities that span the local and international spectrum. Moreover, although most of the novels examined in this study acknowledge the existence of a spiritual realm and its role in the forging of communities or collectivities, Castillo’s novel explores and embraces much more fully the possibilities for new forms of communal agency and coalition work that derive at least in part from alternative constructions of spirituality. With poor Mexican American women as its central characters, the novel engages in an examination of other (than dominant American) constructions of spirituality that value formulations of faith, justice, and collectivity grounded in material social practices and that, at the same time, break down the hierarchies and binaries associated with most dominant established religions — Catholicism, in this instance — and the cultures in which they reside. Given their “shared history of conquest and colonization,” Mexican American women as the novel presents them share a distinct standpoint from which “to challenge the dominant [American] culture’s devaluation” of their “own culture, language, and indigenous intellectual legacy” and to assert a “vision of a new paradigm of civilization that is free of systemic injustice and violence” and that “affirm[s] new models of social relationships that are capable of fully sustaining human dignity.”1 Castillo’s novel reformulates spirituality through a creative and stra-

tegic borrowing from the alternative, activist spiritual traditions available to these women: Latin American liberation theology, Mexican and Mexican American populist Catholicism inflected by Native American forms of spirituality, and feminist spirituality.2 What these alternative and more populist forms of Christian and non-Christian spirituality have in common is an emphasis on liberation, in the sense of aiming toward “justice, equality, human rights, true democracy, and a greater quality of life for all.”3 Moreover, they emphasize concrete experiences and daily life as “the point of departure”4 for all analysis and praxis. Reformulating and revaluing spirituality in terms of specifically Mexican American – inflected notions of liberation and everyday life enable the novel to craft a creative model of agency that posits spirituality as necessarily linked to social change and thus as a rich source of activism; to assert the inextricability of the individual from the community, so that individual agency becomes possible only within the context of the community; to focus on the potential for agency that resides within women and the domestic arena; and to reformulate and revalidate both the biological family and the family-community as loci for agency. By locating the novel in the small town of Tome, New Mexico, with a largely poor Mexican American population, Castillo is able to focus on both the material exigencies faced by this socially devalued people —  “people of mixed Spanish and Native blood” known as mestizos/as5   — and the potential in particular of mestiza identity for reformulating social structures and modes of thought through processes not only of synthesis but also, crucially, of constructive tension. The novel creatively engages the multiple borderlands of which Gloria Anzaldúa speaks in her groundbreaking book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and which include the “actual physical borderland” of “the Texas –  U.S. Southwest/Mexican border” as well as “psychological borderlands,” “sexual borderlands,” and “spiritual borderlands” that exist “at the juncture of cultures.” Being positioned in the borderlands opens up possibilities for “racial, ideological, cultural and biological pollination” that can in turn lead to the creation of what Anzaldúa terms “a new mestiza consciousness,” characterized in particular by “a tolerance for contradictions” and ambiguity.6 The women characters that populate Castillo’s So Far from God take this idea of a mestiza consciousness a step further by not just tolerating but embracing and revaluing contradictions and ambiguity. Indeed, the novel’s characters embrace their ambiguous identities as mixed-race women, as well as the distinct hybridized traditions they have received

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as a consequence of that mixed heritage, even if those traditions at times are at odds with each other. Instances of agency within the novel derive at least in part from the deliberate choice to accept such culturally and sociohistorically specific ambiguities and contradictions in positive, constructive terms so as to enable communal forms of agency aimed at collective physical and psychic survival and the creation of a better life based on a valuing of the common good. Centered on the characters of Sofi and her four daughters, Esperanza, Caridad, Fe, and La Loca, the novel specifically highlights the rich potential of women and realms traditionally associated with women —  such as the realms of the domestic and of the emotions — in its reformulation of agency. These characters’ particular borderland position, derived from the historical, economic, and geopolitical circumstances that mark their lives and those of their ancestors, has resulted in their being carriers of a rich array of traditions, strategies, and beliefs that at times coexist in tension with one another but that they nevertheless can utilize to create alternative, hybrid forms of agency. As poor Mexican American women struggling to survive in a culture that views them as invisible because of their multiple marginalizations (in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and gender), the novel’s central characters offer other perspectives and strategies, particularly in terms of a multicultural spiritual heritage linked to ideas of liberation and social progress, that contribute to this project of examining how a variety of American women writers are actively reimagining alternative forms of agency at a historical moment in which the very possibility of agency has been put into question. Not only is Castillo’s novel “embedded in a long [Latin American] tradition of voicing struggle and oppositional consciousness in the language of miracle and popular religion,”7 but the novel also demonstrates the ways in which this tradition is a dynamic ever-evolving one through its Chicana women characters, who borrow from, combine, and refigure old and new forms of populist spirituality to enable progressive individual and communal praxis — with the individual and the community viewed always as interconnected. Describing Castillo’s female characters as Chicanas acknowledges current usage of the term Chicana to denote women of mixed Spanish and Indian descent living in the United States who are politically conscious and/or engaged with respect to the specific conditions of Mexican American women’s lives8 — although, clearly, some of the novel’s female characters are more politically conscious and/or engaged than others. The term Chicana is the feminine form of Chicano, a “previously pejora-

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tive word” attached to lower-class Mexican Americans of mixed ancestry that underwent “reappropriation and recoding” in “a highly politicized act of self-identification, self-empowerment and pride” during the 1960s civil rights era and the formation of the Chicano power movement.9 As Candida Hepworth notes, “What distinguishes the Chicano/a from the Mexican American is a particular philosophical outlook” connected to “dissent” and the development of “a new assertiveness.”10 However, the powerful voices of Chicana writers in the last two decades make clear that their political agenda diverges from that of Chicanos in that they emphasize the differences inherent in the lives of Mexican American men and women that derive from their distinct gendered positions. Not only have Chicanas rejected the tendency within the Chicano movement to thrust women “in the traditional role of nurturer preparing food and coffee while the men plotted revolution,” but they also have asserted the importance of women’s issues alongside issues of “La Raza,” which has at times resulted in their being “considered traitors” by Chicanos.11 Indeed, for Chicanos, “issues of racial discrimination took precedence over those of gender.”12 Many critics associate the term Chicana “with a feminist commitment [to] or consciousness” of the particular condition of women whose lives are circumscribed by both Chicano and Anglo American male-centered cultures.13 The position of Chicanas vis-à-vis their ethnic culture is complicated by the centrality and influence within Mexican American culture of the family and the Catholic Church, both of which have traditionally been highly patriarchal in character. Deborah Madsen points out “the fundamental misogyny of traditional Mexican society,” given that the “Church, the family, the culture require that women be subservient to men, that women renounce themselves in favor of men.”14 Because of the tremendous influence of the Catholic Church and the highly patriarchal structure of the family, Mexican and Mexican American images and notions of women have tended to remain contained within the classic virgin/ whore dichotomy. As Anzaldúa insists, “For a woman of my culture there used to be only three directions she could turn: to the Church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother.”15 With respect to the Catholic Church, however, many critics point out the ways in which Mexican culture historically has embraced a “folk Catholicism”16 that is intermixed with many indigenous elements. Sandra Cisneros describes it as “European Catholicism and Precolumbian religion all mixed up.”17 Scholars note that this hybrid form of Catholicism has its roots in the ways in which, following the sixteenth-

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century Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, the “native peoples appropriated elements of Catholicism into the Mesoamerican cultural matrixes” as a sort of “camouflage.”18 Over time, a form of “popular Catholicism” rather than official Catholicism has seeped into the practices of Mexican and Mexican American culture.19 Indeed, “popular religiosity” has become “an essential part of [Mexican and Mexican American] popular culture” and “central to the lived experience of the people.”20 The result is that “religion and culture are inseparable.”21 This hybrid popular Catholicism includes elements that at least implicitly contest or exist in tension with the patriarchal nature of official Catholicism. In particular, the centrality in Mexican and Mexican American religiosity of the Virgin of Guadalupe — arguably “the single most potent religious, political, and cultural image of the Chicano/mexicano”22 — not only raises the stature of the Virgin Mary but also destabilizes the traditional whiteness associated with Western forms of Christianity. The Virgin of Guadalupe is “the first dark Mestiza Virgin, who miraculously appeared to the Indio Juan Diego in the early colonial period.”23 In 1660, the Roman Catholic Church officially deified her as “Santa Maria de Guadalupe.”24 This process of deification occurred at least in part because of the growing recognition by the Church hierarchy that the Virgin of Guadalupe could serve “as a useful instrument of conversion.”25 Her appearance in a geographical place “known to be the sacred worshipping place of an important pre-Columbian Nahuatl goddess, Tonantzin,” further indicates the melding of distinct spiritual and cultural traditions that characterizes the Mexican and Mexican American form of Catholicism.26 As the politically savvy narrator of Castillo’s So Far from God explains, “The Catholic Church endorsed as sacred what the Native peoples had known all along since the beginning of time.”27 Because Tonantzin is one aspect of an “earlier Mesoamerican fertility and Earth goddess” known as Coatlalopeuh,28 her implicit association with the Virgin of Guadalupe revises the latter. Indeed, the link positions the Virgin of Guadalupe as retaining ties to powerful “feminine principles” that the Roman Catholic Church tried unsuccessfully to purge from its version of the Virgin Mary.29 Moreover, “pre-Columbian Nahuatl philosophical thought” in general is characterized as “a more intuitive and heart-directed way of understanding and interpreting reality” that validates “knowledge that is the consequence of being in touch with one’s own inner experience as lived out communally,”30 characteristics that in Western culture have been associated with the feminine but have found their way into Mexican and Mexican

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American popular religiosity. According to Gail Pérez, Mexican (and, I would add, Mexican American) Catholicism is in many ways “the cultural space” within “which the indigenous world view survives.”31 That Mexican American – lived popular religiosity results from such processes of hybridization also points to the dynamic aspects of religiosity and thus to the potential for further shifts, which Castillo’s novel asserts are ongoing — particularly in the hands of Chicanas.32 The other central and highly influential institution within Mexican American culture besides the Church is the family, which according to most scholars is arguably “the single most important unit in MexicanAmerican life.”33 As Cherríe Moraga asserts, “Being Chicana and having family are synonymous.”34 The valuing of family combined with the Catholic influence results in larger families; as reports based on the 2000 census indicate, Mexican American families are three times as likely as white American families to contain five or more people.35 Although Mexican families tend to be characteristically patriarchal and thus have come under close critical scrutiny by Chicana scholars and activists, Chicanas nevertheless emphasize the positive aspects of the valuing of “community and relationships”36 associated with the privileging of the family. As Nancy Pineda-Madrid explains, “The efficacious power of la familia resides in the deeply rooted communal, relational self-understanding of Chicanas and Chicanos,” so that “notions of the ‘self’ invariably mean ‘self in community.’ ”37 Chicanas point in particular to the importance of their bonds to female family members, which Castillo’s novel emphasizes in her focus on life-affirming relationships between women. Building on this notion of self in community derived specifically from a Mexican American conception of family, Castillo’s novel veers away from dominant American notions of self-interested individualism and toward a notion of the individual as necessarily embedded within a larger collective of human beings. In order to further emphasize such a larger notion of the collective, the novel also reconceives the family away from the traditional patriarchal family and away from defining family only in terms of biological connections. In point of fact, the presentation of alternative forms of family found in So Far from God is not without precedent, given that recent sociohistorical research “documents the proliferation of varied familial practices throughout the many contexts of Chicano/a history and pre-history.”38 For example, families headed by women have certainly always been prevalent. As Sofi in Castillo’s novel asserts, “All her life, there had always been at least one woman

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around like her, left alone, abandoned, divorced, or widowed, to raise her children” (161) and to construct a family that does not depend on or revolve around a patriarch. Given the centrality and influence of the family and the popularized form of Catholicism within Mexican American culture, however, a rejection of either or both would inevitably entail a simultaneous rejection of her ethnic culture for a Chicana writer like Castillo. Instead, she engages in strategies to revalue certain traditional aspects of the Mexican American family (particularly its emphasis on community and relationships) and of popular religiosity (particularly its commitment to community and to the lives of the oppressed) while jettisoning their hierarchical, patriarchal, inequitable, binary aspects. Castillo’s So Far from God develops an alternative model of agency derived from the Mexican American “cultural values of cooperation and mutual aid”39 but does so in ways that give voice to and authorize Chicana women and the specific strategies and traditions they have developed as means of survival and of bettering their own and their families’ lives. Even on the level of form, So Far from God demonstrates its commitment to communal and populist democratic values that veer away from both American notions of self-interested individualism and Mexican American forms of machismo. The novel is organized into sixteen chapters of narrative, prefaced by an imposing table of contents that takes three pages to list their lengthy titles. These titles, which run from three to seven lines punctuated at various points by colons, semicolons, and commas, are unusual not only in their length but also in their descriptive character. While reminiscent of eighteenth-century novels, these read more like attention-grabbing T.V. Guide plot summaries than conventional chapter titles. Written in simple, descriptive language and emphasizing engaging and at times extraordinary or even sensationalistic plot lines, these chapter titles aim for accessibility and general appeal. The back cover of the 1994 Plume edition of the novel includes a celebratory statement by fellow Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, claiming that “Ana Castillo has gone and done what I always wanted to do — written a Chicana telenovela — a novel roaring down Interstate 25 at one hundred and fifteen miles an hour with an almanac of Chicanoismo — saints, martyrs, T.V. mystics, home remedies, little miracles, dichos, myths, gossip, recipes — fluttering from the fender like a flag. Wacky, wild, y bien funny. Dale gas, girl!” Cisneros’s reference to the telenovela style of Castillo’s novel further illuminates my claim that the form of So Far from God works in tan-

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dem with its overall insistence on issues of populist democracy and community.40 Telenovelas are often described simply as “Mexican soap operas.”41 However, telenovelas, an extremely popular form of “Latin American television serial” (especially in Brazil and Mexico), differ from typical U.S. soap operas in that they are conventionally broadcast in prime time for a period of six to seven months, which gives them closure but nevertheless has time to build a community of viewers.42 Indeed, telenovelas “are complete narratives in around 100 episodes, unlike the never-ending soap operas.”43 In addition to their prime-time broadcast, they arguably build upon the strong oral traditions of most Latin American nations through their “use [of] a lively, everyday language.”44 Using “discourses [that] are polysemic, not directed to one group or class alone,” has helped to ensure telenovelas of a diverse audience: “All the social classes, males and females alike, watch telenovelas.”45 While clearly television participates strongly in a commodity capitalism that in many ways works in opposition to the kind of participatory and populist democracy Castillo’s novel champions — particularly in the sense that television scripts, targets, and positions its offerings with an eye toward ensuring as large an audience as possible and shapes consumers to certain expectations in the process as a means of ensuring advertising moneys — the incredible success of telenovelas in drawing a large and diverse audience suggests that they exert a certain populist appeal, particularly in their capacity as a popular media form that cuts across classes. Part of that populist appeal seems to rest on the tendency of telenovelas to focus not only on “stories of struggle of heroes and heroines to solve their problems and find happiness together” but on “the social difference between the lovers” (my italics) as the common obstacle.46 By placing the problematics of class center stage, telenovelas address a series of key political questions that face viewers in Latin American countries in which the gap between rich and poor remains of extreme proportions and, therefore, the issue of class dominates everyday life. Moreover, by tending to take “the side of ordinary people,” telenovelas “at their most powerful [ . . . ] make political statements with potentially huge impact,” given the size of their viewing audience.47 Furthermore, because “they are expected to have a happy ending,”48 telenovelas tend to possess a certain utopian dimension; they are forced to imagine alternative, positive results of class struggle — in contradistinction to the horror and violence that have tended to mark much of Latin American class conflict. While such happy endings can be accommodative and

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clearly market driven rather than revolutionary, possibilities for the latter exist as a consequence of the form’s populist emphasis on class. By translating formal aspects of the popular telenovela to her novel, Castillo emphasizes not only the specificity of Mexican American culture within the United States but also the centrality of class struggle within its cultural ethos, given the extremely large number of Mexican Americans at the bottom of the U.S. class spectrum. At the same time that Castillo’s novel borrows the populist aspects of the telenovela form, however, it rewrites the form in a variety of ways to develop more fully its more revolutionary possibilities — possibilities often stunted by the market-driven aspect of the standard telenovela. The most obvious change occurs in So Far from God’s shift away from the telenovela’s classic emphasis on male-female romance with class differences as the obstacle to the happy-ending marriage.49 In the late twentieth-century, multiethnic United States, such scenarios remain overly simplistic in that they do not take into consideration the ways in which class struggles are complicated by issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and geography. The novel posits male-female relationships as themselves problematic in that they exist within the framework of a deeply male-centered Mexican American culture that silences and disempowers women and within the framework of a capitalistic, racist, and male-centered American culture that silences and disempowers Mexican American men and women. This state of affairs produces men whom the novel depicts as debilitated, as lacking a sense of community, of responsibility, of balance, of self-worth: Sofi’s husband Domingo is a compulsive gambler whose “bets got bigger and bigger” (214); Esperanza’s live-in boyfriend, Rubén, “dumped her for a middle-class gabacha with a Corvette” (26); Caridad’s husband, Memo, kept “seeing his exgirlfriend” (26); Fe’s fiancé, Thomas, comes down with a case of susto (30) — a type of spiritual fright 50 — and breaks off their engagement; and Francisco struggles so hard to deny himself pleasures of the flesh “in the name of God” (191) that he finally snaps and violently rapes a woman. In contrast, the novel posits its women characters as survivors, notwithstanding the pain and hardships they are forced to face and endure; and their ability to survive is specifically anchored to their belief in community and their spiritual faith, which remain intertwined. Unlike typical telenovela plots, the positive relationships worth struggling for in Castillo’s novel are between women: mother-daughter, daughterdaughter, comadre-comadre, older woman­ – younger woman, womanwoman (romantic). Moreover, the obstacles to these relationships do

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not reside in class differences between the involved parties but rather involve a communal struggle by the women against the various sexist, racist, economic cultural forces that dominate their lives. Another key way in which Castillo’s novel diverges from the telenovela form is in its first-person narrator, who is not a character within the story she narrates but who is clearly invested in the story she tells and freely comments on it in a highly opinionated manner. Her politically engaged voice vis-à-vis the lives of the Mexican American women characters she depicts is recognizably that of a politically savvy Chicana. Moreover, this narrator addresses the reader in a direct and intimate manner that, I would argue, borrows from another prominent Latin American form: the testimonio. As Tey Diana Rebolledo notes, “The testimonio, or testimonial narrative, a form whose contemporary outpouring has arisen from political terror and subjugation in Latin America,” functions as “documentation and narration” of the material struggles and violence that accompany social struggle and acquires authority from “the personal witnessing, the personal narrative which gives it validity.”51 As such, it serves as “an affirmation of the individual subject [ . . . ] but in connection with a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression, and struggle.”52 A testimonio is thus never individualistic, since the narrating self defines itself in relation to the community and the problematic social structures and never independently of them. John Beverly further defines testimonio as a “nonfictional, popular-democratic form of epic narrative,” in which the narrator “speaks for, or in the name of, a community or group, approximating in this way the symbolic function of the epic hero, without at the same time assuming the epic hero’s hierarchical and patriarchal status,” and giving voice “to a previously ‘voiceless,’ anonymous, collective popular-democratic subject, the pueblo or ‘people.’ ”53 Although Western cultures have tended to privilege objective, thirdperson documents as valid representations of events, exception has conventionally been made for highly personalized and often emotionally laden testimonials that focus on severe, horrific events connected to the realm of official national politics — with the Holocaust as a prime example. Survivor or testimonial narratives are positioned as true representations of events that have been silenced through repression and violence or the threat of violence. The testimonio is the form specific to Latin America that has developed to record its “problematic collective social situation.”54 Moreover, as “a visionary discourse inevitably gazing toward a future ridden [sic] of the oppression both of the past and of

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the present,”55 the testimonio offers a form with much potential for contemporary Latin American women and Chicana writers in the United States. Indeed, Rebolledo makes the argument that many Chicana writers make use of the “notion of testifying and remembering” in order to address the ways in which they have been “silenced and erased,” “although not to the extreme of the political repressions of Latin America”: she refers to Chicana writers as “testigas (witnesses) to the social and political happenings around them.”56 I would argue that the narrator of So Far from God functions as such a testiga. Although Castillo’s first-person narrator breaks from the testimonio form, in that she remains anonymous and the story is presented not as the story of her personal experiences but rather as the story of a host of presumably fictional characters, the narrative is at the same time highly personal, in that the experiences of the women characters whose stories the narrator presents represent and parallel her own experiences as a Chicana and her journey to speech. The narrator of So Far from God thus falls between the ordinarily distinct roles of compiler-editor and narrator that characterize the majority of testimonios, in that she does not take part in the action she depicts and yet asserts her viewpoint throughout the text in ways that demonstrate not only that she has much invested in the story she is telling but also that she has so much in common with her characters that she can testify to their difficult lives dominated by struggles.57 Rather than an individual testimony, then, the narrator produces a communal testimonial, testifying to the lives of Chicana women in the plural (including her own life) through her narrative about Sofi, her four daughters, and the other women of Tome, New Mexico.58 Castillo thus produces a text that emphasizes the collective, communal aspects of the testimonio form by deemphasizing the narrator in its refusal to name her. Moreover, like a testimonio, the narrator’s story depicts not only the ways in which cultural forces work to silence its women characters but also the diverse, creative ways in which the women resist those efforts to silence them and create alternative means of obtaining agency — in their case, by working communally. Castillo’s novel thus borrows from and adapts the testimonio genre, which aims not only to depict but also “to engender immediate and collective socio-political and cultural praxis,”59 in order to produce its own model of communal, collective agency. Although Sofi raises four daughters alone, cares for them after they each undergo violent experiences of some form, and then loses all four daughters to deaths linked to the larger, oppressive culture they

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cannot escape, Sofi never gives up hope. Anchored in her faith, Sofi’s hope lies securely in the communities she keeps building and nurturing, from her immediate family, to the business cooperatives she helps to launch in Tome, to the international organization, Mothers of Martyrs and Saints, that she founds after the deaths of all her daughters. So Far from God thus borrows from while simultaneously altering the telenovela and the testimonio to structurally link its narrative to distinctly Latin American cultural forms as it works to offer a model of agency anchored in communities held together by a materially grounded faith linked at least in part to specifically Latin American forms of popular religiosity and the hope derived from that faith. Castillo’s novel derives its model of agency specifically from the concrete lived experiences of Chicana women, whom it depicts as enabling communities through their faith-based perseverance and hope. So Far from God presents its characters in ways that disrupt the stereotype of Mexican American women as submissive, silent, powerless wives and mothers who remain within the confines of the home. The novel’s central character, Sofi, is a wife and mother, but she is neither submissive nor silent. Moreover, she straddles the domestic and public spheres by asserting herself and assuming positions of leadership in her home, in Tome, and, eventually, internationally. As many scholars have noted, Chicana women simultaneously fit and do not fit the stereotypical characteristics conventionally assigned to them.60 Women’s relegation to the home does not necessarily mean that their role there is passive, for example, since “the family is undoubtedly the most important institution for Chicanos.”61 In Castillo’s novel, Sofi works tirelessly and single-handedly to uphold her family in an extremely active way, including publicly admonishing her priest, Father Jerome, when he suggests that her youngest daughter La Loca’s coming back from the dead might be the work of Satan: “Don’t you dare start this about my baby! [ . . . ] This is a miracle” (23). Moreover, given the low class positioning of many Chicanas, they must often work outside the home out of necessity and thus do participate in the public sphere as workers. According to 2000 census figures, Mexican Americans are more than three times as likely as their white American counterparts to live below the poverty line: 24.1 percent as compared to 7.7 percent.62 In addition, because the “significance of the familia has strong roots in the historical function which the Chicano family has performed in protecting individuals from the hostilities of Anglo White society” by providing “a source of trust, refuge and protection,” political activism

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in the public sphere has always been intertwined with the domestic sphere.63 In Castillo’s novel, home is conceptualized as both separate from the outside world and inextricably connected to it. I would thus argue that the home functions for Chicanas much as it has historically for African Americans, as “one site [ . . . ] where one could resist” and “strive to be subjects,” “restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world,” and “nurture our spirits.”64 Indeed, Sofi constructs a caring, nurturing home that allows her daughters to restore themselves after doing battle in the outside Anglo world and to develop as subjects in their own right who for the most part value and work toward community-oriented goals.65 For the novel’s women characters, home remains the only sane place in a world in which they are marginalized on multiple fronts. Within the home, they are able to create a caring, communal social model that exists in contradistinction to the hierarchical, competitive, violent world that assails them from the outside. At the same time, Sofi’s role as mother is neither romanticized nor presented in passive terms. Indeed, Sofi confronts her husband some time after his return from his nearly twenty-year absence about the constraints that her mothering role has placed upon her: “I have been hanging the rumps of pigs and lambs and getting arthritis from the freezer and praying to God to give me the strength to do the best by my girls alone and with the wits I had left after what I’d been through with them,” and “since that child out there died [La Loca, who then came back to life] there hasn’t been one evening when I have been away from this house!” (111). Even here, however, Sofi’s mothering role cannot be separated from her work outside the home, in the butcher shop she inherited from her parents and now owns and runs, to provide fiscally for her family. Moreover, Sofi chooses to be a caring, active mother and to head her family, designating her a subject with agency rather than a passive, objectified wife and mother as the stereotype would have it. As she eventually admits or, as she puts it, “remembered” (214), Domingo did not desert her with four daughters as her neighbors all assume and as she had herself begun to be believe — she is known as “la ‘Pobre Sofi’ y la ‘Abandonada’ ” (215); rather, “in those early days,” “she couldn’t take no more” of his “betting away the land she had inherited from her father” and so she “gave him his walking papers” (214). Gail Pérez argues that Sofi “has ‘forgotten’ [that she herself threw Domingo out of the house] because the culture has no name for her agency, her empowered role.”66 Twenty years later, however, when Domingo begins to bet heavily again

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after Fe’s death and loses “the deed to the house” — “which had been her mother’s and father’s and her grandparents’ ” and “had belonged to her” (215) — she seeks the help of her Anglo lawyer neighbor to “serve the [divorce] papers she figured were twenty years overdue, and told him to leave” (218) once again. Although she still finds Domingo “as enrapturing as [ . . . ] when she was fourteen years old” (113), Sofi refuses to be subjugated by his gambling habit; and she usurps (this time officially) his traditionally bestowed power as head of the family using the American legal system to which she is entitled as a citizen. Moreover, Sofi no longer fears excommunication by the Church and her mother’s disapproval  — “her mother has been like the Church’s conscience incarnated to her daughter” — which had made divorce out of the question years earlier. To survive as a Chicana, Sofi has learned to make strategic use of her borderland position, choosing to adopt, reject, and revise aspects of both the Mexican and Anglo American traditions in order to fulfill her family’s and community’s needs. For example, she revises the head-of-thefamily position she willingly assumes by emptying it of hierarchical positioning over her children and transforming it into a more nurturing, enabling position; she directs the power she wields for (and not over) the family-community that she and her daughters form. That Sofi’s throwing out of Domingo is both times connected to his gambling away of their land and home further emphasizes both her historically charged position as a Chicana and her subjugation by both Mexican American and Anglo American cultures. The novel highlights the parallels between Domingo’s betting away of Sofi’s family’s land and the imperialism that resulted in the imposition of U.S. citizenship on Mexicans who resided in lands that presently make up the southwestern United States. The result of the United States’ defeat of Mexico in 1848 and the subsequent 1854 Gadsden Purchase was that “almost fifty percent of Mexico’s national territory had changed hands within a matter of years” and that a huge number of Mexicans “awoke one morning to find that the border had shifted.”67 As Anzaldúa notes, “100,000 Mexican citizens [ended up] on this side, annexed by conquest along with the land.”68 Moreover, these annexed “mexicanos found themselves in the position of the racially inferior foreigner”;69 and they discovered that they were expected to assimilate to the now dominant Anglo American culture, all of this while they remained in the same place geographically. Both Domingo’s and the United States’ actions are not only subjugating but also functionally disrupt people’s cultural and familial roots and communities. The text implicitly links these forms of violent disrup-

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tion to a male-centered, colonial impulse to win. As Sofi’s neighbor and comadre Rita notes, “First the gringos took most of our land away when they took over the territory from Mexico — right after Mexico had taken it away from Spain” (217); moreover, Spain had taken it from the Aztecs, who had taken it from a number of other native peoples. Sofi’s assertion of power and subjecthood in making Domingo leave thus functions not only as a refusal to allow the further disruption and erasure of her familial and cultural ties, which are connected to the land and the home built upon it, but also as a choice to assume responsibility over the form of familial and cultural structures that she will allow to survive and that she will help to reshape. Through the character of Sofi, Castillo’s novel thus revalues and revises motherhood and mothering by insisting that in practice these traditional concepts are far from static and that they possess potentially transgressive elements. By promoting the values of caring and nurturing conventionally associated with motherhood and mothering as the central values of the family, as well as of other larger communities, Sofi offers an alternative to the male-centered, hierarchical, binary values of the Mexican American and Anglo American cultures that simultaneously derives from and reworks tradition.70 Moreover, while the focus on Sofi and her four daughters clearly validates the biological family as a locus for this kind of community, the novel in no way privileges the nuclear biological family. Not only does Sofi carry her nurturing community-building style outside her immediate family and not only does the novel offer other examples of women with no biological ties nurturing each other, but the novel also consistently depicts the ways in which individuals and communities are intertwined and interdependent for good or for bad. For example, at the start of the novel, while Sofi lives a fairly isolated life as a single mother “who lived alone with her four little girls by the ditch at the end of the road” and protected her family with a baseball bat she kept “under the bed — just in case” (20), she nevertheless interacts with the community of Tome both as the owner of the town butcher shop and as a member of the church. When her fourth daughter dies at the age of three, “the neighbors all came out to accompany Sofi and the girls to the church” (20 – 21) for the funeral mass — “Everyone Sofi knew was there: the baby’s godparents, all of Sofi’s comadres and compadres, her sister from Phoenix” (21). The scene at the church is one of communal support for Sofi through a communal sharing of pain and clearly demonstrates that Sofi’s family is part of a larger community bound

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by geographical proximity, similar positioning as poor Mexican Americans, and a common faith. Moreover, the community of mourners also functions as a witness to the miracle of La Loca’s resurrection when she pushed open the coffin lid, sat up, and then “lifted herself up into the air and landed on the church roof” (23). The community thus participates in the events of Sofi’s family’s life by both sharing and testifying to her grief and joy, thereby overtly linking the novel’s plot to the testimonio form that the novel borrows from and revises. While remaining interconnected to the community of Tome, especially through a shared faith and populist religiosity, Sofi’s family nevertheless functions as its own community, which its female members all help to shape in ways that offer an engaging model of a nonhierarchical, nurturing community — making possible not only survival but also the development of active subjects with at least limited agency. The nurturing that Sofi’s family members offer to each other combines physical, emotional, and spiritual forms of care that at times involve a synthesis of the three and at other times a mixture of distinct approaches, with material, physical care necessarily coming first. Not only does Sofi support and care for her four daughters, but her daughters also care for her and for each other.71 Even La Loca, who after her miraculous resurrection only rarely “permitted human contact at all,” always without question gives her all to the task of “healing her sisters from the traumas and injustices they were dealt by society” (27). As Carmela Delia Lanza notes, La Loca acts “collectively [ . . . ] within the framework of the family.”72 When Caridad went back home pregnant after she discovered Memo was cheating on her, “La Loca had ‘cured’ her sister of her pregnancy” discreetly, since public knowledge of an abortion would have been “a cause for excommunication for both” (27). After Fe breaks down and begins to scream continuously following a broken engagement, “it was Sofi and her daughters who took turns feeding, cleaning, and dressing poor Fe,” all the while putting up with “her bloodcurdling wail [that] became part of the household’s routine” (32). When Caridad “came home one night mangled as a stray cat, having been left for dead by the side of the road” (33), she or “what was left of her” had to be cared for night and day: “it was Sofi’s main job to care for Caridad” while “La Loca took care of the horses and the other animals as well as helped her mother with preparing meals for her sisters” (37). With Fe and Caridad incapacitated in different ways, Sofi and La Loca, with the occasional help of Esperanza when she is home from work, must care for their physical needs.

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La Loca “also prayed” for her two hurt sisters, “since that was her principal reason for being alive” (32): immediately following her resurrection, the then three-year-old La Loca had announced to the crowd of mourners that “God sent me back to help you all, to pray for you all” (24). The form that La Loca’s spirituality takes, however, is hybrid in the sense that it combines Mexican American populist Catholicism with a woman-centered spirituality that values the power of the nurturing activities that take place in the home. The combination of interconnected physical and spiritual care showered upon Fe and Caridad provide the necessary atmosphere for another set of miracles in the form that their recoveries take. Indeed, the novel posits the spiritually and physically nurturing space of Sofi’s woman-centered and nonhierarchical family, where all members willingly care for each other in a giving, reciprocal manner, as enabling otherwise impossible or improbable recovery and growth. The mother’s and sisters’ support of each other is thus not limited to grueling physical caring, although they certainly perform that work; they also witness and testify to each other’s physical and spiritual rebirth, which happens on various levels for at least three of the sisters and is ongoing for Sofi. The novel thus demonstrates through its women characters how constructive change can occur in locales and among people often dismissed as ineffectual and powerless and using strategies cobbled together from a variety of cultural traditions that thrive within the United States even though they are given short shrift by the dominant male Anglo-American culture. As discussed earlier, Sofi and her three elder daughters all witness La Loca’s miraculous resurrection at the age of three and support her throughout the life that she spends in the vicinity of her home because of her phobia of people, which she claims derives from the “smell of humans” that is “akin to that which she had smelled in the places she had passed through when she was dead” (23). La Loca chooses to distance herself from the outside world that is so cruel, especially to women, and reminds her too much of hell — “You never forget that smell” (41). Indeed, she “did not regret not being part of that society,” which “disappointed, disillusioned, devastated” her sisters: “At home she had everything she needed. Her mother’s care and love, her sisters” (152). While La Loca’s sojourn to and back from hell and her decision to distance herself from the outside world situates her firmly in the Catholic tradition, her choice to sequester herself in her woman-centered, poor, Mexican American home rather than in a convent points to a form of spirituality that blends a variety of traditions

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and remains firmly anchored in the everyday life of the people. Her family further witnesses La Loca’s development as an expert horsewoman, a skilled fiddler, “a one hundred percent manita cook” (164) — skills she manages to master miraculously without being taught and which are central to carrying on particular cultural traditions — and most importantly a vital contributor in manifold ways to the construction and daily functioning of their caring, synergic familial community. For example, Sofi makes clear that she could not have survived caring for Fe and Caridad, much less run for mayor of Tome, “if it wasn’t for this pobre criatura here who EVERYBODY looks down on and tries to make out as retarded, no matter that she’s smarter than most people” (157). Caridad’s recovery from her severe rape and beating almost parallels La Loca’s resurrection in terms of miraculous events and, indeed, becomes known as “Caridad’s ‘Holy Restoration’ ” (43), a reference that links her recovery to a Catholic tradition. One evening, the entire household witnesses “a whole and once again beautiful Caridad,” dressed in Fe’s wedding gown, walking “soundlessly” across the room and then “out of sight” (37). Fearing that this vision — evoking the Christian image of the bride of God — heralds Caridad’s death, Sofi heads to the bedroom only to find “not what had been left of her daughter, half repaired by modern technology, tubes through her throat, bandages over skin that was gone, surgery piecing together flesh that was once her daughter’s breasts, but Caridad as she was before.” Moreover, not only does Sofi find Caridad whole again, but she also finds that “a calm Fe was holding her sister, rocking her, stroking her forehead, humming softly to her” and “had stopped screaming” (38), an image of reciprocal sister love and nurturance that points to feminist modes of spirituality. Although “Caridad’s and Fe’s spontaneous recoveries were beyond rhyme and reason for anyone” (39), the novel makes clear that these recoveries are linked to the nurturing woman-centered home environment, as well as to La Loca’s active prayers for her sisters — “I prayed real hard” (38). Indeed, throughout its pages, the novel highlights alternative hybrid forms of spirituality as an other source of knowledge outside Western rationality that is powerful and that Sofi and her daughters to different degrees co-opt in their efforts to heal and nurture themselves, as well as one another. Not only does Sofi staunchly depend on her faith, but three of her daughters appear to possess nontraditional spiritual powers that develop after death or near-death experiences and that they utilize as means of healing others and/or allowing people to connect with each other: La

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Loca comes back from the dead to pray for others; Esperanza’s spirit continues to visit and communicate with her mother and sisters after her death; and Caridad not only is physically restored after being mutilated and left for dead but also demonstrates clairvoyance and develops into a curandera. The only sister who does not possess spiritual powers and, consequently, does “not return ectoplasmically” (186) after her death as her other sisters do is Fe. As the novel makes overtly clear and as most critics have noted, Fe’s spiritual lack derives from her choice to place her faith completely in the American dream and its more materialist aspects and to distance herself from her family — the members of which she views as “self-defeating” and “unambitious” (28) — and her Mexican American roots and thus from a community. However, Fe’s firm belief in the American dream does not save her from the ruthless corporation that benefits from her hard work but remains indifferent to her humanity as it allows her to work with toxic, illegal materials with no physical protection. Because Fe is “intent on moving up quick at Acme International, [ . . . ] she took on every gritty job available” (178) and “worked hard no matter what” (181); in return for that hard work, she dies at the age of twenty-six of a painful rapidly spreading cancer “eating her insides like acid” (186). Although Fe “had all her life sought to escape her mother’s depressing home” (171), on the brink of death Fe yearns for and goes back to the “sanctuary” (172) of her family and home. Unlike her three sisters, Fe recognizes too late her need for community as a Mexican American woman in a world dominated by male- and money-centered corporate interests.73 So Far from God presents La Loca, Esperanza, and Caridad as using their spiritual powers for community-oriented purposes that involve caring for others, in contrast both to Fe and to the novel’s only spiritual young male character, Francisco el Penitente Santero, who chooses silence and isolation as his means of “pleasing God” (191), despite the Penitentes’ “history of resistance to social, political, and cultural domination.”74 Francisco’s spirituality remains individualistic and turned inward while the women in the novel (except for Fe) demonstrate a spirituality that is communal and turned outward. Indeed, the novel offers its women characters’ spirituality as deviating from official Roman Catholicism with its hierarchical structure and emphasis on “mortification and repentance” (191) even while it embraces a more populist, specifically Mexican American Catholic faith inflected by feminist forms of spirituality. Michelle Sauer argues that the novel also recuperates an older Cath-

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olic “framework of medieval women mystics in order to explore the power of the female community and a new feminine spirituality” in which any woman can lay “claim [to] spiritual authority.” Given that the “cults of the saints began as community sponsored devotions” and thus as a form of grass-roots movement that valued “the community voice,” they represent “a tradition that is both transgressive and traditional.” Their transgressive element lies in their refutation of the power of “only a select few men [ . . . ] to confer ‘sanctity’ ” and thus undermining the Church’s “(patriarchal) structure,” which led to the suppression of this particular form of community voice “when the Papacy reserved the sole right to canonization in 1234 ce.” According to Sauer, the novel also calls up echoes of “another medieval tradition, a more subversive sect called the beguines,” who valued “community, specifically a female community that would aid and protect its members from the harshness of a male-dominated society” and who were ruthlessly suppressed by the Church.75 By recuperating these older traditions of powerful spiritual women that are part of Catholic history but have tended to be swept under the carpet by it, Castillo’s novel asserts its women characters’ spirituality as powerful and as Catholic, at the same time acknowledging the need for an other form of spirituality that moves past the hierarchy and male-centeredness of the established Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, the novel wrests spiritual authority from the exclusive province of priests and males in general and democratizes the process of claiming spiritual authority. In the resurrection scene depicted at the beginning of the novel, for example, La Loca forcefully disrupts the patriarchal hierarchy of the Church by steadfastly laying claim to spiritual authority over the parish priest, Father Jerome, based on her otherworldly experiences and direct contact with God: when the priest tells her that “we’ll all pray for you,” La Loca bluntly retorts, “No, Padre [ . . . ] Remember it is I who am here to pray for you” (24).76 Using this scene as a springboard, the novel develops an alternative vision of a hybrid spirituality that derives directly from the material experiences and everyday lives of the people — most specifically, of women — and from their direct contact with the realm of the spiritual, whether in the form of the Christian God or of the various gods, goddesses, and other spiritual beings within a variety of spiritual traditions. Esperanza, Sofi’s eldest daughter and the only one to get through college, with a B.A. in Chicano studies and an M.A. in communications, possesses a spirituality that develops from her intellectualized political consciousness and “ ‘spunk’ ” (26), which she uses to protest in college

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for a “Chicano Studies class [to be] offered on the curriculum” and to educate others on campus “about the struggle of the United Farm Workers” (239). Trained in the radical ideas of the Chicano power movement, she teaches her mother and sisters vital political lessons that they retain and, indeed, apply to their own local forms of activism. When Sofi runs for mayor, for example, she recalls how “Esperanza always tried to tell me about how we needed to go out and fight for our rights. She always talked about things like working to change the ‘system’ ” (142). However, Esperanza, who yearns “to consolidate the spiritual with the practical side of things,” finds that difficult in the face of the miracle of her sisters’ recoveries. Indeed, Esperanza is torn between her Catholicism and her own rebelliousness, her interest in Marxism, her occasional cynicism, and her flirtation with “the Native-American Church” (36). Rather than face the miracles, she accepts a TV reporting job in Washington, D.C.; eventually, she is sent to cover the Gulf War and is taken hostage and killed. While on the surface Esperanza appears to escape her family much as Fe has, her political savvy and activism vis-à-vis oppressed peoples positions her differently than Fe. Arguably, Esperanza runs away from her family and her sexist boyfriend because she is having a spiritual crisis of sorts rather than for material gain; and the narrative clearly supports such an interpretation: Esperanza, unlike Fe, does “return ectoplasmically” (186) after her death. That the spirit of Esperanza returns home specifically to visit and converse with her two spiritually gifted sisters, La Loca and Caridad, further indicates that the novel views Esperanza as herself in death possessing the kind of hybrid spirituality that the text champions. Indeed, her discussions with Caridad about the Gulf War, “about the president’s misguided policies, about how the public was being fooled about a lot of the things that were going on behind that whole war business, how people could get some results by taking such measures as refusing to pay taxes” (163) offers Esperanza as a spirit who is politically aware and active, thus emphasizing a form of spirituality engaged in social action and protest. Esperanza’s embracing of her Chicana heritage surfaces in her spirit’s choice to send her family news of her death “via La Llorona, Chicana international astral-traveler” (162). A familiar folk figure within Mexican American culture, La Llorona takes the form of a weeping woman, usually appearing “at night near bodies of water” and “wailing, in search of her children whom she drowned so as to run off with her lover” (160). Sofi rejects this myth “of a wailing woman suffering throughout

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eternity because of God’s punishment” (160), at least in part because of its overt patriarchal aspects, as a story to teach women to stay in their place or else be punished severely by God as La Llorona has been.77 In Sofi’s experience, men rather than women were more likely to leave their families, and she personally knew no women who “had ever tried to kill their babies” (161). Since La Loca asserts that she has repeatedly seen La Llorona, however, Sofi is forced to rethink her attitude toward this folk figure. As the narrator suggests, Esperanza’s political and race consciousness has allowed her “spirit-mind” (163) to reimagine rather than reject La Llorona as “a woman who had been given a bad rap by every generation of her people since the beginning of time” (162 – 163) and who “in the beginning (before men got in the way of it all) may have been nothing short of a loving mother goddess” (163). As Domino Renee Pérez suggests, the novel thus offers a contemporary version of La Llorona as “a caring individual who, as a result of her suffering, can comfort the living” and thus recasts “her outside of the boundaries of tragedy” as a figure of “female resistance within a wholly oppressive environment.”78 Esperanza as spirit thus not only bridges the spiritual and material worlds and asserts the interconnectedness of spirituality and activism but also reconfigures populist Mexican American spirituality in feminist terms by reinterpreting the figure of La Llorona in a positive way and rejecting the virgin/whore and good mother/bad mother dichotomies that dominate Mexican American culture. However, the trajectory of Caridad’s spiritual development exemplifies perhaps most fully — in comparison to that of her sisters — the novel’s offering of an alternative, hybrid spirituality that combines elements of the Catholic, Amerindian, and feminist traditions in order to emphasize a communal, nonhierarchical, nonbinary, caring approach that revalues women’s spiritual authority. Following her “Holy Restoration” (43), Caridad starts falling into trancelike states followed by predictions that come true. The first time, for example, Caridad announces to her family upon coming out of her trance that Esperanza, who has moved to Washington, D.C., for a TV news job, “is here” and that she “is going far away” and is afraid (46); minutes later Esperanza shows up at the door with the news that she is being sent to Saudi Arabia on assignment. Caridad’s “psychic don” (118) or nonrational source of knowledge simultaneously validates the spiritual realm, as well as the realm of the emotions and intuitions traditionally associated with women, and disrupts the conventional Western privileging of reason and rationality.

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Given that, at least since the Enlightenment, the West has embraced the “connection between rationalist ideals and the belief in a hierarchical opposition of ‘mind’ and ‘nature’ ” that parallels the hierarchical opposition of man and woman, 79 Caridad’s clairvoyance undermines not only the primacy of reason but the whole Western hierarchical system of thought upon which that primacy is based and upon which cultural traditions are constructed — including Mexican American culture and popular religiosity. While Castillo’s novel does not reject reason, it nevertheless affirms the existence of other forms of knowledge embedded within populist Mexican American culture, which is itself hybrid, and points to their potential usefulness in creating new, more communal forms of agency. Not only does her own family accept Caridad’s “faculty of prophesy” (49), but after she moves out of Sofi’s house her new landlady, doña Felicia, sees in her the “healing gifts” (56) necessary to become a curandera, a traditional figure of Mexican American folklore. The curandera is highly respected “for her healing powers and her knowledge of plants and herbs.” Her knowledge of and close connection to the natural physical world combined with her possession of “mystic and spiritual qualities” balances “intuition and rationality” in a way that invalidates the traditional Western binary oppositions between mind and body, rationality and intuition, and their implicit hierarchies. Moreover, the curandera is a figure who “emerges from the history and traditions of multiple cultures: the complex and intricate healing knowledge that the Arab culture had brought to Spain, the medieval EuroSpanish healing traditions, and the Native American (both Mexican and Southwestern) traditions of herb women, folk doctors who taught the Spanish arrivals their knowledge.”80 As a product of multiple cultures, the curandera is thus the quintessential mestiza with the strength and power of the hybrid species. Moreover, as a healer, she is an active figure within the community who bridges the physical and spiritual realms in a nurturing way and thus embodies the potential for an alternative form of agency that springs from and is oriented toward the collective. The constructed hybrid nature of the curandera also designates her as a dynamic figure who can continue to change her form and practices based on current context. To become a curandera, however, requires an apprenticeship with an experienced elder curandera; and Caridad accepts doña Felicia’s offer to teach her to heal and to share with her “the wondrous healing secrets” (56). Caridad’s decision to give up her job at the hospital — where her tasks are to “change starched linen, clean out bedpans, help make patients

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comfortable” (50) — and train herself as a curandera also functions as what Madsen in a broader context describes as “an assertion of cultural identity and resistance to assimilation”81 by the Anglo American culture. Marginalized in the dominant culture, Caridad chooses to embrace an aspect of traditional Mexican American culture in which a woman holds a position that is both valued and powerful. Indeed, the curandera combines faith and women’s traditional powers of healing and caring. Whereas Caridad’s hospital job allows her to do only menial material supportive tasks, the role of curandera provides control over the remedies and care prescribed to the patients and an ability to treat patients more actively and holistically, considering the body, spirit, and psyche as interrelated.82 As doña Felicia points out, “You are destined to help people as even those trained doctors and nurses down there [in the hospital] can’t do. Look at what you did for yourself! [ . . . ] It was with the help of God [ . . . ] but you healed yourself by pure will” (55). The curandera thus has to have a strong sense of self as well as faith, but this sense of self is rooted in the community rather than individualistic. By choosing to become a holistic healer in the tradition of her particular hybridized ethnic culture, Caridad chooses to assert herself as a Chicana who can have agency based on her active participation within a community that wants to preserve the positive aspects of its cultural specificity. The curandera is simultaneously traditional and subversive; she is a known and respected figure in Mexican American culture at the same time that she disrupts elements of that culture, particularly its male centeredness and the influence of the Church. That the curandera has historically figured in the folklore of Mexican Americans as a respected, knowledgeable, powerful woman manifests itself in the materials gathered in the Southwest during the 1930s and 1940s by the Federal Writers’ Project, which “gathered oral histories, trying to preserve the history and culture of the ‘old timers’ ” of the region.83 However, the curandera’s subversive side also shows up in the folklore, most overtly in the thin line between the curandera (healer) and the bruja (witch), which is not surprising given that nontraditional and powerful women who threaten the male status quo have historically been labeled witches in the West —  of particular relevance is the historical denigration of women healers that accompanied the development of medicine as a male-centered profession grounded in post-Enlightenment notions of reason and science. Not only is the curandera a powerful independent woman, but her powers of spiritual healing undermine the Church’s claim to those

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powers and the Church’s appointment of only male priests for that task. Although the curandera uses traditional religious symbols alongside “massages, herbs, and folk remedies,”84 she values faith rather than established (man-made) religion. Indeed, doña Felicia is described as “suspicious of the religion that did not help the destitute all around her despite their devotion” (60); and Caridad never went to Mass, preferring yoga as a means of spiritual rejuvenation. However, one of the first and most crucial things Caridad learns during her extensive training with doña Felicia is that “nothing you attempt to do with regards to healing will work without first placing your faith completely in God” (59): “as long as the faith of the curandera was unwavering, successful results were almost certainly guaranteed — the only thing that could prevent them was the will of God” (63). The curandera’s healing powers are tied simultaneously to cognitive knowledge and to faith “based not on an institution but on the bits and pieces of the souls and knowledge of the wise teachers that she met along the way” (60) — a faith grounded in the people, in the community. That Caridad’s faith derives from the people, the community, and diverges from official Church doctrine is evident in her home altar, which holds “statues and pictures of saints” alongside “the framed photographs of her loved ones” (63). As Gail Pérez argues, “In the home altars of women, the Church’s monopolization of the sacred [ . . . ] was broken.”85 The contents of Caridad’s altar embody a faith that bridges the present material world of everyday life and the spiritual world and that embraces both, thus forming a basis for her healing work out in the community. Such faith functions as an alternative source of power and knowledge and, as such, threatens the absolutist claims to power and knowledge of the male-centered Church and dominant Mexican and Anglo cultures and the hierarchies that underlie those claims. By embracing and valuing the strength, resiliency, and courage associated with love, caring, and nurturing alongside faith, the curandera asserts an alternative form of power and knowledge that also derives from characteristics historically associated with women. Symbolic of this women-centered strength and power is the “passive but herculean strength” Caridad demonstrates when she resists three grown men’s attempts to take her home when they find her after a lengthy disappearance: the men find that “the young woman could not be budged” even though she was “a slight person” (87). This strength clearly has a spiritual and psychic rather than a physical basis; doña Felicia attributes it to the resiliency required to maintain “an abundant heart”

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that is “incapable of hating anyone or anything” (77) — something that women historically have learned to do in order to care for and nurture their families. Certainly Caridad shows strength when she recovers fully from her rape and mutilation at the hands of the malogra, who “wasn’t a man with a face and a name” but rather “a thing, both tangible and amorphous,” that “held the weight of a continent and was indelible as ink” and “was pure force” (77) — the malogra thus representing patriarchal power and violence. As Theresa Delgadillo argues, “Castillo’s malogra (evil spirit) metaphorically describes the force of the institutionalized patriarchal relations that foster disregard for women at every level of society,” so that the violence against Caridad is presented “in all its systemic force.”86 The malogra also exists on a spiritual level in its representation of the imbalances of the world; and it is within this spiritual dimension, into which Caridad has tapped, that the battle rages. The novel presents a mixture of alternative spiritual and psychic powers tied to a caring, nurturing approach as a means of overcoming the ravages of a male-centered world. After she is physically restored, Caridad continues to battle the malogra in her dreams; and, although “it still frightened her, on each occasion she built courage against it” (78). At least in part, Caridad’s courage, resiliency, and strength derive from love: for God, her family and friends, and in time Esmeralda. Esmeralda is the woman with whom Caridad “fell in love that Holy Friday” (74) during her “Lenten pilgrimage to Chimayo” (72), the sacred site where two centuries earlier a Penitente brother had found “a statue of Our Lord of Esquipúlas,” “the black Christ of the far-off land of the converted Indians of Esquipúlas, Guatemala” (73). Caridad “stopped short at the sight of the most beautiful woman she had ever seen sitting on the adobe wall” (75); and, for the first time since she was attacked, Caridad’s “heart was renewed, moved by another human being” (79). The particular circumstance of Caridad’s falling in love again brings together the spiritual, emotional, and physical realms, reinforcing the novel’s holistic approach that insists on the interconnectedness of these realms. By situating Caridad’s falling in love with Esmeralda during a Holy Friday pilgrimage, So Far from God asserts a connection between spiritual and human love; and, by highlighting the variability of the image of Jesus with the reference to the black Christ, the novel also gestures to alternative versions of all sorts of conceptions — including that of romantic human love. While her experience of renewal at the sight of Esmeralda has a spiri-

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tual dimension, Caridad “experienced what she felt throughout her entire body” (76) and “could not bear the thought of living without that woman” (79). Because her love is multidimensional, Caridad can use it to sustain herself even when she learns that “Esmeralda already loved someone and her name was Maria” (204). Her obsession for Esmeralda remains loving as, during many long nights, she “pacified her yearnings by simply keeping an eye on the little home of Maria and Esmeralda” (205). That Caridad in no way tries to impose her love and passion on Esmeralda demonstrates the giving aspect of her love — a love that does not resort to power over the loved one. The novel further highlights Caridad’s caring, giving love for Esmeralda by contrasting it to that of Francisco for Caridad. Francisco’s obsession for Caridad is in some ways similar to that of Caridad for Esmeralda, in that he “felt himself powerless with desire” and wished only to be “in proximity to his beloved,” since “he couldn’t get Caridad to so much as acknowledge his presence” (198). Indeed, Castillo’s novel sets up a classic love triangle in the style of the telenovela, which turns almost comic in the scenes in which Francisco watches from his car Caridad watching Esmeralda’s house from her car. So Far from God veers from this classic scenario, however, by introducing the element of lesbian love and by highlighting the difference between nurturing, giving love and a love that is warped by the Western conceptualization of women as either virgins or whores and by notions of ownership. Francisco worships Caridad as if she were the Virgin Mary, viewing her as “all that was chaste and humble” (192) and believing that “he wasn’t in love in the base human sense of the word” (202). Because the virgin/whore dichotomy is particularly salient in the Catholicinfused Mexican American culture with its worship of the Virgin Mary, particularly in the form of Our Lady of Guadalupe, women are caught in the bind either of being expected to be “passive, self-denying, and nurturing to others” or of being considered “wicked, sexual women”; in other words, Chicanas are bound by a cultural logic that asserts that “if you are not the Virgin then you must be the prostitute.”87 For example, following Caridad’s rape and mutilations, some “suggested that she had for all intents and purposes ‘asked for it’ when she was attacked” (83) — the classic and highly pernicious male-centered response to rape  — given her tendency to frequent bars and pick up men.88 This lack of sympathy for the rape victim is particularly evident among the sheriff’s deputies and the local police department, representatives of the maledominated institutional structures, and, consequently, little was done

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to find Caridad’s attacker or attackers. The tendency within Chicano culture to link Chicanas with prostitutes is further aggravated by their historical association with La Malinche, “Hernán Cortés’s mistress and translator, the mythic mother of the Mexican and hence the Chicano.”89 Indeed, Mexican men and Chicanos tend to view La Malinche as “the mother-whore” and “responsible for the foreign Spanish invasion.”90 How­ ever, in response to this historical condemnation of La Malinche by a patriarchal culture, contemporary Chicana feminist scholarship has been actively resituating her as “a resourceful slave rather than a traitor.”91 In this vein of scholarship, she is portrayed as “a woman who had and made choices. Because she possessed the power of language and political knowledge, for them [feminist Chicana scholars] La Malinche is a woman who deliberately chose to be a survivor.”92 Francisco, however, remains trapped within his culture’s traditional binary conceptualization of women, as exemplified by his eventual positioning of Esmeralda as the whore while retaining Caridad in the position of virgin.93 Francisco’s love turns violent when he can no longer stand not to possess Caridad, “doing nothing but keeping in proximity to his beloved” (198), a situation that is further aggravated by Caridad’s love for Esmeralda. Not only does Francisco feel powerless in his passive role of lover from afar, but he also views this powerlessness as linked to Esmeralda’s unnatural and thus evil lesbianism. Love between women leaves him out, leaves him feeling emasculated within a cultural logic dependent on male dominance. As Anzaldúa notes, the Catholic lesbian “goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality,”94 which makes Esmeralda a whore two times over and thus worthy of punishment. In order to retain his love object, Caridad, in the exalted position of virgin, Francisco displaces his feelings of frustration and powerlessness over Caridad’s refusal to return his love onto Esmeralda — who for him exists as a monstrous woman. Having followed Esmeralda in his truck, he “abducted her, right in front of the rape crisis center” where she worked (207), the location of the abduction making its outcome almost evident. While the novel does not depict exactly what happens — the reader is merely informed that “Francisco dropped her off in front of her house” later that night (207) — references to the effect that “the worst was what had happened” (207) and Caridad’s weeping when she “unintentionally overheard Esmeralda and her grandmother talking” (210) further suggest that the abduction included rape. As Cheryl Clarke makes clear, lesbianism can be “dangerous business in patriarchy,” given that “men at all levels of privilege, of all classes and colors have the potential to

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act out legalistically, moralistically, and violently if they cannot colonize women.”95 Francisco’s kidnapping and rape of Esmeralda functions simultaneously as punishment for her fallen state and power over Caridad and as an assertion of male-patriarchal power. The situation ultimately results in the deaths of Caridad, Esmeralda, and Francisco, making undeniably clear the destructive consequences for all those involved of male-patriarchal power and its dependence on violence and colonization. But the novel also emphasizes a crucial difference between the women’s deaths and Francisco’s death as a means of supporting its call for more communal and giving forms of power and agency. Having herself been the victim of a brutal rape, Caridad feels Esmeralda’s pain. Indeed, empathy brings the two women close together; they share not only the rapes they were forced to endure but also the strength to hold on to love and empathy.96 When Caridad breaks down in loud sobs upon hearing of Esmeralda’s assault at Francisco’s hands, “Esmeralda scooted down and simply held Caridad trying to comfort her” (210). When Esmeralda spots “a tall, lean, lonely coyote trying to camouflage himself as a tourist” that she recognizes as her attacker, however, “she started to run” with Caridad right behind her (210) and “together they leapt into the air” hand in hand (211) right off the mesa where Esmeralda’s grandmother’s Native American village sat. The two women refuse to submit to male power and violence and choose instead to face death, but they do so together and publicly, so that their leap off the mesa has a communal quality to it. The scene of the leap invokes the native American goddess Tsichtinako or Thought Woman, the supreme spirit that “pervades everything,” that “informs right balance, right harmony,” and that has “the power to make, to create, to transform.”97 As the two women leap off the mesa, Esmeralda’s grandmother, the Pueblo tour guide, the priest, and most of the Acoma people all heard and thus witnessed “the spirit deity Tsichtinako calling loudly with a voice like the wind, guiding the two women back, not out toward the sun’s rays or up to the clouds but down, deep within the soft, moist dark earth where Esmeralda and Caridad would be safe and live forever” (211). That “no morbid remains of splintered bodies” (211) are found below the cliff, so that Caridad and Esmeralda appear to have been spirited away, further reinforces the novel’s insistence on the possibilities that alternative forms of spirituality offer and the novel’s refusal to adhere to a binary between the material and spiritual realms. This invocation of a female deity known as “the true creatrix”98 positions Caridad’s and Esmeralda’s leap not simply

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as an escape or leap away from Francisco and the patriarchal violence he enacted but also as an embracing of or leap toward a worldview that is not dominated by men and that values balance and harmony rather than hierarchy. In other words, this worldview is one that actively “break[s] down the subject-object duality that keeps her [the mestiza] a prisoner” and “unlearn[s] the puta/virgen dichotomy” that is so pernicious.99 Caridad’s and Esmeralda’s deaths thus contain an element of defiance and a gesture toward a utopic dimension. In contrast, Francisco hangs himself in a field alone, moaning “Caridad!” (212); his death has no communal or utopic quality to it — it remains merely pathetic. So Far from God consistently depicts its Chicana characters as possessing a kind of strength that has both a spiritual and material dimension and that deals with the realm of the everyday at the same time that it looks forward. This spiritual and material strength both derives from a firm grounding in community and aims to promote community. Sofi and her daughters make use of this strength in different ways, as the previous discussion makes clear. While La Loca focuses her attention on her mother and sisters and Caridad becomes a curandera, Sofi not only holds her family together but also helps transform the community of Tome in which she lives. Tired of making do, Sofi at the age of fifty-three decides to “run for la mayor of Tome and make some changes around there” (131), thus extending “her housekeeping into the community.”100 That this decision comes right after she mutters, “If Domingo doesn’t fix the screen door this week, I’m gonna have to do it myself,” and right after her washer “went out with a big shake and clank” (130) highlights its material basis. As Sofi explains to her comadre, whom she recruits as her campaign manager, “I have been living in Tome all my life and I have only seen it get worse and worse off and it’s about time somebody goes out and tries to do something about it” (137­ – 138).101 For Sofi and others like her, “activism [ . . . ] is a matter of survival,”102 given the economic and political consequences of their multiply marginalized positions. In slightly different terms, Sofi’s decision to take action participates in what Nancy Naples calls “activist mothering,” in which “women draw on traditional female identities to justify taking revolutionary actions to improve their communities and the lives of their families.”103 Unfazed by her comadre’s initial reticent response that “there has never been no mayor of Tome,” Sofi moves full-steam ahead in her campaign to work for community improvement based on her belief that “faith has kept [her] going” (138) all her life and will continue to do so. Sofi’s energetic, faith-based plan to rebuild her community through

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the creation of coalitions and material cooperatives among its members functions as the novel’s most overt instance of the ideals espoused by liberation theology, which emphasizes the link between spirituality and social change and has its roots in Latin America.104 Although Castillo argues in an essay entitled “Saintly Mother and Soldier’s Whore: The Leftist/ Catholic Paradigm” that liberation theology is problematic in that it contains “a blend of Marxist and Christian beliefs” and “both ideologies are male-centered, have hierarchical structures,” she makes a case for a “Hispanic women’s liberation theology” that subverts and moves beyond male-centeredness and hierarchical structures.105 In So Far from God, Castillo seems to offer an illustration of what the practice of Hispanic women’s liberation theology can engender: a religion that “addresses the economic and political struggles of her people.”106 Indeed, liberation theology upholds a “value of justice in which all people are co-creators of the reign of God.”107 Moreover, because liberation theology asserts that “there is no justice and peace” without liberation, it requires that the strug‑ gle for liberation be “the struggle to be self-determining within the context of community and in view of the common good, and to have the material conditions needed to develop into the fullness of our capacity”; “Liberation theologies insist that the poor and oppressed must struggle consciously to be agents of our own history. They must move away from being mere objects acted upon by the oppressors and become active subjects.”108 Sofi’s faith-based activism within the community of Tome aims toward such self-determination within the communal context. In order to reimagine a better future for herself, her daughters, and her community, Sofi begins to think in terms of community organization and praxis. As she announces to her husband, “The only way things are going to get better around here, is if we, all of us together, try to do something about it,” “to go out and fight for our rights,” to work “to change the system” (142). Sofi understands that forming a grassroots coalition in her community will entail a realization by each family that it “is not alone with its problem.”109 Although she asserts herself as leader of this movement “to rescue” (146) Tome, Sofi thinks in terms of a communal “we” that does not associate leadership with hierarchy. She begins her campaign by “going around for months talking to neighbors, to fellow parishioners, people at the schools, at the local Y, and other places to get ideas and help” and, once “people began to respond,” by encouraging “community-based meetings” to promote active debates to come up with a plan that would provide “economic self-sufficiency for their area” (146).

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Because the ideas and energy for creatively rebuilding the economically depressed Tome come from the people themselves, the eventual plan “to start a sheep-grazing wool-weaving enterprise, Los Ganados y Lana Cooperative,” (146) engages everyone in a supreme effort of cooperation and coalition building.110 Not only do the people have to give a lot of effort and time to the project for years, but they have to learn that the choice they have is one of “doing it all together or nobody doing anything at all”; and choosing to do it all together entails radically altering “their whole way of thinking so that they could do it” (146). The people of Tome have to learn to work as and for a “we.” In the spirit of cooperation, Sofi herself sells her “Meat Market in shares to her neighbors and they developed a food co-op” (148) that then benefits the entire community. Moreover, the community of Tome works to establish coalitions with local institutions. For example, the women weavers negotiate an “arrangement with the local junior college” in which their experience running the weaving cooperative provides them with college credits toward an associate’s degree in business or in fine arts. Sofi thus spurs Tome into action so that it can reconstruct itself into a community that is praxis oriented and works with the understanding and belief that liberation depends on the people’s assertion of agency through community building and activism. A “communal spirit” comes to dominate in Tome to the extent that almost all of its residents contribute to “their community’s improvement” (148). Having constructed a utopian vision for their town, the people of Tome put in the kind of hard collective work necessary to realize that vision. The community thus achieves social change and economic redevelopment through its own cooperative efforts, evidencing a form of agency defined in terms of the interrelationship between individual and communal agency: the existence of a community makes individual agency possible and, at the same time, is made possible by individual agency. The changes brought about by the development of a communal spirit in the people of Tome do not stop with their work toward economic selfsufficiency; they develop a communal sense of praxis that enters all aspects of their lives. This more holistic form of communal praxis is particularly well exemplified in the Holy Friday procession depicted toward the end of the novel, which illustrates vividly the interrelation between the spiritual and material realms that enlivens the kind of social activism the novel champions and links it to the ideals of liberation theology.111 In addition, the procession connects the activism within the town of Tome to that of others in other towns, demonstrating that

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the communities depicted within the novel do not remain separatist little islands but have the potential of forming coalitions with other communities engaging in social activism. Sofi and Loca, the latter in her only foray “out into the world” (238), join “their vecinos [neighbors] and members of various cooperative efforts in the Way of the Cross Procession through the main streets of the villages and then on to the city” of Albuquerque — a procession that “grew as it went along, comprising ultimately as many as two hundred people” (241). Such processions have a long history as expressions of the popular religiosity of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and exist as part of the “mexicana collective spiritual practices” that Yolanda Broyles-González asserts “have formed part of the bedrock of day-to-day survival for marginalized communities.”112 This particular procession, however, unfolds in ways that participate in that history but, at the same time, alter it radically, so the traditional procession obtains a new form within the novel. Foregoing the traditional Catholic emphasis on penance through self-mortification of the flesh, “this Procession [ . . . ] did not flagellate itself with horsehair,” and “no brother was elected to carry a life-size cross on his naked back” (241). Instead, this Holy Friday procession reorients the traditional ritual toward contemporary social problems and injustices and thus inflects the procession with a materialist social conscience. As Delgadillo similarly notes, the participants of this procession choose protest rather than “accepting suffering as the route to salvation.”113 The famous woman singer who accompanies the marchers, for example, sings songs that “were not in the least religious in nature but about workers and women strikers and things like that,” and some people “carried photographs of their loved ones who died due to toxic exposure” (241). This emphasis on social problems does not negate the spiritual character of the procession, however, but rather illustrates a form of hybrid spirituality that links the Catholic insistence on social justice to a program of social praxis aimed at combating concrete contemporary problems grounded in forms of injustice. This blending of spirituality and social praxis asserts itself as the novel describes how, at each station of the cross along the route, “the crowd stopped and prayed and people spoke on the so many things that were killing their land and turning the people of those lands into an endangered species” (241 – 242). As Delgadillo explains, “Each station of the cross marks the contemporary suffering of working peoples and oppressed populations,”114 so that the procession’s ritual recalling of Jesus’

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suffering is transformed into a radical critique of the injustices of the present day. Rather than replicating Jesus’ carrying of the cross through a form of literal miming, the people verbalize the parallels between their own lives and Jesus’ carrying of the cross. For instance, Jesus’ death sentence elicits a speech by “the spokesperson for the committee working to protest dumping radioactive waste in the sewer,” and statistics to the effect “that most of the Native and hispano families throughout the land were living below poverty level” accompany Jesus bearing his cross (243). As the list of these parallels continues, the narrative begins to reinforce grammatically the linkages between Jesus’ trials and those faced by marginalized people in the contemporary moment through the use of conjunctions, asserting that “Jesus fell and people all over the land were dying from toxic exposure in factories”; “Jesus met his mother, and three Navajo women talked about uranium contamination on the reservation, and the babies they gave birth to with brain damage and cancer”; “Jesus was helped by Simon and the number of those without jobs increased” (my italics) (242). The story that surfaces is one that insists on the contemporary devastation of the land and the people who reside on it — particularly those marginalized by the dominant culture; and the novel makes use of a “blend of Catholicism, native belief, selfrespect, political action, and reflection” to voice this story.115 While this story is one of past and current suffering and devastation, the procession itself has a utopic dimension, in that it brings together a number of people bound by faith and common experiences of oppression — including the people of Tome, the Navajo women, representatives of activist organizations, “a dark somber man with sunglasses and an Eastern accent” (243) — and creates a space within the context of a hybrid spirituality for them both to voice their individual stories and to contribute to a larger story that gets at the systemic problems that plague contemporary America.116 That the novel offers this procession as a gesture toward something new in the utopic sense is reinforced by the last sentence describing it: “No, no one had never seen a procession like that one before” (244). Indeed, the novel presents the collective voice that emerges from the procession as an instance of collective agency that derives its strength from a coalition of communities of individuals held together by a faith that is at once spiritual and activist in character. To further demonstrate the need for and possibilities of blending spirituality and activism via communities and coalitions, Castillo’s novel concludes with the playful and even outrageous instance of “the Later-

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to-Become World-Renowned Organization M.O.M.A.S.” (246). Sofi not only founds Mothers of Martyrs and Saints after the deaths of all her daughters but also proceeds to serve as its president for thirty-eight years, at least partly on the basis that “there was never no question at all” that “Sofia had truly been the mother of a saint [La Loca]” (248); moreover, her other three daughters certainly could be said to have died as martyrs — Esperanza in the Gulf War, Fe of cancer from the toxic chemicals she was made to work with at Acme International, and Caridad as a result of the violent assaults and rapes of herself and then of Esmeralda. While the narrative makes use of humor in its at times hysterically funny descriptions of the workings of M.O.M.A.S., a serious note nevertheless surfaces. Indeed, the internationally recognized M.O.M.A.S. humorously validates all that the novel has forwarded as means toward an alternative model of agency and activism: spiritual life, hybrid forms of spirituality, alternative forms of knowledge, women’s connections to each other, the necessity and power of communities and coalitions.117 That the “annual conference of M.O.M.A.S. eventually became, as anyone could easily imagine, a world event each year, taking the cake over the World Series and even the Olympics” (249), playfully emphasizes the novel’s claims that power resides in the embracing and development of the kinds of alternative models of agency and activism it champions. Despite the charlatans that show up to sell T-shirts with slogans like “My Mother Is a Member of Mothers of Martyrs and Saints  — Genuflect, Please!” (249) — the novel here parodying U.S. consumerism and its ability to co-opt all things — the narrative insists that the conference conducts serious business in the form of “important information exchanged during these meetings” (250), thus emphasizing the importance of communal dialogue. Such vital dialogue occurs not only between “Las Mothers” (250) themselves but also between the mothers and their “santito and martyred ‘jitos’ ” (251), who tend to make “ectoplasmic appearances at the national and international conventions” (248) in order to bring all kinds of news and advice to be “passed on to relatives, friends, the petitioning faithful, and community agencies, as well as to relevant local or federal governments” (251). The organization thus moves motherhood out of the private/public binary and functions at least in part as a mechanism for accessing forms of knowledge that lie outside the realm of Western rationalism, as represented by the “obvious skepticism on the part of officials” (251) to whom some of this information is relayed.

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The novel’s proffered vision in its final pages of an ongoing dialogue among mothers from around the world and their otherworldly sainted and martyred children extends the notion of communal activism beyond the geographical boundaries of Tome and even of New Mexico, as well as beyond the rationalistic boundaries between life and death. The vision forcefully rejects binarism, calling for something new that is not a reversal but rather an active negotiation of differences. Although women/mothers head M.O.M.A.S., for instance, the organization neither reverses gender roles nor accepts wholesale the traditions it inherits. Mothers are clearly validated in M.O.M.A.S., but the organization does not achieve that validation by demoting or discriminating against men, as evidenced by its inclusion of “an equal portion of male and female santos and martires” (247). Moreover, M.O.M.A.S. embraces a hybrid form of Catholicism that retains many of its principles, especially with respect to issues of justice, and communal rituals, while at the same time radically alters others. For example, although “a Mass always kicked off the convention” (250) as a means of asserting through ritual the diverse members’ common bonds of faith, M.O.M.A.S. rejects firmly held Catholic conventions when it insists that these masses be led “by women clergy, not just men, including some who were married” (250 – 251). The novel thus offers a Catholicism that is at once freed of its patriarchal structure and reshaped by an embracing of the nurturing, communal qualities traditionally associated with women but also found in the Church’s teachings on social justice. This insistence on the necessity of a revised, more inclusive Catholicism that veers from the Church’s traditional hierarchical and malecentered structure takes a particularly sharp turn in the novel’s concluding two paragraphs, which stress that, while membership in the organization requires that “you had to have issued the declared santo or martyr from your own womb” (251 – 252), M.O.M.A.S. accepts the word of its members as sufficient proof and does not make its members sit on “a chair that was structured to prove that you were in fact a mom or, at least, could have been” in the vein of the chairs “popes back in the beginning of their days were made to sit on after a woman who passed herself off as a man had been elected pope” (252). Such emphasis on trust, on a faith that is not chained to reason, and on the dangers of extremism further illustrates the novel’s position that a progressive activism depends on the construction of communities that value spirituality and notions of justice that jettison hierarchical, binary structures and embrace notions of communal responsibility and of the social good.

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The narrator’s rhetorical question that ends the novel makes this clear: “After all, just because there had been a time way back when, when some fregados all full of themselves went out of their way to prove that none among them had the potential of being a mother, did it mean that there had to come a time when someone would be made to prove that she did?” (252). The novel as a whole resoundingly answers no. Indeed, the novel is more interested in constructive, progressive change through processes of hybridization and community formation rather than through reversals or inversions. Castillo’s So Far from God’s depiction of processes of hybridization and community formation not only emphasizes “the centrality of community”118 and the struggle within Chicana culture that so many scholars note but also offers renditions of future-oriented collective praxis that derive simultaneously from a hybrid form of nonhierarchical and nonpatriarchal spirituality and the daily experiences and lives of the people. Moreover, the novel presents individual agency as necessarily grounded within the community or collective, and community or collective agency as dependent on individuals. Individual characters within Castillo’s novel effect positive change only within the framework of supportive communities that value a form of justice based on notions of care and the common good; and communities effect positive change only inasmuch as individuals actively create and support such communities. Such a notion of agency involves a “responsibility to others — and not for others”— and a reconceptualization of “power not as something to possess but as a dynamism to be shepherded for the good of the whole community.”119 The multiple borderland positions of the novel’s Chicana characters result in the creation of hybrid cultural forms that emphasize the community orientation of Mexican Americans while rejecting American self-interested forms of individualism, but that simultaneously emphasize the American valuation of the individual (including the individual woman) and the possibilities of individual agency within a communal context. The novel also asserts the value of spirituality and spiritual forms of knowledge in addition to (and not in an inferior position to) rational forms of knowledge, but it insists on offering a hybrid version of spirituality that derives from the multiple traditions available to Chicanas and that rejects and moves past hierarchical and male-centered paradigms.

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Chapter 5 The Call to Love, to Assert Power with Others Toni Morrison’s Paradise

T

oni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) moves further past notions of kinship than any other novel examined in this book as it explores more specifically the politics of community and coalition building. The novel demonstrates that, within the context of the United States and its complex history, kinship claims are almost impossible to sever from patriarchal and racist structures and often facilitate oppressive power relations. Focusing specifically on a community of freed slaves and their descendants, Paradise explores the ways in which even oppressed minorities adopt Western notions of kinship and the hierarchical power dynamics that accompany them and, consequently, create communities that require and support a patriarchal and racist power dynamic. To break this vicious pattern, Morrison’s novel seeks to re­ imagine community as a dynamic entity made possible by coalition processes that are communal and caring in impulse; and it does so in ways that complicate and finally gesture away from dominant conceptualizations of coalition in the United States in the wake of the civil rights and New Left movements, at the same time rejecting the separatist impulses of the black power movement. By strategically locating the present setting of its narrative in 1976, the novel situates itself at a complex historical moment in terms of a reflection upon the goals and principles of the United States on its twohundredth anniversary with respect to issues of race. In particular, Paradise addresses the immediate conflict between the Martin Luther King, Jr. – inspired version of the civil rights movement, with its nonviolent and inclusive approach to the struggle for the rights of African Americans, and the rapid growth of the black power movement, with its increasingly supportive stance toward violence and exclusion

of nonblacks following the assassinations of King and Malcolm X. On one level, Morrison’s novel thus functions as an exploration of the options the nation has at the end of the twentieth century to redress its shortcomings vis-à-vis its history of racial oppression and racial strife in the aftermath of the political assassinations of the late 1960s and the turn to increasingly violent forms of racial protest — the latter deriving impetus at least in part from Malcolm X’s “rhetorical support for black militancy.”1 Indeed, Malcolm X argued for “meet[ing] violence with violence,” for choosing self-defense over passive resistance.2 While Paradise demonstrates that the move toward racial separatism and violent resistance evolves as a complex reaction to very real material forms of racist oppression, the novel cautions against “anti-racist activism” that grounds itself in “a call to violence rather than a call to love.” As bell hooks argues, such a move away from love and toward violence has historically resulted in subsuming “the quest for liberation” to “the quest for power,” and this power has tended to take a distinctly patriarchal form: “as black liberation was made synonymous with the creation of strong black patriarchs, love could no longer have a central place in the movement. Real men were fighters” and freedom was about “the will to power and not the will to love.”3 Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall concur, arguing not only that “the Black Power movement was in large part dedicated to the restoration of Black manhood” but also that it at times engaged in “shocking expressions of misogyny,” most notably exemplified by the assertion made by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver that he “became a rapist [ . . . ] consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically” because he believed that “rape was an insurrectionary act.”4 Not only does Morrison’s novel explore the detrimental consequences to race relations in the United States of this shift away from an affirmation of love, nonviolence, and inclusion toward an emphasis on power, violence, and exclusion, but, more importantly, it also reimagines the possibilities for race relations in the United States that lie within a renewed attempt to theorize agency in terms of love, care, and community. Indeed, Paradise makes clear that what became lost in the political shift away from love is not only the “message of nonviolent revolution spearheaded by Martin Luther King, but also the [perhaps more crucial] message of building self-love, healthy self-esteem, and loving communities”5 that women civil rights activists in particular worked to promote in their grass-roots efforts to recruit, mobilize, and sustain the movement and that was translated into the early second-wave women’s

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movement’s practice of consciousness raising (see Chapter 1 for a more in-depth discussion of consciousness raising). Indeed, although the term consciousness raising is typically linked to 1970s radical feminism and “has been attributed to [white] feminist activist Kathie Sarachild,” Sarachild herself “acknowledges that she learned the practice of ‘telling it like it is’ during her involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the civil rights movement in Mississippi.”6 The kind of telling it like it is or consciousness raising from which Morrison’s novel borrows involves an exploration within a communal context of social inequities from the perspective of individuals’ material experiences as a means of reconstructing a more positive sense of the interrelationship of self and community in terms of mutual care, nurturing, and love — never allowing the consciousness raising it offers to remain insular, to overfocus on the individual, or to underestimate the complexities of and interrelationships between the various forms of social inequity. In the world of Paradise, hope lies only with those characters willing to undergo the difficult process of consciousness raising and revaluing of love, and in some sense the novel calls the reader to undertake such a process as well.7 In the spirit of hooks’s notion that a link exists between “positive agency” and love, the latter defined “as a combination of care, knowledge, responsibility, respect, trust, and commitment,”8 Morrison’s novel offers an alternative notion of agency; this form of agency grows out of the King-inspired emphasis on love, nonviolence, and inclusion but moves past it in its rejection of patriarchal structures to which the civil rights movement held on under King and reinforced after his death and the rise of the more militant black power movement. Demonstrating the terrible costs and consequences of patriarchal structures and power to African Americans and to the nation as a whole, Paradise makes clear the need for a radically different notion of agency that derives from a self-in-community, in which self and community are both built upon and value an ethics of care, nurturance, and love, and interweaves it with notions of equality and fairness.9 Such a form of agency does not depend on power over others but rather advocates a very different kind of power with others aimed toward the common good and toward a nonhierarchical concept of justice. While the novel’s conception of power with derives at least in part from conceptualizations of coalition and community that emerged from the civil rights, New Left, and women’s movements, it pushes beyond those formulations by insisting much more forcefully on the interrela-

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tionship of coalition and community. Indeed, Paradise’s reformulation of coalition entails a more radical infusion of certain attributes of community, namely the emphasis on empathy and ideas of the common good, particularly in terms of survival and justice; the result is a heightened awareness on the material, physical realm and a deep distrust of hierarchical structures. At the same time, the notion of community itself undergoes an alteration in that, within Morrison’s novel, community emerges as constructed, dynamic, and necessarily a function of coalition work among the different people that make up any community, so that even ideas of the common good are never a given but must be constructed.10 Individual interests are always in dialogue with group interests within communities, whether that dialogue is acknowledged or not; and communities are always shifting as members enter and leave them and as the interests of individual members change. Thus, Morrison’s novel reimagines community as having the potential to create a positive, dynamic space for difference, thus distancing itself from notions of black power that endorse separatism. As the novel engages in reimagining coalition and community, it borrows from existing practices that have typically been left out of dominant conceptions of coalition and community, including the historical practices of “othermothering and community othermothering” that Stanlie James argues “have been critical to the survival of Black communities” in America. African American communities have been forced to develop other means of survival, given the legacy of slavery and continuing racism, both of which have contributed to the disruption of African American families and communities and a lack of accessibility to the dominant forms of power. One of those mechanisms of survival has entailed the development of othermothering, a form of “cultural work” and communal “intervention” that engages nurturing as a vital means of addressing specific needs resulting from concrete social, political, and economic inequities.11 More specifically, as Patricia Hill Collins explains, “Womencentered networks of bloodmothers and othermothers” have historically organized and taken on child-care responsibilities in African American communities, demonstrating not only “cooperative approaches to childcare” but, more crucially, a valuing of an “ethic of caring and personal accountability” within the context of community.12 Nurturing and caring activities usually associated with biological mothering and the private sphere thus become transformed into larger social practices with sociopolitical implications. As cultural work, othermothering does not simply take place within an already existing, static African American

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community but involves the ongoing construction through localized coalition processes of an African American community that makes possible and values othermothering. With an eye to such other traditions of coalition and community practices, Morrison’s Paradise depicts women characters acting collaboratively on the basis of particular, temporary intersecting subject positions connected to a common history of oppression in order to resist and move beyond specific forms of injustice perpetrated by an exploitative racist and sexist American culture. In Collins’s terms, the women are linked by a “common location within power relations” rather than as “the result of collective decision making of individuals.”13 Paradise offers its form as one means of emphasizing the intersection of the women’s positions vis-à-vis the dominant power structures. Each of the novel’s nine chapters is named after and focuses on women who have been violated and/or outcast in some way and tells their stories, stories that the novel lays side by side in order to produce a larger, more complex story that highlights their interconnections and the possibilities of constructive alliances. This larger story constructs women characters who are enabled through active acknowledgments of the subject positions they share, but without ignoring those they do not share. As a result, these characters can move beyond certain oppressive subject positions to create new, more liberating, and active — although always unstable — subject positions, as well as (temporary) grounds for agency. Although the coalitions they form and communities they create are local and temporary, these nevertheless lead to concrete acts that affect the characters’ material lived existence. A form of collective agency thus results that depends on neither fixed subjectivity, nor hierarchical structures, nor totalizing metanarratives. Indeed, the novel depicts women of different pasts, races, classes, and ages actively constructing communal spaces and identities (even if they are temporary and unstable) that allow them not only to survive at least temporarily in the face of injustices but also to reach toward a new, alternative nonhierarchical sense of justice that emphasizes both equality and nurturing. Identity and agency are reconfigured as decentered, multivocal, and always in process but, nevertheless, as constructive. Morrison’s Paradise thus reimagines the bases from which coalitions are formed and communities are constructed in ways that highlight the importance of coalition and community building in terms of a nonhierarchically based form of justice while nevertheless retaining sight and sites of differences. Coalitions and communities remain neither

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static nor unproblematic in Morrison’s text, in the sense that they are presented as dynamic, ever-changing processes that must perpetually negotiate the differences between their actors or participants but that, at the same time, do result in at least temporary physical and psychic survival for some of the women characters. The novel functions as an instance of what Collins calls “visionary pragmatism” through its offering of “visionary thinking” in terms of “practical action.”14 Indeed, in a utopian gesture, Paradise depicts an alternative community of women actualized through coalition- and community-building processes. At the same time, however, the novel examines the ways in which this group of women threatens the dominant societal structures that remain patriarchal and hierarchical. Moreover, Morrison’s novel questions rigid separatism as ultimately destructive of coalitions that depend on forms of justice that remain grounded in inequitable power relations, particularly if the separatism functions on a patriarchal, hierarchical model; however, the text also explores the possibilities and even necessity of temporary forms of separatism in the formation of coalitions.

Paradise explicitly foregrounds its engagement with issues of coalition and community by weaving the early Martin Luther King, Jr. – inspired civil rights movement into its text through its presentation of the character of Reverend Misner. A relatively recent arrival to the town of Ruby and thus not a descendant of the founders, Misner attempts to raise the consciousness of the young people to the nonviolent national movement in the face of their fathers and grandfathers, who established first Haven and then Ruby on racist, separatist grounds and who strive to protect that separatism at all costs — and who thus have more in common with the more separatist and violence-endorsing black power movement.15 As a case in point, Stewart Morgan, one of the twins who function as the present generation senior patriarchs, had “outspoken contempt for the schoolchildren sitting in that drugstore in Oklahoma City,” wrote “a hateful letter to the women who organized the students,” and “called Thurgood Marshall a ‘stir-up’ Negro.”16 Men like Stewart are deeply suspicious of Misner, whose past experience “floated behind him” in hints of “covert meetings to stir folks up; confrontations with rather than end runs around white law,” and thus who “could encourage strange behavior” (56). Morrison’s text thus approaches the issue of coalition and the civil rights movement by focusing on the splits, the racism, and the patriarchal structures within the African American community itself.

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The novel carefully delineates the history of the town of Ruby as one created by the male descendants of former slaves, men who had been discriminated against not only by whites but by “Negro towns” (13) and who reacted to this insult by constructing a separatism that became discrimination against all others. Morrison’s novel explores the potential consequences of the geographical displacement, following emancipation, of scores of former slaves who “moved west to establish new black towns and settlements in Kansas and Oklahoma in the closing decades of the nineteenth century” in a quest for “freedom and equality of opportunity.”17 As Nell Painter further notes, these former slaves’ westward movement as a means of “seeking their fortune” was a means of participating in the American dream, in that it replicated the movement of “other immigrants to the United States.”18 As such, this westward movement by former slaves “follow[ed] the traditional Euroamerican model of being American.”19 The freed-slave ancestors of Ruby’s inhabitants believe they can assert themselves as Americans and escape oppressive conditions by moving west from the Louisiana Territory, but they quickly find that they cannot free themselves from social constructions centered on their skin color and that racism pervades social interactions even among African Americans when they are barred from the town of Fairly — an experience that comes to be known as the “Disallowing” within Ruby’s official history-mythology.20 Although slavery prepared them for white racism, they are psychically unprepared to be shunned by a “colored townsite” (194). In response, the freedmen “became a tight band of wayfarers bound by the enormity of what had happened to them. Their horror of whites was convulsive but abstract. They saved the clarity of their hatred for the [black] men who had insulted them in ways too confounding for language: first by excluding them, then by offering them staples to exist in that very exclusion” (189). That this exclusion by other “Negroes” is grounded in skin color, in “light-skinned against black,” is a revelation to the “8-rock males” (194) — the 8-rock designation likening their “blue-black” skin to “a deep level in the coal mines” (193). Moreover, the men immediately understand the serious consequences of their racial difference in terms of patriarchal power: “Serious enough that their daughters would be shunned as brides; their sons chosen last” (194).21 Their response to this insulting rebuff by “fair-skinned colored men,” by “blue-eyed, grayeyed yellowmen” (195), is to found their own “all-black” (5) town, Haven (and later Ruby, after Haven withers), grounded in dogmatic racist and patriarchal terms that simply reverse the hierarchy of the racism they

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themselves suffered by excluding all who are not as dark as themselves and thus engaging in an “inversion of the infamous ‘one drop rule.’ ”22 They thus engage in a reestablishment of “terrifyingly rigid boundaries of racial identity,”23 demonstrating that they have internalized the binary logic on which racist and patriarchal power depends. Indeed, the men react to being rebuffed by other blacks by creating a form of what Manuel Castells calls “resistance identities” that is based not only on their dark skin but also on “the traditional values of God, nation, and the family” and is secured by “territorial defenses.”24 Morrison’s novel pre­sents this “walled-up” community built as a “shelter”25 from the outside world as problematic in that it replicates within its own separatist space the institutional structures and ideologies of the outside world that has oppressed them — an implicit critique of the black power movement’s advocating of separatism. In Haven and then in Ruby, the “Fathers” (6) rule and the darkest 8-rock coal-black skin is privileged; others are driven away or marginalized. Indeed, “the men attempt to fortify Ruby against the incursion of alien otherness.”26 Holding on to the “logic of hierarchical opposition,” the town must continually enforce its borders, given that defining “an identity, a closed totality, always depends on excluding some elements.”27 As the town schoolteacher, Pat Best, recognizes, “People get chosen and ranked” based upon skin color in Ruby (216). For example, the community forces Menus to “return the woman he brought home to marry. The pretty sandy-haired girl from Virginia” (195) — an event that sends him reeling into alcoholism for the remainder of his life — and marginalizes Roger Best’s wife (Delia), daughter (Pat), and granddaughter (Billie Delia) for their “sunlight skin,” which makes visible a “racial tampering” (196) that Ruby has all but outlawed within its borders with its insistence on racial purity and its strict watch over lineage and that thus marks them as others, as outsiders.28 Marginalization functions as a form of violence when Delia dies because no one will get her the medical help she needs. The “fastest girl in town” (59) label — rooted in a deliberate misreading of the naïve actions of a toddler — accentuates and casts a deprecatory shadow over Billie Delia’s racial otherness, again replicating through a simple reversal the traditional white Western tradition of associating racial otherness with sexual licentiousness and depravity; and she eventually leaves Ruby.29 That these examples are all women is not surprising, given that the town patriarchs consolidate their power through an unspoken but ex-

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tremely tight control over reproduction and thus over women. As Pat recognizes, “Everything that worries them must come from women,” since “the generations had to be not only racially untampered with but free of adultery too” (217) in order to ensure the racial purity they privilege. More specifically, her daughter, Billie Delia, understands that the rumors and verbal battles between the men that ensue when Arnette is found pregnant out of wedlock and then loses the baby have to do with “disobedience, which meant, of course, the stallions were fighting about who controlled the mares and their foals” (150). Indeed, the patriarchs are proud that “any girl who got pregnant in Ruby could count on marriage” (153), a statement that denotes not only control over Ruby’s populace but also control through the unspoken threat of violence and banishment — the latter itself a form of violence. The town patriarchs’ suspicion and fear of the women living in the convent on the outskirts of their town is also a function of their desire to retain control over their (always precarious) separatist enclave, grounded in racial purity and enforced through a patriarchal and racist ideology allowing for no dissenting views. The novel traces the trajectory of this unforgiving and dogmatic separatism and the patriarchal power attached to it — which implicitly echoes the separatism and championing of patriarchal power and violence of the black power movement, especially in the form of the Black Panther movement — to its logical murderous conclusion, given that “neither the founders of Haven nor their descendants could tolerate anybody but themselves” (13).30 As Pat puts it, the men resort to violence to rid the convent of its women residents not only because they see the women as “impure” and “unholy” but mainly “because they could — which is what being an 8-rock meant to them” (297). Power and violence are interlaced for the town’s patriarchs, as they have been historically in the West, given that the men’s source of power depends on absolute power over women and their reproductive capacities. Although clearly offering a critique of the town’s racist, patriarchal, separatist structure and ideology as incompatible with any kind of coalition and community work that seeks to reimagine justice not only as fair but also as nurturing and nonhierarchical, Paradise nevertheless indicates the necessity at times of separatism for survival and the (limited) possibilities of community within a separatist structure. Indeed, when first founded, the town of Haven does operate in the spirit of community, in the basic sense that its citizens help each other survive:

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its “residents refused each other nothing, were vigilant to any need or shortage” (109). Initially, the oven they build at the center of town serves as “a community ‘kitchen’ ” (99) and “families shared everything” (108). Having been rebuffed on all sides, they regroup and work communally to found their own thriving town as a place where “its people were free and protected” (8); their goal initially is to create a space “where their skin color will not be equated with economic poverty and the denial of social opportunity.”31 But this caring community is so rigidly circumscribed, operating only with respect to the chosen families and excluding outsiders on the basis of skin color, that it cannot survive. Indeed, freedom and protection of its own becomes possible only through increasingly fascist tactics of exclusion and threats of violence.32 The town’s exclusionary practices bear traces, according to Jill C. Jones, of the “Puritans’ intolerance” earlier in America’s history, given that, “from the beginning of the En­ glish colonization, this new-found Paradise [America] began to exclude its own.”33 Haven and later Ruby ironically (in that they are all-black towns) participate in “one of the most canonical European American narratives — that of American exceptionalism,” initially derived from “the Puritans’ advance expectations of America as the Promised Land and the American people as God’s chosen agents” and historically “entwined with a violent marginalization of its non-exceptionalist other.”34 As Morrison’s novel makes clear, a place in which outsider and enemy “mean the same thing” (212) and in which the “Fathers” rule with absolute power cannot sustain an open, truly communal spirit.35 Predictably, Haven collapses; too many offspring choose to desert. However, the sons of the original founders and fathers regroup around their own racial purity: “They consolidated the 8-rock blood and, haughty as ever, moved farther west” (194) — again seizing upon the American association of freedom and opportunity with westward movement —  to start the experiment all over again, founding the town of Ruby and believing once again that they were “on their way to Paradise” (202). Moreover, they once again experience a painful racist rebuff that ends in the death of Deacon and Steward’s sister, Ruby, when she is taken ill but is turned away by the hospitals to which they take her: “No colored people were allowed in the wards. No regular doctor would attend them” (113). The problem is that Ruby replicates Haven in all ways and is thus doomed to repeat its failures: it thrives while it is being constructed in the spirit of community but its fears of “Out There where your children were sport, your women quarry, and where your very person could be

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annulled” (16) lead it to evolve into an even more fascist enclave than Haven had ever been. Keeping its own in and others out becomes its primary means of ensuring its identity and survival at all costs. Although the novel presents the ideals of the early, nonviolent civil rights movement as a means of getting past the dead end that Haven and then Ruby represent, Paradise also engages in a critique of the patriarchal aspects of all forms of the civil rights movement and the limitations that result as a consequence of these aspects. The novel’s presentation of Misner as working to bring battling factions in the town together to negotiate truces and to give voice to the young people of the town, growing restless in the face of the unbending rule of their fathers, illustrates the possibilities of the early civil rights movement’s ideal of participatory democracy in moving away from a dynamic that gives power to the few and functions through the threat of violence. For example, Misner attempts to teach the young people “strategies of defense. Not aggression. Defense.” However, his work is made difficult by their inability to “know the difference” (208), as Pat points out to him, given that their worldview has been constructed within an extreme hierarchical, patriarchal context that does not flinch from resorting to violence to ensure its dominance. The shadow of that violence surfaces, for example, at the end of one meeting organized by Misner, ostensibly to defuse tension between the generations, when Steward Morgan literally threatens the young people who are pushing for changes in Ruby: “I will blow your head off just like you was a hood-eye snake” (87). Misner himself remains caught within a tightly woven patriarchal structure that seriously limits the possibilities for change that he wishes to promote. As a male preacher, Misner inherently holds power in a town and culture that privileges men and fathers as well as a religious structure that is itself deeply patriarchal. Misner’s Baptist church boasts “the largest congregation in town as well as the most powerful” (56 – 57), so that even the most powerful town patriarchs, Deacon and Stewart Morgan, are forced to reign in their suspicions of the man and at times bend to his will. Although Misner’s authority as a Baptist minister allows him to bring together the various interested parties after the altercation between Arnette and K.D. in an attempt to put into practice the ideals of participatory democracy and nonviolence, the attempt remains seriously flawed in its exclusion of women. Ideally, participatory democracy involves “extensive and active engagement of citizens in the self-governing process,” in a direct fashion, “day in and day out, in all matters that affect them in their common lives.”36 Participatory democracy thus entails

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“collective deliberation” and “ongoing accommodation.”37 However, Arnette is glaringly absent from the meeting of “those concerned,” as is her mother; instead, K.D. is present along with “his uncles Deek and Stewart, Reverend Misner, [and] Arnette’s father and brother” (54). Misner’s meeting thus reinforces the dogmatic patriarchal structure of the town in which women are denied a voice and, indeed, remain possessions of men that must be protected and negotiated by men. As Arnette’s father, Jeff Fleet, asserts at one point during the meeting, “I’m her father. I’ll arrange her mind” (61). Although the men pay lip service to the influence of women, as when Jeff claims that “my wife’s the key” and Deacon Morgan agrees that “women always the key” (61), the men essentially silence and exclude the women from negotiations and decisions.38 Morrison’s novel pointedly foregrounds that exclusion when Misner closes the meeting with a prayer and the men hear “the tippy-tap steps of women who were nowhere to be seen” (61). Misner’s actions are emblematic of the King-led civil rights movement’s patriarchal structure, in which officers of the leading organizations were male African American ministers who did not allow women into their ranks, even though women were not only very active but also highly influential in the day-to-day running of these organizations, as well as in setting the agenda for the movement and constructing a model of participatory democracy.39 “Though without the same titles as men,” according to Belinda Robnett, women “nonetheless operated as leaders and assumed a great deal of power” that has all too often remained unrecognized by the dominant histories of the movement.40 That Misner organizes an all-male meeting indicates the same sexist “assumption of male superiority” that women within the movement often complained about.41 Even as Misner participates in excluding women from the coalition work he promotes, however, he has inklings of the exclusions of many from official versions of the movement; he reflects that “all sorts of people will claim pivotal, controlling, defining positions in the rights movement,” that “a few would be justified,” but that “the ordinary folk” would be forgotten even though “they were the ones who formed the spine on which the televised ones stood” (212). The character of Misner thus serves multiple functions as a means of presenting both the complexities and limitations of the civil rights movement. The novel’s presentation of the women inhabitants of Ruby further explores these complexities and limitations by demonstrating how the women’s actions and attitudes have much in common with the nonviolence and communal spirit that are hallmarks of the Martin Luther King,

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Jr. – inspired incarnation of the civil rights movement, even though they do not officially participate in the movement, and, yet, how most of them have internalized and collude with the exclusivist ideology that structures their town and the violent means by which such exclusion is enforced. Although the town of Ruby has over time come to exemplify “the idea of total community” as “embodied in fascist political ideology,”42 particularly via processes of exclusion and of surveillance, the women within the town continue to function at least in part on the basis of the spirit of community grounded in empathy and care that marked the formation of Haven. The character of Lone DuPres perhaps best exemplifies this empathy and care on the part of Ruby’s women. Lone’s very presence as a citizen of Ruby derives from the “empathic ‘feelings’ ” as well as “empathic ‘actions’ ”43 of one of the town’s original descendants, Fairy DuPres, who rescued Lone from a sod house after finding her dead mother inside and “put up such a fight” that the men allowed her to adopt Lone as her own  — thus creating a nonbiological tie of kinship based on care and nurturance. Fairy “raised and taught [Lone] everything she came to know about midwifery,” so that, following Fairy’s death, “Lone slipped right in and took over the birthing for everybody” (190) in town. Since the midwife is “the one giving orders” during the birthing process and possesses a “secret skill” upon which men must depend, however, Lone’s position as Ruby’s midwife has marginalized her in a town where men control everything and everyone. Indeed, Fairy had warned her that “men scared of us, always will be,” because their “dependency” (272) on the midwife threatens their patriarchal power. At the same time, however, Lone as midwife values forms of knowledge associated with community, care, and nurturance and views the convent in those terms, which is why she attempts to stop the men’s assault on the convent after hearing them plot. The novel’s depiction of other women in Ruby also demonstrates that they live by a more communal sense than do the men. When Anna rebukes Misner for intimating that Ruby is Deacon’s and Steward’s town because they financed it, for example, she insists that they don’t own Ruby and that it is a collaborative endeavor of the “fifteen families [that] founded this town. Fifteen, not two” (115) — and thus needs to be viewed in terms of a shared community rather than one in which power is consolidated in the hands of the men with the most material wealth. Indeed, the women hold on to the original communal, trusting spirit of the town wherein “families shared everything” (108), as further evi-

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denced by Dovey’s fury over her husband Steward’s new habit of “bolting the house as though it were a bank too” (90) and Soane’s lack of understanding with regard to “why [her husband Deacon] wasn’t worried enough by their friends’ money problem to help them out” when he himself accumulated money (107). Ruby’s women not only are more inclusive of others than are their male relatives but also demonstrate in their actions and thoughts the absurdity of exclusivist notions of community. As Pat notes when she attempts to trace “the genealogies of each of the [founding] fifteen families” (187), the town itself is neither homogeneous nor racially pure, even though it defines itself as such. Not only were these supposed fifteen families in actuality a combination of “nine large intact families who made the original journey” west, supplemented by “fragments of other families” (188) — “orphans [ . . . ] who spotted the travelers and asked to join, and the two toddlers they simply snatched up because the circumstances in which the children were found wouldn’t let them do otherwise” (189) — but also the various family genealogies are filled with women with “only one name [ . . . ] whose [official] identity rested on the men they married” (187). What Pat’s genealogical work indicates is that outsiders have consistently been taken in and made part of their community, regardless of the public insistence on exclusivity. In addition, Ruby’s women engage in neighborly interactions with the convent women down the road over the course of many years, thus giving the lie to Ruby’s self-proclaimed identity as insular. Grown materially more prosperous and no longer having to scrape by just to survive, Ruby’s women actively trade with and come to depend on the convent’s fresh produce and homemade barbecue sauces, baked breads, and herbal remedies. As one of the convent women tells a newcomer, “Somebody [from Ruby] always come. Everyday. This morning already I sold fortyeight ears of corn and a whole pound of peppers” (40). Ironically, even the men who eventually go to the convent to rid it of its female inhabitants recall the times they have “parked Chevrolets near its porch to pick up a string of peppers or have gone into the kitchen for a gallon of barbecue sauce” (3) to bring home to their wives. Such habitual interactions again demonstrate that the borders of Ruby are much less rigid than it likes to claim. The neighborliness between Ruby and the convent is also evidenced when the convent’s last remaining nun dies and the town’s women collected food and “carried it out there” (101) in a gesture that replicates what they would do for one of their own townsfolk. Moreover, some of Ruby’s women develop active and long-lasting

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friendships with the convent women and seek them out precisely because of their inclusive and accepting communal spirit, which Ruby no longer fosters but for which the women still yearn. For example, Soane brings Connie a basket filled with sugar cookies as a pledge of friendship after the latter helps to save Soane’s son following a car crash; and “they traded that basket back and forth for years” (247). Many Ruby women and even some men also seek out the convent women to help them through crises — for instance, Menus stayed at the convent when “he had the d.t.’s” (165) — finding in the convent women a capacity for care and nurturance that is absent in Ruby. While Ruby’s women interact more freely than do their male counterparts with the convent women and display a sense of community that at least in part derives from empathy, they never completely break from Ruby’s exclusivist notions of community. Most women do not openly critique or challenge the status quo established and enforced by Ruby’s patriarchs, because they do not want to endure the town’s censure. As Anna notes, something as innocuous as “her unstraightened hair” earns her severe disapproval in the form of “strange, silly, invasive probings. She felt as though they were discussing her pubic hair, her underarm hair” (119) — the censure of women thus taking the form of questioning their moral standing. Moreover, by sharing in the material prosperity that Ruby’s citizens gain over time, the women inevitably collude in their town’s ideology of superiority over all others: for example, upon first meeting Mavis at the convent, Soane rejects Mavis’s familiar reference, “Hon,” and insists on “Mrs. Morgan” as she stands in her “expensive oxford shoes, sheer stockings, wool cardigan” and dress of “summerweight crepe, pale blue with a white collar” (43). Soane thus assumes a position of privilege vis-à-vis Mavis in this scene based upon her status as the wife of one of Ruby’s senior patriarchs, which makes her complicit with the town’s exclusionary practices. Indeed, years of bounty have resulted in a raised standard of living for Ruby’s households, complete with “soft toilet paper” and “appliances [that] pumped, hummed, sucked, purred, whispered and flowed” and that “gave the women time” (89) for activities not bound to sheer survival and necessity — such as dressing well and “cultivating plants that could not be eaten” (89). The women thus have much to lose if they do not support Ruby, and so they tend to gloss over their men’s faults and to give support to their men and their town.44 Although Pat recognizes the contradictions inherent in Ruby through her genealogical work, for example, she nevertheless decides to burn all her work rather than have it stand as a

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challenge to the town and leave herself in a precarious position with respect to the town she calls home. Indeed, although she knows Ruby’s weaknesses, Pat makes a pragmatic choice to discontinue the genealogical work that underscores her own and, even more, her daughter’s marginalized status. Perhaps more disturbing is the physical violence Pat demonstrates when she “missed killing her own daughter [Billie Delia] by inches” with a “pressing iron” during an argument and Pat’s recognition that she has always thought of her daughter “as a liability somehow” (203) with her light skin, highlighting how the underlying violence with which Ruby secures its racial purity has infected its women as well as its men. Even after the violent assault on the convent women, the men’s “families and friends (who had been nowhere near the convent) supported them” (297), so that the women’s allegiance remains in the last instance tied to their men and to Ruby despite the violence that underlies their identity. Ruby and its inhabitants, both male and female, thus belie the nonviolent ideals of the King-inspired civil rights movement by supporting — through overt actions or through inaction and silence — exclusionary practices that resort to psychological and physical violence. However, Morrison’s Paradise does not embrace unquestioningly the civil rights movement led by King, especially its patriarchal aspects, but ultimately moves beyond the movement while retaining its ideals, as evidenced by the centrality to the novel of the community of women living in the convent. Indeed, Paradise positions the convent women as the best hope for moving past racism and patriarchal structures, which the novel presents as interrelated, and toward an alternative, nonhierarchical form of justice that emphasizes coalition and community: coalition in the sense of joining forces to strive for specific goals, and community in the sense of a communitarian space. Moreover, the novel explores the interdependence of coalition and community as a means of reconfiguring a communal form of agency. The convent provides a space that not only ensures temporary survival to all who find their way there — regardless of race, class, age, or past history — but also validates “ordinary” women and “their small stories” (212) to the extent that collectively they can construct subject positions for themselves that include positions other than that of subjugation. In other words, the convent functions as a community that fosters “being-in-common, which [in turn] gives rise to the existence of being-self,”45 thus emphasizing the interdependence of self and community. On one level, survival entails a loving, mutual,

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cooperative nurturing within the framework of this community; each woman is nurtured by and provides nurturing to the others. Moreover, although the convent appears separatist in its geographical marginality as well as in its exclusively female membership, the novel presents the community of women living in the building at the edge of Ruby as able to negotiate a separatism that is merely temporary, that is constructive and inclusive, that reconceptualizes power as power with rather than power over, and that depends on dynamic coalition practices. As Jane Mansbridge argues, “Power with” envisions “power not only as dominance but also as ‘energy, capacity, and effectiveness.’ ”46 Indeed, the notion of power with reinvigorates conceptions of coalition and community through a rejection of stable hierarchical structures — particularly patriarchal ones that depend on the threat of violence and violence itself (power over) — and a reframing of power as derived from dynamic, collective, caring interactions. Although the civil rights and New Left movements’ practices and notions of coalition to which the novel gestures included an ethics of care, especially in the emphasis on nonviolence, care inevitably veered from material forms of nurturance and became subsumed and devalued within structures that continued to build “on a competitive intellectual style” that assumed that intellectual work and leadership were primarily male tasks and thus remained caught within a power over framework even as they attempted to push the ideal of power with.47 The convent community in Morrison’s Paradise more fully embodies a reformulation of power as power with as it infuses the idea of coalition with the material practices of community as a caring, nurturing space. The building that the town refers to as the “Convent” itself serves as a metaphor for the dynamism and possibilities that the novel attaches to the community of women who live there. Although originally built in 1922 as “an embezzler’s folly” (3), the building is later transformed by Catholic “Sisters Devoted to Indian and Colored People” into “an asylum/boarding school for Indian girls,” Christ the King School for Native Girls, run by Mary Magna (223 – 224). Once the order closes the school and all but Mary Magna and her protégé, Consolata, are left, the building seems to be overlooked by the authorities and organically becomes a kind of safe, regenerative haven for women who find their way there. In all its incarnations, the building stands geographically separate from the society and culture of its time, “a big stone house in the middle of nothing” (169). Even when in 1954 the town of Ruby is built “some

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seventeen miles south of Christ the King” (225), the house remains effectively alone out in the Oklahoma countryside. Moreover, “against all reason, the students, the state officials and those they encountered in town called it the Convent” (224), which not only reinforces the house’s geographical separation but also imbues it with an ideological separation, in the sense that convents traditionally have functioned as places of overt retreat for women from the various cultural, economic, historic, and gendered structures at work in the social, secular world. Having internalized, at least in part, the entrenched Puritan heritage of white America, Ruby views the convent skeptically at best, even though its official ties to Catholicism have long been severed. In addition, because Ruby’s male leaders are unable to see the parallels that exist between the patriarchal structures of their town and of Catholicism, they view with suspicion the idea of convents and nuns and, in particular, the idea of women who have chosen deliberately to abstain from sexual relations with men and thus to forgo reproduction; they cannot make the connection between their own and Catholicism’s maintenance of power precisely through the regulation of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity. In effect, the town of Ruby actively sets up the convent as a dangerous separatist space in order to keep the convent women outside its own boundaries. However, the real dogmatic separatist enclave is Ruby itself, whose leaders work hard to construct the convent in binary opposition to itself. Indeed, in its various guises the house has never truly engaged in any absolute or dogmatic form of separatism. The embezzler built the elaborate mansion as a direct consequence of his participation within a vital, thriving economic system, even if his mode of participation was illicit. Furthermore, his choosing to decorate his house, with an eye to entertaining guests,48 with the most ornate artifacts of Western culture — such as “bisque and rose-tone marble floors,” ornate bathroom fixtures, Flemish candelabra, and nymphs carved in niches (3 – 4) — marks the mansion as existing very much within rather than outside the social context of his time. As a school for Indian girls, the building is engaged with an America that has steadily pushed aside the native inhabitants of the land it has usurped and attempted to erase their native culture through reeducation. Indeed, the school aims “to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither” (227). The novel’s reference to the converted “schoolroom, where stilled Arapaho girls once sat and learned to forget” (4), eloquently captures America’s colonial project visà-vis its Native inhabitants.49 The convent’s mission and attempts to

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provide a Catholic education first to Arapaho girls and later to wards of the state are impossible to sever from the complex American culture within which it is interceding. The later incarnation of the house, as a now secular place of retreat and rejuvenation for women, is similarly difficult to denote as separatist, given its inclination to accept openly women of all stripes — and even men in a few instances — who drift through its doors seeking nurturance. Moreover, the nuns and later the women who live in the house engage their neighbors within a shared economic sphere by advertising and selling “produce, barbecue sauce, good bread and the hottest peppers in the world” (11). Geographic separateness thus does not necessarily translate to absolute separatism; in all its guises, and particularly the latter two, the house continues to engage and participate in the world outside its borders. Although the convent community could be charged with separatism based on gender, given that the building houses only women in the cases of the school and the subsequent group living there, the question is whether this constitutes a problematic form of separatism. I would argue that on one level the community of women does function as a separatist space, but a rather complex and in the end constructive one. For one thing, this separatism is for the most part imposed onto the community by the patriarchs of Ruby, who view the convent women with deep suspicion and, consequently, designate the convent as separate from and in opposition to Ruby. However, the convent women make use of that separatist designation as a means of readying themselves to face and combat the structures that seek to marginalize them. In hook’s terms, the convent community refashions its “marginality” into “a site of resistance, as a location of radical openness and possibility.” Such a notion builds upon the historical function of the “homeplace” for African Americans as a “space where we return for renewal and self-recovery, where we can heal our wounds and become whole,” as well as a space “for organizing, for forming political solidarity.”50 The novel presents the convent women as a separatist community that functions as a temporary nurturing space but cannot become the end-all if survival is the goal. As the activist Bernice Johnson Reagon firmly argues, “There is no chance that you can survive by staying inside” within “a space that is ‘yours only’ ”; at the same time, however, she advocates using that space while it lasts to “act out community,” “to construct within yourself and within your community who you would be if you were running society.”51 Paradise goes one step further in presenting a community of women within a space that functions as a separatist nurturing space and, yet,

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is simultaneously in process of construction. Morrison’s novel not only urges isolated communities to give up their insularity to engage in coalition work with the express aim of survival but also offers communities themselves as products of coalition. Given the multitude of subject positions negotiated by individuals, communities are never natural, selfevident; their formation and upkeep are necessarily a function of active, ongoing coalition work. The inhabitants of Ruby, for example, choose to consolidate their group identity around their dark skin and their rejection by others on the basis of that skin color. Other subject positions continually intrude upon and challenge that stable community identity, however, so the town must forever be reconsolidating itself; eventually, Ruby’s patriarchs resort to fascist mechanisms of consolidation as the only means of ensuring its identity. In contrast, the convent community accepts a more fluid notion of identity that views the self as inextricable from the community and thus enables ongoing, accommodative coalition work. The group of women who find themselves at the convent possess one common subject position: each has sought escape for a variety of reasons from the dominant patriarchal and materialist culture and has found refuge in the convent, a place marginalized from both white American culture and the local African American community.52 The commonalities end here. The women’s physical attributes, life circumstances, and personalities remain quite distinct, and they must continuously negotiate the different subject positions they hold. To begin with, although most of the women are African American, one is white (two, if counting Mary Magna, who dies before many of the women arrive), and one is clearly of mixed race. Although Paradise leaves hazy which of the women is white, the first line of the novel asserts that when Ruby’s men arrive to rid the convent of its inhabitants, “they shoot the white girl first” (3). This lack of certainty as to the identity of “the white girl” marks skin color as in and of itself not of primary importance within the context of the convent community, a marked contrast to the community of Ruby where skin color dominates its identity. The novel does not in any way signal race as unimportant culturally but offers a community that accepts racial diversity and does not construct its identity solely in terms of race — which is a bold move, given that in America “identity” has always been “fundamentally racialized.”53 According to Linda J. Krumholz, Paradise “dismantles racial ideology [ . . . ] by deconstructing whiteness without reifying or sanctifying black-

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ness.”54 Indeed, the character of Consolata, the senior convent woman after the death of Mary Magna, embodies all that threatens Ruby’s stable identity: originally from South America, she has green eyes, “tea colored hair,” and “smoky, sundown skin” (223). Consolata’s physical features highlight “the fluidity of racial categorizations”55 and the absurdity of attempting to construct fixed racial identities as Ruby’s patriarchs try to do. Not only is Consolata of mixed race, but she asserts that the white Catholic nun, Mary Magna, “is my mother” (48), thus rejecting blood ties as inherent to mothering, to family: “When Mary Magna died, Consolata, fifty-four years old, was orphaned in a way she was not as a street baby” (247). The women also have very different class and personal backgrounds. At one end of the spectrum is Consolata, who was abandoned in “the street garbage” (223) as a child and then rescued and raised by a nun and who had a brief but intense love affair with Ruby’s Deacon Morgan. In contrast, Pallas grew up as the only daughter of affluent divorced parents  — arriving for a visit to the convent in a limousine with three suitcases in tow — and ran away with the young school janitor, only to have him fall for her artist mother. Between these two extremes lies Mavis, who unwittingly killed her twin infants by allowing them to suffocate “in a hot car with the windows closed” while she was buying groceries (23); Seneca, who was tossed between foster homes and fondled by many a boy and who now mutilates herself by cutting “short streets, lanes, alleys into her arms” (261); and Gigi, whose mother was “unlocatable” and whose father was “on death row” (257) and who witnessed “a neat little black boy” shot dead by the police in a demonstration (170). Moreover, the women’s ages run from Pallas’s sixteen to Consolata’s seventyodd years at the novel’s conclusion. Not only are the convent women a diverse group, but that diversity is continuously reinfused as Ruby’s women seek them out and, at times, even stay with them for brief intervals in order to renew themselves before once again facing the heavily patriarchal culture of their town. The novel offers the convent as a diverse and dynamic space that functions on the basis not only of intersecting subject positions, positioned in tension with the dominant male-centered culture, but also of a locally developed ethos of mutual caregiving in both a physical and a psychic sense. However, this ethos of care remains in-process and is never naturalized or severed from the sociohistorical context of the women’s lives. Caregiving becomes an active and activist response to

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the diverse social inequities the women have suffered. Because care has traditionally been devalued within the American context, the convent women’s choice to live by an ethic of care becomes a political move. As Joan Tronto insists, “An ethic of care relies upon a political commitment to value care,” to value “attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion, meeting others’ needs.”56 Casting aside the conventional Western split between mind and body, the convent offers a space that recognizes the interconnections of physical and psychic pain or imbalances and that allows experiments in ways to face up to and move past those pains or imbalances. For example, reflecting upon her own experience and the distressing tension in her life between Catholicism and sexuality, Consolata advises the women: “Never break them [body and spirit] in two. Never put one over the other” (263).57 When Consolata leads Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas in a communal healing ritual by making them lie “unspeaking,” “naked in candlelight,” and unmoving in a painted, fixed outline of their bodies on the cold cellar floor (263), the women’s ability to communicate to each other their harsh pasts is a direct function of their immediate shared experience of the unnatural confinement of their bodies on that floor, which reflects the parallel confinement of their bodies by the dominant patriarchal culture at large: “In spite of or because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer’s tale” (264).58 Moreover, these “outlines of themselves [ . . . ] become self-representations through which they are able to gain much-needed perspectives on themselves and each other.”59 Indeed, these outlines allow the women to “displace the traumas that set them apart.”60 Although Consolata gets the ritual started and thus could be viewed as holding a position of power over the other women, her role is more that of facilitator and she quickly becomes one of the participants; a kind of “discursive equality” 61 is achieved as all the women mutually encourage a process of dialogue driven by sympathy, encouragement, and concern. As the senior woman at the convent, both in terms of age and tenure, Consolata does hold a position of power. However, the power she wields is inextricable from caregiving and functions as a means of encouraging the construction of a community that depends on coalition processes of combining resources to achieve specific aims and that operates through caring and accepting each other’s differences; Consolata’s power is thus not “fundamentally oppositional and hierarchical.”62 Indeed, the other women care for her as much as she cares for them. The healing ritual involves the women telling each other their stories

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in the form of “loud dreaming,” which is described as “no different from a shriek” (264) and is thus itself physical in nature — given that producing and hearing a shriek involves both physiological and psychic triggers and responses. By willingly sharing and experiencing each other’s painful stories, histories, dreams with their bodies and psyches simultaneously, they provide for each other unmatched nurturing support.63 To borrow Carol Gilligan’s terms, the women engage in a “process of coming to know others” through “a joining of stories.”64 Moreover, this form of “knowing” is potentially transformative in that it “brings into being new sympathies, new affects as well as new cognitions and new forms of intersubjectivity.”65 The empathy produced by this difficult process involves an engagement on both an emotional and a material basis and thus contains the potential for activism, in the sense that empathy entails “a tremendously active process, one that involves integrating what we know with what we see, hear, smell taste, and touch.”66 The painful storytelling creates a multivocal, dialogic space that embraces both the physical and psychic and that functions as a form of extremely difficult but productive coalition work and community agency. This experience exemplifies coalition work in that it entails the coming together of women with different pasts, interests, and resources in order to articulate and, subsequently, create possibilities for moving past the hurts that have to a certain extent paralyzed each of these women, making them unable to seize any kind of agency individually in the culture at large — before engaging in this collective healing process, they are all “broken girls, frightened girls” with “no plans to do anything” (222). As hooks asserts, “Emotional healing is a process that can take place” only in a “setting where we are genuinely cared for.”67 The convent in this phase thus embodies a space “where one is able to redeem and reclaim the past, legacies of pain, suffering, and triumph in ways that transform present reality” and that “move us into a different mode of articulation”; such a movement is made possible through an empathy that is constructed from “shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender, race, etc.,” and that can “serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.”68 Communal caring does not homogenize the women, however, who remain distinct from each other and who at times demonstrate overt dislike for each other: Mavis and Gigi even come to physical blows at one point, their “bodies roiling in the dust and crushing weeds” (168).69 In spite of the differences between them, the process of joining together and shrieking their stories becomes cathartic for the women in that “accusations directed at the dead and long gone are

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undone by murmurs of love” (264); finally, “the Convent women were no longer haunted” (266) by and thus could survive their hurtful pasts. The women become more “sociable and connecting” (265) and display a more “adult manner” (266) as they fashion themselves into agents within a communal setting. This experiment with a specific, locally developed form of mutual caring, nurturing, and unconditional love as an activist response to past inequities not only makes healing possible for each individual woman but also functions simultaneously as both a condition and a result of coalition work within the women’s particular sociohistorical context. The convent women thus demonstrate how caring, nurturing love can provide human beings “the strength to cope with difficulties in a constructive way.”70 On an immediate material level, the convent community offers food, shelter, and/or herbal remedies to the women who find their way there; however, the physical healing remains connected to psychic healing. Indeed, the preparation and sharing of meals, whose descriptions are filled with concrete sensual details, function in the novel as an instance of a kind of community that is dependent on coalition processes and that is firmly grounded in the body, in the realm of the material, rather than merely in abstract coalition ideals and theories. After the physical fight between Mavis and Gigi, for example, all the women unite over food: “The fear, the bickering, the nausea, the awful dirt fight, the tears in the dark — all of the day’s unruly drama dissipated in the pleasure of chewing food” together (179). Antagonisms and hierarchies rather than differences dissipate through the process of caring for their bodies and psyches communally. Healthy, nourished bodies have a better shot at survival; and carefully, lovingly prepared food satisfies not only physical needs but also psychic ones. Even Ruby’s women seek out the convent women not only for the specialty foods they produce and herbal remedies they prepare but, more crucially, for the loving kindness they dispense indiscriminately — which highlights the cracks in Ruby’s identity as separatist and self-sustaining. In contrast to the closed community of Ruby, the convent invites all to join in continuously recreating its dynamic, diverse community — thus serving as “a vision of collective well-being that necessarily requires sharing skills and resources.”71 Over the course of more than twenty years, “crying women, staring women, scowling, lip-biting women or women just plain lost” (and some men) made the trek “back and forth” between Ruby and the convent (270); “early reports were of kindness and very good food” (11). No matter

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what her/his story is, the convent women accept each person who seeks shelter under their roof unconditionally with open arms and hearts. Indeed, the convent women accept and live by the responsibility that, in Emmanuel Levinas’s terms, accompanies being human: a responsibility for the “neighbor,” “the other” that “demands sympathy or love.”72 For example, “revolted by the work of her womb,” Arnette seeks shelter in the convent to deliver the baby that she has been unable to abort with a mop handle and that dies shortly after birth; Soane Morgan depends on a tonic prepared specially for her by Consolata to help keep at bay the depression, the “thinning” air, that began when both Soane’s sons were killed in Vietnam (100); and, after a physically and psychologically violent fight with her mother, Billie Delia seeks refuge at the convent. Billie Delia’s memories of her stay there demonstrate how intertwined physical and psychic healing are: “They had treated her so well, not embarrassed her with sympathy, had just given her sunny kindness. Looking at her bruised face and swollen eyes, they sliced cucumber for her lids after making her drink a glass of wine. No one insisted on hearing what drove her there, but she could tell they would listen if she wanted them to” (308). While the women treat her physical injuries with practical remedies, they also offer her a caring, loving, nonintrusive, inclusive environment based on mutual respect. The women who find their way to the convent for varying lengths of stays find renewal through being cared for and caring for other women in a nonjudgmental, nonhierarchical, nonpatriarchal atmosphere. They are included in the community and have a voice in how they will participate in it.73 Billie Delia describes the convent community as “a place where you can stay for a while. No questions,” and where “you can collect yourself” and “think things through, with nothing or nobody bothering you all the time. They’ll take care of you or leave you alone — whichever way you want it” (175 – 176). Seneca similarly appreciates how the women “cooked for her and didn’t pry” (131) when she arrives there. When a mute Pallas first appears at the convent, the women initially care only for her immediate physical needs but otherwise leave her alone for a few days, recognizing that “the pain was down too far.” Eventually, however, Consolata’s “magic” enables Pallas to tell her story: “She just stretched out her hand and Pallas went to her, sat on her lap, talk-crying” in a “backward and punctured and incomplete” manner (172­ – 173). Although Pallas is technically a complete stranger to Consolata, this scene of patient, unconditional, loving attention demonstrates the warm empathy

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that Consolata feels for other women hurt by a cruel world, an empathy that “serve[s] as a base for solidarity and coalition.”74 Across their overt differences with respect to age, class, race, and past experiences, nurturing coalition work takes place on the basis of a matrix of historically specific intersecting subject positions connected to pain endured within a male-dominated culture. The women’s healing is made possible in great part by the “blessed malelessness” of the house, “like a protected domain, free of hunters” (177) — at least temporarily.75 Given that the dominant American culture and the nearby town of Ruby are heavily male centered and that both envision and enact power as power-over women, the malelessness of the house makes possible the reconceptualization of power in more collective and just terms, as power-with.76 Moreover, this maleless community allows the women not only to work through their pain but also to begin reconstructing nonsubjugated identities for themselves. Given that individual identity is to a degree always a function of the culture within which the individual exists,77 the convent community becomes for the women an alternative to white America and Ruby both in its malelessness and in its emphasis on collective agency, on a form of agency that is “coproduced”78 and thus no longer grounded in a selfinterested and market-driven form of individualism. They create a form of what Alberto Melucci terms “collective identity as a process,” which is a function of “active relationships” and “emotional investment.”79 The difficult, dialogic coalition work in which the women engage as they create this alternative community enables them in turn to fashion new, more dynamic identities for themselves.80 The process of each woman speaking the painful experiences of her past and, at the same time, listening to the different, individual past hurts of the other women creates a caring, communal space for each woman to reconstruct more fluid and community-grounded identities with greater possibilities for agency. For example, Mavis feels “elated” when she begins to feel that “the old Mavis was dead. The one who couldn’t defend herself” and “couldn’t figure out or manage a simple meal” (171). Similarly, after having lived for a number of years in an alcoholic haze following the death of Mary Magna, Consolata reshapes herself into an energetic, “revised Reverend Mother” (265) — catholic but not Catholic, whom the other women at first “do not recognize” (262) but who engages in a type of othermothering as she proceeds to lead the women living in the house through an active, communal process of healing. Through the process of negotiating strategic alliances across their differences to heal themselves

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from the consequences of the injustices they have been made to suffer, the convent women create a nurturing, dialogic space from which their own refashioned subjectivities emerge, subjectivities that collectively can not only survive a racist and sexist culture but also work to resist and redress its injustices.81 Although the healing ritual in which the convent women participate is reminiscent in form and spirit of the 1970s feminist practice of consciousness raising, the healing ritual that Paradise offers rejects the kind of identity politics that characterized consciousness raising and actively participates in the contemporary reconceptualization of identity, subjectivity, and agency that radically destabilizes the individualistic basis of identity politics. Morrison’s novel moves toward the notion of identity that Mouffe describes as “an ensemble of ‘subject positions’ that can never be totally fixed in a closed system” and that remains “always contingent and precarious, temporarily fixed at the intersection of those subject positions”; moreover, Mouffe argues that these points at which subject positions meet or intersect function as “nodal points, partial fixations,” as “precarious forms of identification” that have the potential of constructing “forms of unity and common action” that do not depend on centered subjects or on “pre-existing identities or unities.”82 Morrison’s Paradise simultaneously undercuts any notion of a stable, centered, fixed self and illustrates possibilities for constructively fashioning — within the context of a nurturing community that is itself always in the process of construction through coalition work — more dynamic selves that are not completely constrained by the dominant culture or by communities, like Ruby, that have internalized certain dominant values and thus can function collectively as agents. As a diverse and dynamic community, however, the convent functions outside and comes into conflict with the patriarchal structures and exclusivist impulses that dominate the nearby town of Ruby. Indeed, that the local town’s African American men eventually find it necessary to destroy the community of women and literally kill them highlights the threat that any reconceptualization of identity and agency as decentered and multivocal has for a status quo dependent on patriarchal, hierarchical structures and on having “nothing at the edge” (9) that the men “couldn’t control” (279).83 There is no room for unmarried “women who chose themselves for company” (276) in a town in which women’s “identity rested on the men they married” (187) or on the fathers to whom they were born; consequently, Ruby’s patriarchs can interpret the convent community only in demonic terms, in terms of a witches’

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“coven” (276). In order to hold on to their identity as a separatist, patriarchal, all-black town, Ruby’s men must get rid of the human “detritus” (4) on its edge; they must make sure that “nothing inside or out rots the one all-black town worth the pain” (5). The convent women become scapegoats for all the town’s problems, as the men assert that “everybody who goes near [the convent women] is maimed somehow and the mess is seeping back into our homes, our families” (276). In order to justify their violent actions, Ruby’s men dehumanize and demonize the convent women as “female malice” (4) incarnate, “strays” (114), “bitches. More like witches,” “heifers,” and “sluts” (276).84 The town’s African American men paradoxically become “the epitome of the [white] American stereotype [ever since the Puritans] — men taking the law into their own hands with God on their side.”85 The extent of not only their hatred but their fear of the women is reflected in the weaponry they carry on their raid of the convent; nine men arrive with rope, handcuffs, Mace, and “clean, handsome guns” (3) to oust five unarmed women — an absurdity the men fail to recognize. As Billie Delia puts it, Ruby is “a backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where; who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mare and so got rid of them” (308). The patriarchal and racist separatism that grounds Ruby’s identity allows for no other response than hate and violence to the threat that the convent community poses to that identity. In contrast to the convent women, who opt for love and empathy, Ruby’s patriarchs “did not think to fix it [the “ruination” they see plaguing the town] by extending a hand in fellowship or love. They mapped defense instead” (275). That Ruby’s own women (and even some men) occasionally seek out the convent community for renewal indicates that some of the town’s citizens, particularly those with little power, at times feel confined by Ruby’s separatism grounded in hierarchy, hate, and violence. This attraction to the convent for some of Ruby’s inhabitants points not only to cracks within Ruby’s positioning of itself in binary opposition to the convent but also to a recognition of the potential of versions of separatism that are nonhierarchical and grounded in caring. Separatism thus functions quite differently in Ruby and in the convent, even if its impetus is survival in both cases. In Ruby, separatism aims to keep everything and everyone it does not claim outside its borders and is enforced by the town patriarchs through the threat of violence or, at times, violence itself. For example, Ruby defines itself explic-

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itly in binary opposition to the convent. In contrast, the separatism of the convent is in part imposed upon it by geography and by the town of Ruby and aims to lovingly nurture and strengthen, within a communal setting, persons (mostly women) who have been hurt in different ways by a violent, male-centered culture so that they may once again face the world at large. The combination of a patriarchal structure and a racist agenda makes Ruby a doomed but nevertheless dangerous separatist entity. As horrendous as the murderous assault on the convent women is, however, it does produce a wake-up call for the town, which opens the door for moving past the hatred and violence. As Reverend Misner recognizes near the end of the novel, Ruby’s men “think they have outfoxed the whiteman [through their separatist town] when in fact they imitate him” (306). After the massacre of the convent women, the whole town wonders how Ruby’s “so clean and blessed a mission [could] devour itself and become the world they had escaped?” (292). Many of the townspeople do reject violence before the attack occurs even if they do not often speak up, and an attempt is made to stop the violent plans of the men. When Lone DuPres chances to overhear “the devilment [the men] were cooking” up the night before the assault on the convent, she does act by first “driving out [to the Convent] in the middle of the night to tell them, warn them” (269). Faced with disbelief at the convent, she manages to round up a good many of Ruby’s inhabitants to go stop the men from harming the convent women; but they arrive too late. Ruby’s citizens thus do not all condone the hatred and violence that the massacre embodies; as one man asks the murderous group, “What manner of evil is in you?” (291). Even Deacon Morgan, one of the chief patriarchs and one of the nine men involved in the assault, acknowledges after the fact, “This is our doing. Ours alone. And we bear the responsibility” (291). He feels remorse for having become, along with the others, “the kind of man who set himself up to judge, rout and even destroy the needy, the defenseless, the different” (302). Given his earlier love affair with Consolata, the novel presents Deacon as having already not only transgressed the boundaries of Ruby but also questioned on some level the limitations of Ruby’s insularity and the kind of power that regulates it. Indeed, the power structure of Ruby changes in a concrete way when Deacon disassociates himself from his “unapologetic” (299) twin brother, Stewart — “It was as if he had looked in his brother’s face and did not like himself any more” (300) — and aligns himself with the more progressive Misner. That Misner decides to stay in Ruby precisely “because

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there was no better battle to fight” and “the future panted at the gate” points to the inevitable changes that will take place now that Ruby has been jolted into acting to avoid a reoccurrence of the convent assault. There is talk that “connecting roads will be laid” between Ruby and the rest of America, which will break Ruby’s previous isolationism by allowing “outsiders” to “come and go” (306). The novel thus does not end without hope, since the town is opening its borders and since the realignment of Deacon and Misner gestures at a change away from the separatist, violent racism that Stewart Morgan continues to champion and toward a civil rights – inspired vision of nonviolent change, racial unity, and participatory democracy.86 What this realignment leaves intact, however, is Ruby’s patriarchal structure. However, hope surfaces at the novel’s conclusion in other shapes that indicate a continuing challenge to patriarchal structures and the threat of violence toward women that ensures the survival of such structures — for example, K.D. “beat up Arnette” (195) and “smacked” (256) Gigi at different times to get them to mind him. Subsequent to the massacre at the convent, the townspeople all head home and Roger Best is called to go pick up the bodies in his “ambulance/hearse”; when he gets there, however, he finds “no bodies. Nothing. Even the Cadillac was gone” (292). Although Consolata and “the white girl” (3) are shot and killed within the house and their dead bodies are thus witnessed by the various people who arrive too late to stop the carnage, the other three women manage to escape the house during the assault. The narrative relates that “men are firing through the window at three women running through clover and Scotch broom” (289) and Sargeant admits that “they went down. In the grass” (290); but no one ever sees whether these three women were actually injured or killed before all the bodies disappear. Moreover, although the bodies disappear, the women reappear in other contexts. It remains unclear whether they have survived in the flesh, in some ghostlike form, or a combination thereof; but they all seem to haunt those who have hurt them while at the same time they continue to embody hope.87 On one level, the disappearance of the women’s bodies functions as a rejection of conventional closure and a refusal to be co-opted; they will not neatly and properly be buried within the patriarchal enclosure of Ruby. More significantly, that their bodies are somewhere “out there,” whether dead or alive, imbues the convent women with a mythical power that provides hope. Indeed, Billie Delia “hoped for a miracle,” “hoped

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with all her heart that the women were out there, darkly burnished, biding their time, brass-metaling their nails, filing their incisors — but out there”; she wonders, “When will they return. When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town?” (308). The disappearance of the murdered women thus further positions the convent women, or rather the idea of them, as indestructible in the sense that their engagement in such a dynamic, alternative coalition process grounded in caring and intersecting subject positions in conflict with the patriarchal status quo will continue to emerge. Billie Delia’s hope that the convent women will return to wage war against Ruby’s male aggressors, as well as the further depiction of two of the convent women in their ghostly forms as warriors equipped for battle (Gigi is described as wearing an “army cap and fatigue pants —  camouflage colors. Heavy army boots.” She seems to be “packing” [310], presumably a gun, and Pallas is seen “carrying a sword” [311]) complicate the novel’s presentation of the convent women as dedicated to loving care and nurturance, however. At first glance, the novel appears to veer away from the King-inspired civil rights movement principle of nonviolence and toward the black power movement’s assertion that violence may be a necessity in the fight against oppression. But Billie Delia’s vision of the women as Amazon-type warriors can be attributed to her own context, raised within a town that cannot imagine change in terms other than violent war even if she is attracted to the convent women and their alternative means of approaching the world. Similarly, the descriptions of Gigi and Pallas in war gear after their disappearance from the assault scene come via the perspective of others in the world, Gigi’s father in prison and Pallas’s mother, who have also presumably internalized the dominant culture’s notion that violence and war are the only means of achieving change. While the representation near the end of Paradise of the assault scene at the convent depicts the women as actively resisting the violence aimed at them, they are never presented as either promoting violence or using violence to ensure the status quo by asserting power over others. When Ruby’s men attempt to massacre them, the women do not passively allow themselves to be slaughtered, martyr fashion. Instead, they fight back: “An alabaster ashtray slams into Arnold’s temple,” Harper receives a “skillet swinging into his skull,” and Menus gets hot stock straight from the stove poured upon his face (286). These acts of self-defense,

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however violent in the sense that they inflict physical harm and pain upon human bodies, do not fall into the same category as the men’s own violent aggression. Immediate physical acts of self-defense in the face of violent assault do not represent a form of power over others but rather a form of self-preservation deriving from the human wish to survive; in contrast, the men’s deliberate plan and actions to rid the convent of its inhabitants through violent means does represent an assertion of power over others. The distinction between the weapons that the men and women use also points to a difference between self-defense as a survival mechanism and aggressive violent actions aimed at asserting and achieving power over others: the women use household objects designed for domestic purposes to defend themselves — an ashtray, a skillet, a pot of boiling stock — while the men use guns designed specifically to kill. Indeed, the men’s violent intrusion into the convent disrupts a very domestic and peaceful scene that includes the “yeast-and-butter smell of rising dough” (4), “a full pitcher of milk,” and “stock [that] simmers on the stove” (5). The overt and disturbing violence that erupts when the men attack the convent women thus functions not as the novel’s condoning of violence as in the last instance the only way to combat oppression but rather as a reminder that violence continues to dominate the American imaginary as well as material practices and that male-centered forms of power that depend on violence will necessarily resist change through violent means. Crucially, Paradise ends not with violence but with a scene of loving nurturance: “a woman black as firewood is singing” to “a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap,” and the song is one that evokes “the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home  — the ease of coming back to love begun” (318). This scene unambiguously points toward a valuing of love, care, and nurturing in a utopian gesture. At the same time, the novel acknowledges the hard work that actions directed toward such a utopia will necessarily entail, given the present state of affairs. As the very last sentence asserts, some incarnation of the convent women will continue “shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in Paradise” (318). The reference to Paradise reflects both a note of irony at the twisted notion of paradise envisioned by Ruby’s patriarchs and a note of hope as to the alternative possibilities that exist and toward which the convent community begins to work. The novel thus constructs an alternative vision of paradise as

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“a complex, dynamic, and challenging process in which insight informs action and responsibility.” 88 Another gesture associated with a sense of hope is the hint that Pallas’s “delicate [newborn] son” (283) has survived the assault on the convent, given that none of the inhabitants of Ruby mention a baby. Indeed, no one in Ruby is able to connect Consolata’s dying words, “ ‘Divine.’ [ . . . ] ‘He’s divine he’s sleeping divine,’ ” to the “sparkling white crib in a bedroom with the word divine taped to the door” (303); making that connection is left to the reader. The idea of a baby boy raised within a nurturing, caring community raises possibilities for the creation of an alternative nonviolent, nonpatriarchal social structure. Although the ending of Paradise rejects closure and remains hazy at best, the novel’s gestures toward hope are all grounded in its reimagining of agency in terms of a reconceptualization of coalition and community as interrelated, emphasizing the need for constructing dynamic coalitions that acknowledge both “connections and diversity,” 89 that envision and enact power as power with rather than power over, and that work to ensure survival and a form of justice that embraces care and nurturing and is no longer grounded in hierarchical structures that depend on violence or the threat of violence.

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Chapter 6 Conclusion Looking to the Future

A

s the preceding chapters have made clear, the notion and ideals of community continue to matter greatly within the context of late twentieth-century America. That community still matters is evidenced by the various social and activist movements since the civil rights movement that build upon and promote ideas of community and the coalition work necessary to create communities; the many theoretical, intellectual explorations of the notion of community in the United States as well as internationally; and the prolific literary engagements with the idea of community. This book has focused on the latter, analyzing the ways in which American women writers in particular have been busy exploring the hybrid versions of community on which ethnic cultures that thrive in the United States, but have not been assimilated as a result of racist attitudes, have had to depend. What these novels demonstrate is that these hybrid versions of community, which draw from other-than-dominant culturally specific ideas and histories, have something to offer Americans as the United States moves into the twenty-first century and must continue to reinvent itself in the face of the increasing diversity of its population. This study argues that novels such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998) exemplify a trend within late twentieth-century American literature to mine the great variety of ethnic traditions present in the United States, within the context of feminist and ethical theories and practices, as a means to rethink community and coalition and offer new hybrid versions of communities and more communal forms of agency. I have focused on ideas of community that derive from racially dis-

tinct ethnic cultures within the United States primarily because, arguably, those are the cultural traditions that have tended not to be assimilated as easily into the dominant culture in the past, given the history of American colonization, immigration, slavery, and the racism that informs all of them. As a nation that early on derived the majority of its immigrants as well as its cultural and intellectual traditions from Western Europe, the United States has tended to exclude and/or marginalize other people and cultural traditions. And this otherness has been marked by race, or more specifically racism. Immigrants from Western Europe — or European settler nations like Canada and Australia  — continue to assimilate into American culture much more easily than do other immigrants, particularly once they have mastered the English language with the proper American accent. This ease of assimilation derives from not being visibly/physically/racially, orally, or even culturally distinct from the assumed norm — white persons of European descent (even if European whites are themselves the product of racial hybridization). The national identity of such immigrants goes unquestioned precisely because they do not look very different from the majority of Americans and do not display cultural traditions or understandings that are too distant from the norm. This ability of European immigrants to pass as Americans, whether or not they are legally so, and not to be categorized as ethnic American after naturalization is a function of the racism and Eurocentrism that prevail in the United States. Even as demographics are changing so drastically that whites of European descent will soon be in the minority numerically and as political rifts between the United States and many European nations have developed, the United States continues to privilege norms and ideas deriving from Western European cultural traditions. What is particularly interesting about this Eurocentric bent is that the United States has been culturally and racially hybrid from the moment Europeans stepped upon its shores but has worked hard to downplay that hybridity. As Monika Kaup and Debra J. Rosenthal argue, “To trace American cultures back to their transoceanic sources is to ignore their new beginnings, their mestizo, mulatto, or métis rebirth in the American hemisphere” that were a function of “the mixing of races and meetings of cultures.”1 American culture has historically categorized people or insisted that people categorize themselves in terms of distinct races and cultures, thus repressing the hybridity in its midst. Rather than champion the inevitable processes of racial and cultural hybridization that settler nations inevitably experience, the United States has opted

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throughout its history to suppress those processes of hybridization in its official rhetorical self-definitions. Even when the United States has acknowledged the influence of other cultures or, at times, acknowledged itself as multicultural, it has tended to do so using the language of appropriation rather than of hybridization so that the dominant European inflected cultural traditions retain their positions of superiority. Indeed, while the United States historically validated the cultural mixing of distinct European peoples, it did so through a rhetoric of assimilation, instantiated by the image of the melting pot, that assumed a Eurocentric norm and thus arrested hybridity at a particular mixed result. Consequently, it has been slower to validate cultural mixing that produces what Homi Bhabha describes as “something different, something new and unrecognizable”2 that cannot be controlled through the rhetoric of assimilation and, thus, will necessarily destabilize the norm. In actuality, such radical hybridization occurs continuously within the United States as ethnically and racially diverse people live and work with or in close proximity to each other, as well as socialize, intermarry, and produce biologically as well as culturally hybrid children. Rather than fearing hybridity, the United States needs to more wholeheartedly embrace the processes of hybridity that have always characterized it as a nation. What the literature I analyze in this book demonstrates is that American creative writers of the late twentieth century are in the vanguard of such a valuing/revaluing of hybridity and are offering models of what such a revaluing makes possible. This literature is actively examining and highlighting the potential inherent within the processes of racial and cultural hybridization that have been ongoing for centuries and have produced American culture as it presently exists. Indeed, these texts highlight that what makes American culture such a dynamic creation is precisely these processes of hybridization. Rather than downplay hybridization, these texts celebrate it and explore ways of mixing and creating new cultural forms with liberatory potential. As Kaup and Rosenthal note, “Hybridization suggests a nonexclusive, plural, dialogic, or multicultural model of culture.”3 The contemporary novels I examine in this study focus in particular on how these aspects of hybridization make possible the creation of new models for community, coalition work, and agency. These texts are thus attuned to the ways in which, as Bhabha explains, “the process of [cultural] hybridity” creates “a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation,” “the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge.”4 At the turn of the twenty-

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first century, the United States has become even more diverse than it has ever been, and demographic statistics suggest that the trend will continue, which may explain the increasing interest both in the need for new forms and conceptions of community and in the possibility of creating these out of the diverse models of community that exist within the various (hybrid) ethnic American cultures that coexist within the United States. Indeed, the novels I examine not only acknowledge processes of hybridization but also explore their positive possibilities for the nation and its future. In order to create alternative conceptions of community and communal agency, these literary texts build from, at the same time they move beyond, 1960s and 1970s forms of communitarianism that all too often naively replicated the hierarchies of the dominant structures they opposed. Moreover, these texts actively challenge the 1980s and 1990s retrenchment to a market- and consumer-driven individualism while refusing to reject the vitality of the individual. Instead, these novels offer new hybrid versions of community and communal agency created from a mixing of various culturally specific models that emphasize the dynamic interrelation and interaction of the individual and the community. Such a focus on community and communal forms of agency also responds to the debates vis-à-vis the possibility of agency at a historical juncture in which individuals are understood as culturally produced. While the novels I discuss in this study present characters that are culturally produced, they also insist that the forces that produce individuals are multiple, so that individuals always necessarily contain or are made up of a variety of subject positions, some of which may exist in contradiction to each other. Consequently, individuals can band (or not) with other individuals on the basis of one such subject position or a cluster of them in politically efficacious configurations. Such strategic banding together or community building not only evidences agency but also makes possible forms of agency that derive impetus from such communities. While such groupings and communities are more local and temporary than traditional large-scale social movements, they nevertheless make possible actions that can have material effects on real human beings. To imagine such communities, all the novels I examine in this study surprisingly build to varying degrees upon the idea of kinship ties. I say “surprisingly” because kinship has tended to contract as a concept within the context of official public rhetoric in the United States throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Given the primacy

188  Conclusion

accorded the nuclear family within U.S. law and customs, kinship has come to denote little more than biological ties, most specifically those between parents and their children. Moreover, with the exception of the realm of law — particularly with respect to issues of inheritance and of control over women and minors — kinship has tended to be associated with the private, domestic sphere and ignored as a model for activist community building. What the novels by Tan, Kingsolver, Castillo, and Morrison all explore, however, are the multiple ways in which other cultural traditions configure and envision kinship and the possibilities of alternative models and ideals of kinship for creatively reimagining community and communal agency in ways that subvert hierarchical structures, as well as the arbitrary line conventionally drawn between the private and public spheres. Indeed, these texts broaden the concept of kinship to emphasize not biological ties but human affective ties, insisting on the crucial role of empathy and caring not only in helping human beings survive in the world physically and psychologically but also for creating the communal base for human beings to act in order to shape and reshape the world in which they live. These explorations of the possibilities of kinship for constructing new models of community engage in a revaluing of the realm of empathy and caring and an assertion of its import for what has long been termed the public sphere. By presenting progressive material changes in the world as dependent on developing models of communal agency that value affective human connections and interactions, these novels by American women offer new ways of thinking about community and agency as the United States moves into a new century. As such, these texts participate in and contribute to contemporary intellectual work aimed at exploring the possibilities of community, coalition, and agency at the turn of the twenty-first century within the framework of feminist and ethical theories that seek to reconceptualize justice in terms of human affective ties. These texts point out the collective and affective nature of efforts to promote the common good within the context of increased international attention to the issue of human rights, constructed on a notion of the dignity of all human beings that derives from the Enlightenment tradition — an aspect of Enlightenment thought that continues to have positive material effects in the world, in that it grounds the ideals as well as (to various degrees) the legal and social policies of most European and North American nations and many others across the globe. The novels I examine in this study thus offer kinship as a useful existing conceptual model that can be broadened to encompass human, rather

Looking to the Future  189

than merely biological, connections based upon caring, love, mutual responsibility, solidarity, and justice. Another strategy that distinguishes the novels I analyze in this book is that they all choose to represent their visions of new forms of community through utopian moments and/or endings. One potential problem with this strategy is that the possibilities that these texts offer their readers for reimagining community might be viewed as unrealizable, as existing in a realm of fantasy that has no connection with the concrete material world. However, that would be missing the point. Utopia and fantasy have historically functioned as literary genres that enable both social critique and the imagining of new social structures. Anything that does not yet exist appears utopian and/or fantastic, but that does not mean it cannot be created and come into being. The world in which most human beings at the start of the twenty-first century move daily is filled with material objects and tools that once would have been relegated to the realms of utopia and/or fantasy, from the electricity that lights their buildings and runs the various machines on which they rely, to the cars they drive, to the medical advances that have lengthened their lives considerably, to the computers like the one on which I typed the text of this book. Moreover, the democratic governmental and legal structures of the United States, as well as the very idea of human rights and dignity, are notions that at various points in human history have been positioned as merely utopian and/or fantastic. In other words, any reaching beyond accepted dominant forms and norms always appears to be a utopian gesture and yet is absolutely crucial to the process of continuing to imagine new ways of bringing to fruition the American ideals of justice and freedom for all its citizens. Although forms of realism are useful for exploring and critiquing existing problems, moving past the known and familiar necessarily entails a leap into the realm of utopia. All the novels I examine in this study make such a leap as they offer alternative forms of community that aim to satisfy the common good via mutual responsibility and caring, loving support. As the United States moves into the twenty-first century, it faces some tremendous challenges as well as opportunities. The horrific terrorist bombing of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, with its huge human death toll and psychological trauma on both an individual and national scale, and the responses to this event are particularly apt markers of those challenges and opportunities. Within the United States itself, the immediate human response both locally and nationally was one of sorrow as well as of a tremendous outpouring of

190  Conclusion

civic and communal action. Americans on- and off-site responded with empathy — “the ability to ‘feel into’ someone else’s experience”5 — by offering their time, skills, money, and prayers to those who could still be helped at the site of the tragedy. Communal and collective actions had a very real material impact. At the same time, however, governmental and legal actions to deal with the terrorist threat against the nation drastically curtailed hard-won civil liberties for all U.S. citizens and permanent residents and have resulted in a culture of suspicion aimed against all those who resemble the physical stereotype of Middle Eastern people — in effect sanctioning a particular type of racism as a by-product of efforts to protect the nation. Such sanctioned racism, engendered by equating a physical/racial type with terrorism, works against community and is clearly problematic in a nation that contains an increasingly diverse population in terms of race, ethnicity, and culture and that continues to assert ideals of liberty and freedom. As the Arab American protagonist of Diana Abu-Jaber’s 2003 novel Crescent notes about the “exchange students and immigrants from the Middle East” who make up the customers who hang out at Nadia’s Café in Los Angeles for the “Real True Arab Food” and for the community the place offers: “Sometimes she used to scan the room and imagine the word terrorist. But her gaze ran over the faces and all that came back to her were words like lonely, and young.”6 While developing adequate defense against terrorism is clearly necessary at a historical moment during which terrorism has become a formidable weapon and form of power for the disgruntled and disenfranchised of the world, and while the United States would be delinquent if it did not defend itself more vigilantly in the aftermath of the events of 9/11 that proved that the nation is not impervious to such attacks, the United States is faced with the difficult task of finding ways of balancing defense with its ideals of human rights and liberty. As Gerard Delanty similarly notes, “Security and freedom do not fit too easily together.”7 Such high ideals have been the hallmark of the United States as a nation and yet have proved historically to be difficult ideals to uphold. However, they absolutely need to be upheld if the United States is to continue creating itself in its own image of a united and principled people. As the speaker in Arab American poet Mohja Kahf’s 2001 poem “We Will Continue Like Twin Towers” poignantly muses: “I will continue to invite your children / to play with my children. / Will you continue to want your children / to come and go with mine?”8 Immigrants have been and continue to be drawn to the United States at least in part on

Looking to the Future  191

the basis of those ideals, and so it remains vital that the United States continue to strive to make human rights and liberty a reality for all its citizens and residents. On the international level, reactions to the events of 9/11 also moved toward the communal, demonstrating a collective human empathy in the face of the senseless deaths of so many fellow human beings. De­ lanty even suggests in his 2003 book Community that “the 11 September terrorist attack opened a space for politics to be redefined around world community.”9 Although such a space was closed up very quickly by the United States’ preference for unilateral military action (first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq), other nations’ criticism of that strategy, and the resulting political tensions, a brief glimpse nevertheless emerged of the possibility for thinking in terms of a world community of human beings linked by their common empathetic humanity. A more recent and perhaps more extended glimpse of such a world community emerged following the December 2004 tsunami in Asia. The outpouring of international empathetic responses in the form of words and prayers as well as of national and individual contributions of money, time, supplies, human resources, and skills exemplifies the best of what thinking in terms of a world community might mean and accomplish. Although some of these efforts are still at work in Asia, however, most people around the globe have returned to their own lives and again withdrawn from that world community they temporarily joined in some fashion. The same is true for most Americans with respect to the events of 9/11. Indeed, major disasters tend to engender a gut understanding that to be human involves what Emmanuel Levinas describes as “love of the other, [and] responsibility for one’s fellowman”10 and a resulting impulse and willingness to join and contribute to some larger human community, whether global, national, or local in character; the problem is that this human understanding and activist response is often very short-lived. To bring my focus back more specifically to the United States, while empathetic responses by Americans to both the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Asian tsunami resulted in an impetus to join a larger community linked by a common humanity and, subsequently, in concrete actions that produced material results in the form of vast amounts of humanitarian aid, Americans nevertheless shifted rather quickly back to their ordinary individual lives and away from thinking in terms of a broader human community. As these recent examples of empathetic community formation demonstrate, human empathy is a means by which people connect and can be incredibly powerful if and when people act upon

192  Conclusion

it, particularly since the emphasis on a shared humanity and the responsibility attached to it breaks down barriers of race, class, gender, nation, geography, and culture. However, as Martha Manning emphasizes, “Without an action component, empathy, in most situations, is little more than a nicety” and “loses its power.”11 This is why rethinking community in terms that validate care, love, nurturance, and mutual responsibility as the action components of human empathy is so vital to the future of the United States if it is going to continue working to instantiate its ideals of human rights and equality within an increasingly diverse nation. What is at stake for the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century is its very identity as a nation capable of uniting people of diverse races, ethnicities, and cultures on the basis of the laudable ideals of human rights and of justice and equality for all. What this project has aimed to demonstrate is that American literature is actively contributing to this task of shoring up and developing that identity by offering creative renditions of ways to acknowledge, revalue, and make use of the hybrid cultural traditions that make up the present-day United States. The novels I examine in this study highlight the variety of ways in which Americans have been experimenting with creating new hybrid forms of community that operate on the basis of mutual responsibility and affective ties and that reject hierarchical structures. Although this book focuses on a limited number of late twentieth-century novels by American women in order to substantiate its claims through substantive analysis, my contention is that these texts exemplify a larger trend that has been and continues to be active within American literature to mine the various hybrid ethnic cultural traditions that exist within the United States as a means of creatively reimagining community, coalition, and agency for the future.

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Notes 1. Introduction 1. Reed et al., p. 230. Sollors makes the claim not only that America is “a polyethnic nation” but that “polyethnic countries are the rule and not the exception in the world today” (Beyond Ethnicity, p. 260). 2. Richard Rodriguez, “An American Writer,” p. 11. 3. Delanty, Community, p. 108. 4. Ibid., p. 158. 5. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 25. 6. Lauret, Introduction, p. 7. Melucci argues that globally “the reaffirmation of a cultural heritage consisting of the language, customs, and traditions of an ethnic group has given minorities a weapon with which to oppose the cultural and linguistic monopoly of dominant groups and resist forced integration into the systems of symbolic codes imposed by the center” (Challenging Codes, pp. 146 – 147). 7. Sollors, The Invention of Ethnicity, pp. xv – xvi. 8. Lauret, Introduction, pp. 3 – 4. 9. TuSmith, All My Relatives, p. 4. 10. Joseph, Nomadic Identities, p. 88. 11. TuSmith, All My Relatives, pp. 15, 21. 12. Lichterman, The Search for Political Community, pp. 17, 213. 13. Delanty, Community, pp. 140, 132. 14. Melucci, Challenging Codes, p. 187. Castells similarly argues that “local democracy [. . .] appears to be flourishing” and, indeed, locates hope in “movements emerging from communal resistance” (The Information Age, pp. 350, 360). 15. Delanty, Community, p. 190. 16. Certainly, I am here simplifying the formulation in the sense that dominant white males also need to be heterosexual, able-bodied, and wealthy, for example. Moreover, white women clearly hold different positions from those held by women from marginalized ethnic or racial groups. 17. Although they both challenge the concept of the humanist subject, poststructuralism and postmodernism can neither be equated nor collapsed. As I argue in Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse, postmodernism “is an umbrella term which encompasses a variety of sociohistorical, theoretical, and aesthetic phenomena,” while “poststructuralism refers to a historically specific set of philosophical discourses.” Moreover, “poststructuralist theories tend to focus on deconstruction, while postmodern theories and aesthetics emphasize both deconstruction and reconstruction.” With respect to subjectivity, “postmodern theories and aesthetics tend not only to challenge established notions of the subject but also to seek new ways of reconceptualizing the subjects that challenge and deuniversalize the presuppositions of Western culture” (pp. 26 – 27).

18. Mouffe, “Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics,” pp. 372, 381. 19. Braidotti defines a “figuration” as “a politically informed account of an alternative subjectivity” and calls for “alternative figurations as a way out of the old schemes of thought” (Nomadic Subjects, pp. 1, 3). 20. Fraser, Revaluing French Feminism, pp. 17, 178. 21. Young, “The Ideal of Community,” p. 300. 22. Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity, p. 142. While Dallmayr’s discussion of community resonates with my own here, his use of the term “communitarian” works within the context of my ideas only if read generally, given that much communitarian theory tends to be rather conservative and does not move in the more radical directions I seek to explore. 23. Scott, “The Campaign against Political Correctness,” p. 42. 24. Messer-Davidow, “Acting Otherwise,” p. 29. 25. Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” p. 78. 26. Radhakrishnan argues, for example, that there exists a need “for the creation of non-aggressive, non-coercive, and generous space where different and multiple constituencies may meet collectively” (“Poststructuralist Politics,” p. 323). 27. Delanty, Community, p. 12. 28. Christenson and Robinson, “In Search of Community Development,” pp. 4 – 5. The dates for Aristotle and Hobbes derive from the “Biographical Names” section of Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, pp. 1393, 1410. 29. See Mayo, Cultures, Communities, Identities, p. 37, and Rubin and Rubin, Community Organizing and Development, p. 82. 30. Delanty, Community, p. 3. 31. Martinez-Brawley, Perspectives on the Small Community, pp. 25, 50. 32. Delanty, Community, p. 1. Although Delanty focuses almost exclusively on “belonging” as that which draws people to community, my project seeks to add survival and justice as also drawing people to community. 33. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, p. 30. 34. Delanty, Community, p. 13. 35. Ibid., p. 21. 36. Mayo, Cultures, Communities, Identities, p. 46. 37. Delanty, Community, p. 25. 38. Ibid., p. 24. 39. Bauman, Community, p. 150. 40. Although Bauman does not use the phrase “ethics of care,” his formulation is in keeping with the ideas of an ethics of care, as discussed by Tronto, which positions “care” as a “moral” as well as a “political concept” (Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 21) and is most often associated with women and feminist thought — see the next section of the introduction for a more detailed discussion of an ethics of care. 41. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 27. 42. Levinas, Entre Nous, pp. 228, 5. 43. Levinas, “On the Trail of the Other,” p. 41.

196  Notes

44. Corlett, Community without Unity, p. 11. 45. Pahl, On Friendship, pp. 38, 35, 123. Pahl argues that “all friendship presupposes a form of community” (160). 46. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. xxxvii. 47. Michaels, “An American Tragedy,” p. 73. 48. Lichterman, The Search for Political Community, p. 6. 49. Michaels, “An American Tragedy,” p. 73. 50. Baier, “How Can Individualists Share Responsibility?” p. 303. Also see Fluck’s “ ‘Money is God’.” 51. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 191. 52. Kimmel, Manhood in America, pp. 26, 20, 23. The dates for Franklin derive from the “Biographical Names” section of Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictio­ nary, p. 1405. 53. Fluck, “ ‘Money Is God,’ ” pp. 432, 431. 54. Werhane, “Community and Individuality,” p. 15. 55. Shanahan, Toward a Genealogy of Individualism, p. 11. 56. Appiah, “Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity,” p. 307. 57. Shanahan, Toward a Genealogy of Individualism, p. 123. 58. As I will discuss later, other conceptions of human rights, identity, and subjectivity have developed alongside the dominant ones in the United States, particularly as a result of the growing multiethnic character of its citizenship; and these alternative conceptions are today finding voice in various venues, including contemporary literature. 59. Appiah, “Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity,” pp. 325, 320. 60. Delanty, Community, p. 49. 61. Ibid., pp. 71, 90 – 91, 112. Mayo explains the conservative aspects of mainstream communitarianism as a consequence of its “emphasis upon people’s responsibilities” and its “agenda for remoralisation” (Cultures, Communities, Identities, p. 37). 62. Lichterman, The Search for Political Community, pp. 11, 16, 4. Delanty also notes that “participation in many kinds of community requires highly individualized egos who are willing consciously to support collective goals and values” (Community, p. 189). 63. Delanty, Community, pp. 112, 122, 125. 64. See Bonjean’s “The Community as Research Site,” for example. 65. Naples, Grassroots Warriors, p. 1. 66. Christenson and Robinson, “In Search of Community Development,” p. 1. 67. Weil, Preface, pp. xv – xvi. 68. Christenson and Robinson, “In Search of Community Development,” p. 6. 69. See, for example, Rivera and Erlich’s edited volume, Community Organizing in a Diverse Society. 70. Lichterman, The Search for Political Community, p. 219. 71. Naples, Grassroots Warriors, pp. 2 – 4, 11, 21, 63, 90. 72. Abrahams, “Negotiating Power, Identity, Family, and Community,” pp. 768, 772.

Notes  197

73. Stall and Stoecker, “Community Organizing,” pp. 748, 732. Indeed, Alinsky argues in Rules for Radicals that the aim of community organizing is to “create mass organizations” (3) and “the radical has the job of organizing” (11) the people, so that “organizations are created, in large part, by the organizer” who must undergo “training” (63) to do so. 74. Naples, Grassroots Warriors, pp. 112­ – 113. Naples further notes that “the notion of activist mothering draws attention to the caretaking activities of women who do not have children of their own and who conceive of their community work as mothering” (112). 75. Abrahams, “Negotiating Power, Identity, Family, and Community,” p. 770. 76. Stall and Stoecker, “Community Organizing,” p. 732. 77. Naples, Grassroots Warriors, pp. 153, 179. Naples notes how “the community workers [she interviewed] stressed the role of personal experiences with racism, sexism, and poverty for enhancing their commitment to community work” (181). 78. Held, “Care and the Extension of Markets,” pp. 21 – 22. 79. Collins, Fighting Words, p. 200. 80. Naples, Grassroots Warriors, pp. 180, 182. 81. Cherie Brown, The Art of Coalition Building, p. 3. 82. Barber, “Participatory Democracy,” p. 921. As Guinier notes, participatory democracy thus involves “collective deliberation” and “ongoing accommodation” (Lift Every Voice, p. 252). As Rowbotham stresses, “Participatory democracy only works if everyone accepts a certain give and take, a respect for one another’s experience, a desire to remain connected” (“The Women’s Movement,” p. 76). 83. Mueller, “Ella Baker,” pp. 53, 51. 84. Evans, Personal Politics, pp. 234, 87. 85. Robnett, How Long? How Long? pp. 19, 10. 86. Ibid., p. 200. 87. Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, pp. 79, 62. 88. Evans, Personal Politics, pp. 108 – 111. 89. For example, see the scholarship of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. 90. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions, p. viii. 91. As Docherty notes in his introduction to Postmodernism, an abstract conceptual mathematical form of reason, which is often referred to as instrumental reason and has come to dominate Western discourses in the twentieth century, conceptualizes knowledge “as abstract and utilitarian, as a mastery over recalcitrant nature,” and is thus “characterized by power” (5 – 6). 92. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions, pp. 102, 21 – 22. 93. Mansbridge, “Feminism and Democracy,” p. 149. 94. Garth and Sarat, “Justice and Power,” pp. 1, 11. 95. See Fineman (“Justice in Law and Society,” p. 81) and Eurick (“Punishment, Power, and Justice,” p. 37). 96. Fisk, “Justice and Universality,” pp. 227 – 228. 97. Hartog, “John Barry’s Custodial Rights,” p. 167. 98. Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity, p. 9.

198  Notes

99. Gilligan, “Remapping the Moral Domain,” pp. 482 – 485. 100. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, p. 2. 101. Broughton, “Women’s Rationality and Men’s Virtues,” p. 135. 102. These ideas were spurred by Jaggar’s notion of “a feminist rather than feminine form of care” that is simultaneously critical and nurturant, a notion that recasts “care, friendship, and love” as “critical rather than sentimental emotions” (“Toward a Feminist Conception,” pp. 132, 138). However, Jaggar retains an opposition between the terms critical and sentimental that the novels I examine move beyond by asserting the possibility that sentiment and emotion can themselves be critical. 103. MacKinnon, “Consciousness Raising,” pp. 165, 171, 166. 104. Sarachild, “Consciousness Raising,” p. 490. 105. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 155. 106. Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship,” pp. 75 – 76. 107. Yuval-Davis, “Beyond Difference,” p. 4. 108. See James’s “Mothering” and Collins’s Black Feminist Thought for discussions of the practice of othermothering within the African American community. 109. Vinacke and Gullickson, “Age and Sex Differences,” p. 1228. 110. Vinacke et al., “Accommodative Strategy and Communication,” p. 511. 111. Vinacke and Gullickson, “Age and Sex Differences,” p. 1229. 112. Chertkoff, “Sociopsychological Theories,” p. 314. 113. Rowbothan, “The Women’s Movement,” p. 65. 114. Radhakrishnan, “Poststructuralist Politics,” p. 326. 115. Miami Theory Collective, Community at Loose Ends, p. ix. 116. Feminism is an active political stance in that it critiques the dominant male-centered culture from a particular position and viewpoint that takes into consideration the complex of power relations — particularly gender/sex relations — between people, institutions, ideologies, languages, and other systems that function within the culture at large, and aims in various ways (depending on the feminism) to end women’s oppression by seeking specific social and cultural changes within the context of everyday material existence. 117. Evans, Personal Politics, pp. 212, 200. Deborah King also notes that “social movements for racial equality in the United States” served as “predecessors, catalysts, and prototypes for women’s collective action.” However, King argues that “black women . . . did not experience sexism within the race movement in quite the same ways that brought many white women to feminist consciousness within either civil rights or New Left politics” and that “the black women of SNCC created within it a women’s liberation group which later became an independent Feminists-of-color organization, the Third World Women’s Alliance, which is today the only surviving entity of SNCC” (“Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness,” pp. 77, 87 – 88). 118. Adams, Grass Roots, p. 11. 119. In a related but less specific vein, Haraway advises that the emphasis needs to be on “affinity, not identity” (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 155). 120. Della Porta and Diani, Social Movements, p. 87.

Notes  199

2. Choosing Hope and Remaking Kinship 1. Elaine Kim notes in her groundbreaking Asian American Literature (1982) that “the theme that underscores the contemporary body of Asian American literature is the need for community” (278). Tan’s novel continues this trend. 2. Shanahan, Toward a Genealogy of Individualism, p. 128. 3. Brannigan, Striking a Balance, p. 242. 4. Shen similarly notes that The Joy Luck Club “presents a continuous whole more meaningful than the sum of its parts” (“Born of a Stranger,” p. 235). 5. McAlister, “(Mis)reading The Joy Luck Club,” p. 103. 6. Ho, In Her Mother’s House, pp. 149, 150. 7. Ibid., p. 151. 8. Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 45. Excerpts from The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, copyright © 1989 by Amy Tan. Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Subsequent citations of The Joy Luck Club will appear parenthetically in the text by page number. 9. Tronto argues that “women remain almost entirely excluded from power in political, economic, and cultural institutions of importance in the United States” (Moral Boundaries, pp. 1 – 2). 10. Ibid., pp. 21, 162, 3, 157, 172. Tronto further notes that “care is also devalued conceptually through a connection with privacy, with emotion, and with the needy” within the context of Western cultures that value “public accomplishment, rationality, and autonomy” (117); and she argues for a “shift from the dilemma of autonomy or dependency to a more sophisticated sense of human interdependence” (101). This argument nicely complements my discussion of Tan’s novel as presenting a notion of individual identity and agency within the collective. 11. Jaggar, “Toward a Feminist Conception,” p. 132. 12. Davis argues that the novel’s structure is that of “the short story cycle,” in which “the constituent narratives are simultaneously independent and interdependent” (“Identity in Community,” p. 4). Souris refers to Tan’s use of multiple narrators and stories as “the decentered, multiple monogue mode” in the style of Woolf and Faulkner and examines “the possibilities of connection across segments” using the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Iser (“ ‘Only Two Kinds of Daughters,’ ” p. 2). 13. Singer, “Moving Forward to Reach the Past,” p. 334. 14. Davis argues that “the short story cycle [as a literary form] looks back to oral traditions of narrative” (“Identity in Community,” p. 4). 15. Ho, In Her Mother’s House, p. 82. 16. Grice, “Asian American Fiction,” p. 135. 17. Ling, “Chinese American Women Writers,” p. 219. Ling further adds that “for women brought up in the old Chinese tradition that for eighteen hundred years codified their obedience and submission to the men in their lives [ . . . ] any writing at all was unusual, even an act of rebellion” (219). 18. Ling, Between Worlds, p. 1.

200  Notes

19. Chu, Assimilating Asians, p. 3. 20. I thus disagree with critics who argue that the characters blend or dissolve into each other. For example, Heung asserts that the “interconnections between motif, character, and incident finally dissolve individualized character and plot and instead collectivize them into an aggregate meaning existing outside the individual stories themselves” (“Daughter-Text/Mother-Text,” p. 612). Rather than dissolving, I am arguing that the individual characters retain their integrities at the same time they contribute to a collective representation. 21. In a much more general sense, Singer also argues that “Tan’s form and content are complementary rather than counterpoised” (“Moving Forward to Reach the Past,” p. 328). 22. Shear similarly notes that “the Joy Luck Club itself is the determination to hope in the face of constantly altering social situations and continually shifting rules” (“Generational Differences,” p. 195). 23. Manning, The Common Thread, p. 33. 24. Lee, “Organizing in the Chinese American Community,” pp. 120, 121. 25. Ling, Between Worlds, pp. 1, 2. 26. For example, Slote and De Vos make the sweeping argument that “the family constitutes the central element of those societies that have been profoundly influenced by the Confucian, and later Neo-Confucian, mandate” (Introduction, p. ix). 27. Tu, “Probing,” p. 124. 28. Cua, “Confucian Philosophy, Chinese,” p. 540. 29. Brannigan, Striking a Balance, p. 190. 30. Slote, “Psychocultural Dynamics,” pp. 37, 46. 31. Ling, Between Worlds, pp. 6, 3. 32. Slote, “Psychocultural Dynamics,” p. 38. 33. Ling, Between Worlds, pp. 1, 6. 34. Ibid., p. 9. 35. Tu, “Confucius and Confucianism,” p. 33. 36. Chu, Assimilating Asians, pp. 156, 165. 37. Kuo, “Confucianism and the Chinese Family,” p. 244. Although Kuo’s discussion focuses on Chinese immigrants to Singapore, some of his broad statements such as this one seem potentially applicable to Chinese immigrants to other places, such as the United States. 38. The formation of the Joy Luck Club thus exemplifies Lowe’s more general claim that “the making of Asian American culture includes practices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented” (Immigrant Acts, p. 65). Furthermore, using Ho’s terms, I would argue that the Joy Luck Club “articulate[s] the private and domestic/familial experiences as significant sites in which identity and culture are negotiated and contested” (In Her Mother’s House, p. 102). 39. Slote, “Psychocultural Dynamics,” p. 38. 40. Ho, In Her Mother’s House, p. 183. Although Ho’s argument parallels mine as she focuses on how the women form “an extended family,” “a network of women loving, nurturing, learning, and caring for each other collectively” (183), I would

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add that the Joy Luck Club includes the women’s husbands and children and thus is a larger extended family and collectivity. 41. Heung, “Daughter-Text/Mother-Text,” p. 602. 42. For example, Bow criticizes The Joy Luck Club on the basis that “the maternal connection is mystified as a genetic inheritance” so that the novel “uses a racialized discourse of genetics to explain [ . . . ] women’s connection” (Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion, p. 95); and Li blasts the novel’s “appeal to blood heritage and ancestral subconscious” as being “regressively feudal and antidemocratic” (Imagining the Nation, p. 124). 43. Hamilton, “Feng Shui,” pp. 11, 7. 44. Chu, Assimilating Asians, pp. 157, 152. 45. Sau-Ling Wong, “ ‘Sugar Sisterhood,’ ” p. 185. Although Wong is on target when she warns that these retrospective stories fall into a “quasi-ethnographic, Orientalist discourse” even if the novel at the same time offers “anti-Orientalist statements” (181), I would argue that the novel’s overt framing of the stories with references to the present-day United States highlights that Orientalist potential and thus implicitly criticizes it. Bow notes that “Asian American literary texts may also replicate normative American values (and apply them to Asia)” (Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion, p. 20). Yuan’s argument that the mothers’ stories are “informed by a complex process of translation, translocation, and transfiguration of the original experiences in China” (“The Semiotics of China Narratives,” p. 292) most clearly approximates my point. 46. Yuan, “Mothers’ ‘China Narrative,’ ” p. 352. Yuan further explains that “recollection” is “a dialectical process in which the past and the present engage each other in a continuous dialogue, each revising and configuring the other endlessly” (353). 47. Heung, “Daughter-Text/Mother-Text,” p. 607. Yuan also notes that, for the mothers in Tan’s novel, “recollection becomes an imaginative process of selfcreation,” a “strategy for self-affirmation and self-construction” (“Mothers’ ‘China Narrative,’ ” pp. 358, 356). 48. Indeed, many critics read the mothers as more static characters: Bow argues that individualism is “denied the mothers’ generation” (Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion, p. 97); Kafka argues that “the mothers remain fixed, of the past” ([Un]doing the Missionary Position, p. 18); and Li argues that the mothers’ “minds and memories are forever mummified in their ancestral land” (Imagining the Nation, p. 115). In contrast, I read Tan’s novel as presenting the mothers as evolving characters who must themselves negotiate a Chinese American identity. 49. Gupta, Introduction, p. 11. Although Gupta focuses primarily on South Asian immigrants from India in her discussion, these particular comments are in concert with Tan’s presentation of the mothers in her novel. 50. Ho, In Her Mother’s House, p. 23. 51. Espiritu, “Race, Class, and Gender,” p. 140. 52. Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion, p. 28. Bow further argues that “the gender position of Asian women improved upon immigration as a direct result of the disruption of the social fabric of the family” (28).

202  Notes

53. Slote, “Psychocultural Dynamics,” pp. 39, 41. 54. Lee, “Organizing in the Chinese American Community,” p. 121. 55. Kafka argues that Ying-ying “has traded in the harshest forms of gender asymmetry in China for inauthenticity — for a benign gender asymmetry in the United States [and in her marriage to a white Irish man], but gender asymmetry, nevertheless” ([Un]doing the Missionary Position, p. 18). 56. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, p. 64. 57. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes, p. 17. 58. Tu, “Confucius and Confucianism,” p. 13. 59. Pahl, On Friendship, pp. 1, 8. Pahl also notes that “friendship is about hope” (165), which further links his argument to Tan’s text. 60. Ling, Between Worlds, p. 20. Hagehorn makes the point that, for Chinese Americans, “our ethnic roots can indeed be traced to Asia, but the ties to America are just as binding” (“Foreword,” p. ix). 61. Ho, In Her Mother’s House, pp. 165, 166. 62. Ibid., p. 157. 63. Hum, “Articulating Authentic Chineseness,” p. 67. 64. Ho, In Her Mother’s House, p. 171. McAlister develops more fully the notion that “the embarrassed and angry responses the daughters have to their mothers are often class- as well as racially-based” (“[Mis] Reading The Joy Luck Club,” p. 113). 65. Ho, In Her Mother’s House, p. 168. 66. Hum, “Articulating Authentic Chineseness,” p. 73. 67. Tu, “Confucius and Confucianism,” p. 4. 68. Slote explains that, “although all Confucian societies are male dominant, within the home it was the mother who was the primary force. It was she who ran the household and brought up the children” (“Psychocultural Dynamics,” pp. 40 – 41). Chu notes that, “for Asian American women, the culturally assigned roles of materially preserving the family and upholding traditional ways pose multiple problems in their efforts to claim authorship, Americanness, and agency” (Assimilating Asians, p. 5). 69. Slote, “Psychocultural Dynamics,” p. 42. 70. Ling, Between Worlds, p. 11. 71. Bow notes the mothers’ and daughters’ “recognition of a commonality of experience based on their subordination as women” (Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion, p. 93), but I would argue that this recognition occurs among peers —  mothers and mothers, daughters and daughters — as well as among motherdaughter pairs. 72. Hum, “Articulating Authentic Chineseness,” pp. 62, 67. 73. Davis notes that the Joy Luck Club “prevails in the renewed relationships between first and second generation women who gather around the mah-jong table” (“Identity in Community,” p. 14). 74. Chu reads the novel’s ending with Jing-mei’s trip to China “as gesturing be­ yond intercultural understanding within America toward a horizon of international cooperation between China and the United States” (Assimilating Asians, p. 143).

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75. Hum, “Articulating Authentic Chineseness,” pp. 61, 68, 79 – 80. 76. Li, Imagining the Nation, p. 124. 77. Heung argues that Jing-mei’s reunion with her sisters performs a “melding of cross-cultural linkages” (“Daughter-Text/Mother-Text,” p. 610). 78. Bow argues that Tan’s novel “locates the mother/daughter relationship as the site for a reenvisioning of self both based on and potentially transcending a maternal legacy” (Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion, p. 71). My argument focuses on the Joy Luck Club as encompassing the mother-daughter relationships and thus as the site for such a reenvisioning of self and of agency. 79. Chu, Assimilating Asians, p. 18. 80. As Heung similarly notes, “Mutual nurturance does not arise from biological or generational connections alone; rather, it is an act affirming consciously chosen allegiances” (“Daughter-Text/Mother-Text,” p. 613). 81. Chu, Assimilating Asians, p. 22. 82. Matsuda notes that “our [Asian American] coalition does not originate in Asia. It is American” (Where Is Your Body? p. 173). 83. Ho, In Her Mother’s House, p. 39.

3. Negotiating Collectivities 1. Perry, Back Talk, pp. 148, 154. 2. Krupat, The Turn to the Native, p. 12. At the same time that Krupat rejects “the positing of a unitary and essentialized ‘Indian voice’ ” (8), an “essentialized Native/non-Native opposition — unitary, simple, and fixed or given in advance” (9)  — he nevertheless asserts that “there is no doubt that Native people have a variety of experiences that differ from (many of) those of non-Native people and that make them more likely to be sensitive, aware, in touch with the experiential dimension of a variety of Native texts” (10). 3. Weaver, That the People Might Live, pp. 37, 39. 4. Godfrey, “Barbara Kingsolver’s Cherokee Nation,” p. 259. 5. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, pp. 132, 129. 6. Deloria, Playing Indian, p. 4. 7. Krupat, Red Matters, p. 20. 8. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, p. 38. 9. Ibid., p. 141. 10. Krupat, Red Matters, p. ix. 11. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 290, 304. 12. Delanty, Community, pp. 126, 129. 13. Ibid., p. 189. 14. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, p. 46 15. Castells, The Information Age, p. 11. 16. Bradshaw, Soifer, and Gutierrez, “Toward a Hybrid Model,” pp. 29 – 30. 17. Gutierrez and Lewis, “A Feminist Perspective,” p. 99. 18. Blakely, Community Development Research, p. 18.

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19. Pressman, “Explaining the Gender Poverty Gap,” p. 17. 20. Rodgers, American Poverty, pp. 31, 27, 10. Rodgers also notes the great need for “better education or advanced job training” and for “childcare and healthcare assistance” (81). 21. Pressman, “Explaining the Gender Poverty Gap,” p. 21. 22. Rodgers, American Poverty, p. 22. 23. Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, pp. 6, 196, 199, 220. 24. I thus think that Fagan’s claim that “Alice and Taylor Greer are lovable representatives of a fierce individualism” (“Adoption as National Fantasy,” p. 255) remains oversimplified. While both women act in untraditional ways and uphold untraditional notions of family, they nevertheless do depend on each other and others in order to survive and act in the world. While Alice does raise Taylor alone and Taylor does set off alone across the United States, the novel emphasizes their need for community throughout its pages. 25. Kingsolver, The Bean Trees, pp. 17, 23, 24. All subsequent citations of The Bean Trees within this section of the chapter will appear parenthetically in the text by page number. 26. Manning, The Common Thread, pp. 33, 36. 27. Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 228. 28. Shanley, Making Babies, Making Families, p. 154. 29. hooks, Yearning, p. 27. In slightly different terms, Wallis argues that “true compassion has less to do with sympathy than it does with empathy,” which he values in terms of “the connection, the relationship, and the transaction in which everyone is changed” (Who Speaks for God? p. 42). 30. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, pp. 14, 113, 114. 31. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, p. 49. 32. Weaver, That the People Might Live, p. 11. 33. Although DeMarr similarly notes that “Taylor repeatedly makes friends and forms or becomes part of communities” (Barbara Kingsolver, p. 61), she does not go on to analyze the idea of community. 34. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 3. 35. Weil, Preface, pp. xv – xvi. 36. Shanley, Making Babies, Making Families, p. 14. I extend thanks to Marianne Novy, whose conversation and scholarly work pointed me toward exploring adoption as a means of thinking about American notions of the family. As she points out in her introduction to Imagining Adoption, “Adoption makes ambiguous the definition of parenthood and of such other important terms as family, kinship, and identity” (1). 37. DeMarr similarly points out that, once she gets to Tucson, Taylor “establish[es] a family that is broader than the birth family” (Barbara Kingsolver, p. 67); but she does not pursue the implications of this point with respect to traditional notions of the family. 38. Wegar, Adoption, Identity, and Kinship, p. 41. 39. Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, p. 27.

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40. I thank Kara Mollis for pointing out this irony of child care being provided at the mall not to help women in a general sense but specifically to encourage women’s participation in the capitalist economy. 41. Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, p. 214. Pressman similarly notes that “some nations use fiscal policy aggressively to assist low-income households” and as a result “have much lower poverty rates. In contrast, nations like Australia, Canada, Russia, and the United States fail to employ fiscal policy aggressively in an attempt to assist poor families; as a result they wind up with large poverty rates,” including “high poverty rates for FHHs [Female Headed Households] and large gender poverty gaps” (“Explaining the Gender Poverty Gap,” p. 38). 42. Rodgers, American Poverty, p. 215. 43. Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, p. 213. 44. Pahl, On Friendship, p. 160. 45. Ibid., p. 8. 46. Shanley, Making Babies, Making Families, p. 153. 47. Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel, p. 144. 48. Shanley, Making Babies, Making Families, p. 11. 49. Wallis, Who Speaks for God? p. 103. Mizrahi and Rosenthal further note the interconnection between “the inclusion of diversity” and practices of coalition (“Managing Dynamic Tensions,” p. 19). 50. Pomata, “History, Particular and Universal,” p. 23. 51. Manning, The Common Thread, pp. 40, 322. Manning thus makes clear that “empathic feelings don’t necessarily lead to altruistic or caring behavior” (46). 52. Pahl, On Friendship, p. 35. 53. Levinas, Outside the Subject, p. 125. 54. Plantz et al., “Indian Child Welfare,” p. 25. 55. Edwards and Egbert-Edwards, “Community Development,” p. 26. 56. Janet Smith, “Analyzing Ethical Conflict,” p. 7. 57. Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven, p. 51. All subsequent citations of Pigs in Heaven within this section of the chapter will appear parenthetically in the text by page. 58. Kingsolver has herself described the “different worldviews” of American white culture and Native American culture in terms of “one that values individual rights above all else and the other that values connections between the members of an entire community above all else” (quoted in Perry, Back Talk, p. 165). 59. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, pp. 50, xiii. 60. Weaver, That the People Might Live, p. 37. 61. Bernard Williams, quoted in Janet Smith, “Analyzing Ethical Conflict,” p. 1. Fagan also notes that “both Taylor’s and Annawake’s positions are morally sound” (“Adoption as National Fantasy,” p. 257). 62. Rodgers, American Poverty, pp. 29, 27. 63. Kimmel, Manhood in America, p. 23 64. Rodgers, American Poverty, pp. 23, 65, 67. 65. Ehrenreich echoes Taylor’s words when she notes, as quoted earlier in this chapter, “No one ever said that you could work hard — harder than you

206  Notes

ever thought possible — and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty” (Nickel and Dimed, p. 220). 66. Modell, Kinship with Strangers, p. 2. 67. MacEachron et al., “Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978,” pp. 452 – 453. Shanley similarly points out that, within the scope of the ICWA, “the parents’ tribal membership, not simply their race, creates the grounds for transferring jurisdiction to tribal courts” (Making Babies, Making Families, p. 36). 68. Weaver, That the People Might Live, p. 6. 69. MacEachron et al., “Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978,” p. 452. 70. Mails, The Cherokee People, pp. 90, 321. 71. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, p. 114. 72. Godfrey, “Barbara Kingsolver’s Cherokee Nation,” pp. 266, 267 – 268. 73. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, p. 38. 74. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, p. 2. 75. Edwards and Egbert-Edwards, “Community Development,” pp. 26 – 27. 76. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, p. 117. 77. Mails notes in The Cherokee People that, “actually, small bands of Cherokees had succumbed to white pressures and moved west as early as 1795. By 1817, a community of several thousand of them had settled between the White and Arkansas rivers in northwestern Arkansas” (215). He records that during the Trail of Tears episode “2,500 of the captives either died during the roundup, or from malnutrition, exposure, and brutal treatment during their few months of imprisonment” and “1,500 more [ . . . ] died along the way” (265). 78. Weaver, That the People Might Live, p. 7. 79. Mails, The Cherokee People, pp. 81, 154. 80. Ibid., p. 283. One discrepancy between The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven is that the earlier novel claims that Alice has a Cherokee grandfather while the latter novel gives her a Cherokee grandmother. My guess is that Kingsolver had to make the change after doing extensive research on the Cherokees and discovering that, as Mails notes, “the mother’s line was the primary means of tracing descent” (The Cherokee People, p. 79), so Alice and Taylor could claim a Cherokee connection only through a female ancestor. 81. Deloria, Playing Indian, p. 153. 82. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, p. xii. 83. Godfrey, “Barbara Kingsolver’s Cherokee Nation,” pp. 259, 266, 269. I find highly problematic Godfrey’s sweeping indictment that, “in spite of Kingsolver’s reformist stance, she updates a long tradition of Anglos who document and describe tribal peoples and cultures for personal gain” (265). Although Kingsolver undisputedly earned money from this novel’s publication, I see the novel’s attempt to not only critique the ways in which the United States has treated the Cherokee but also to offer a utopian vision of a less racist America as participating in and contributing to a crucial but difficult conversation about the present and future. 84. Deloria, Playing Indian, p. 150.

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85. Godfrey, “Barbara Kingsolver’s Cherokee Nation,” p. 269. 86. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, p. 127. 87. Speck and Broom, Cherokee Dance and Drama, pp. 19, 4. 88. Mails, The Cherokee People, pp. 283, 311, 312, 315. 89. Ibid., pp. 315, 321. 90. Deloria, Playing Indian, pp. 8, 186. 91. Godfrey, “Barbara Kingsolver’s Cherokee Nation,” pp. 267 – 268. 92. When she praises the Indian Child Welfare Act, Allen notes that, “in those cases [of adopted Native Children] that have come to public attention, the courts, the adopting parents, and the tribe have usually agreed on a course that will bring the child in frequent contact with on-reservation relatives, even when the adopting family has been non-Indian” (The Sacred Hoop, p. xii). The novel’s resolution of the case of Turtle thus has “real life” precedent and is not as unrealistic as some critics claim. 93. Willis, “Barbara Kingsolver, Moving On,” p. 86. 94. Warrior, Tribal Secrets, p. xx. 95. Ryan, “Barbara Kingsolver’s Lowfat Fiction,” p. 81. 96. Fagan, “Adoption as National Fantasy,” pp. 259, 260. 97. Ibid., p. 259. 98. Ibid., p. 263. 99. Schehr, Dynamic Utopia, p. 133. 100. Collins, Fighting Words, p. 195. 101. Wegar, Adoption, Identity, and Kinship, p. x. 102. Dariotis, “Developing a Kin-Aesthetic,” p. 178. 103. Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel, pp. 144, 145. Reynolds also notes that “the fiction of the past quarter-century has seen a resurgence of the fascination with community which has been the leitmotif in American women’s narratives” (TwentiethCentury American Women’s Fiction, p. 195). 104. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, pp. 3, 127.

4. Collective Liberation and Activism via Spirituality 1. Aquino, Machado, and Rodríguez, Introduction, pp. xvi, xiv. 2. Unlike Gail Pérez, I see Castillo’s novel not as “reject[ing] the Catholicism of the mothers” in favor of “alternative worldviews — precisely non-Christian” (“Ana Castillo as Santera,” pp. 59, 60) but as exploring various alternative populist spiritual traditions in order to think through ideas of agency and social praxis. 3. Aquino, “Latina Feminist Theology,” p. 134. 4. Jeanette Rodríguez, “Latina Activists,” p. 122. Aquino also emphasizes that “what makes Latina thought liberative is that it deliberately focuses on our daily activities aimed at transformation toward greater justice” (“Latina Feminist Theology,” p. 152). 5. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 5. 6. Ibid., Preface (no pagination) and pp. 77, 79. McKenna further describes a

208  Notes

new aesthetic of the border that “results from hybrid and conflicting realities” (Migrant Song, p. 109). 7. Gail Pérez, “Ana Castillo as Santera,” p. 54. 8. As TuSmith emphasizes, the term Chicana denotes “more than birthright and geographical background” in that it “indicates a specific (political) agenda” (All My Relatives, p. 174). Moya defines a Chicana as “a politically aware woman of Mexican heritage who is at least partially descended from the indigenous people of Mesoamerica and who was born and/or raised in the United States” (Learning from Experience, p. 42). 9. Neate, Tolerating Ambiguity, p. 9. Segura argues that, for activist Mexican Americans in the late 1960s and 1970s, “the principle of self-determination included asserting the term Chicano in much the same way as African Americans reclaimed the term black” (“Challenging the Chicano Text,” p. 542). 10. Hepworth, “Chicano/a Fiction,” pp. 200 – 201. 11. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, p. 71. 12. Madsen, Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature, p. 17. Quintana discusses how “the Chicano movement’s failure to critically examine the patriarchal consciousness of the dominant system led to internal power disputes and the creation of a cultural nationalism that duplicated the very hierarchical structures it opposed,” particularly in its positioning of “Chicana women [ . . . ] into the subordinate class within Chicano nationalistic literature” (Home Girls, p. 19). 13. Madsen, Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature, p. 10. 14. Ibid., p. 25. 15. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 17. 16. Ibid., p. 27. 17. Cisneros, “On the Solitary Fate,” p. 67. 18. Broyles-González, “Indianizing Catholicism,” p. 121. 19. Jeanette Rodríguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. 144. Stevens-Arroyo also asserts that the Mexican American form of Catholicism “emerged as a mode of resistance” (“Latino Catholicism,” p. 22) and that “popular religiosity is in religious expressions that fall outside of ecclesiastical control” (Introduction, p. 9). Benavides notes that “the colonial assimilation of popular and potentially disruptive religious practices has a long history within Christianity” (“Resistance and Accommodation,” p. 41). 20. Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha/In the Struggle, p. 48. 21. Jeanette Rodríguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. xx. 22. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 30. 23. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, p. 50. 24. Broyles-González, “Indianizing Catholicism,” p. 124. 25. Gail Pérez, “Ana Castillo as Santera,” p. 53. 26. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, p. 50. As Jeanette Rodríguez notes, the Virgin of Guadalupe “appeared at Tepeyac near what is now Mexico City,” and the term Nahuatl refers to the “language, values, and customs shared by a number of the peoples of the Aztec Empire” (Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 16, 2). Moreover,

Notes  209

Anzaldúa asserts that the Virgin of Guadalupe “is a synthesis of the old world and the new, of the religion and culture of the two races in our psyche [ . . . . ] She is the symbol of the mestizo” (Borderlands, p. 30). Indeed, according to Elizondo, Our Lady of Guadalupe has served over the years as “the banner of Mexican and Mexican American movements of independence, reform and liberty” (“Popular Religion,” p. 122). Jeanette Rodríguez also notes that “Our Lady of Guadalupe [has] been the driving force behind many struggles for justice among Mexicans and Mexican Americans” (Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. 149). 27. Castillo, So Far from God, p. 73. All succeeding citations of Castillo’s So Far from God will appear parenthetically in the text by page number. 28. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 27. 29. Jeanette Rodríguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. 157. 30. Ibid., “Latina Activists,” p. 127. 31. Gail Pérez, “Ana Castillo as Santera,” p. 59. 32. Jeanette Rodríguez argues that “popular religiosity is a hybrid with a life of its own,” that it is “active, dynamic, lived” (Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. 144). 33. Ibid., p. 78. 34. Moraga, “La Güera,” p. 30. 35. See Figure 6 of Therrien and Ramirez, “The Hispanic Population” (p. 4). 36. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, p. 97. 37. Pineda-Madrid, “Notes toward a Chicana Feminist Epistemology,” p. 250. 38. Neate, Tolerating Ambiguity, p. 217. Ybarra also notes that “Chicano families do exhibit a wide degree of variation” and, indeed, “range from a patriarchal to an egalitarian structure” (“Marital Decision-Making,” p. 264). 39. Jeanette Rodríguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. 78. 40. In So Far from God, doña Felicia is said to keep up “with her favorite telenovelas on Spanish cable T.V.” (44), which playfully points the reader to the telenovela form. 41. Mermann-Jozwiak, “Gritos desde la Frontera,” p. 106. 42. Vink, The Telenovela and Emancipation, p. 11. 43. Patterson, “Drama and Entertainment,” p. 61. 44. Fox, Latin American Broadcasting, pp. 1, 194. 45. Vink, The Telenovela and Emancipation, p. 11. 46. Ibid. 47. Berwanger, “The Third World,” p. 194. 48. Patterson, “Drama and Entertainment,” p. 61. 49. Mermann-Jozwiak similarly notes that Castillo’s novel “deflates the telenovela’s assumptions of romance” (“Gritos desde la Frontera,” p. 107), but she does not pursue the implications of that narrative strategy. 50. Anzaldúa explains susto as “a sudden shock or fall that frightens the soul out of the body” (Borderlands, p. 38). The source of Thomas’s supposed susto is unclear, however, unless the shock in question is the thought of marriage itself. 51. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, p. 119. 52. Beverly, “The Margins at the Center,” p. 103. 53. Ibid., pp. 95, 98. Sklodowska also stresses how testimonio focuses on “com-

210  Notes

munal experience” and on “retrieving voices of people who had seldom been heard” (“Spanish American Testimonial Novel,” p. 85). 54. Beverly, “The Margins at the Center,” p. 95. 55. Williams, “Translation and Mourning,” p. 87. 56. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, p. 119. Elenes similarly argues that “Chicana feminist narratives do not portray the self in isolation from the community or from the social structures that reproduce unequal relations of power” (“Chicana Feminist Narratives,” p. 105). 57. As Beverly explains, “The production of a testimonio generally involves the tape-recording and then the transcription and editing of an oral account by an interlocutor who is an intellectual, often a journalist or a writer.” Although Beverly wants “to distinguish testimonio from testimonial novel,” with the former having “a real person” as a narrator, he nevertheless acknowledges that “what is important about testimonio is that it produces if not the real then certainly a sensation of experiencing the real” (“The Margins at the Center,” pp. 94, 105, 102), which I argue is exactly why Castillo borrows from the form to produce So Far from God. Williams asserts that testimonios at times incorporate “the purely fictional and the quasi-fictional” (“Translation and Mourning,” p. 83). 58. Olmos notes the “collective and liberalizing nature” of the testimonio, which she argues “reflects its ties with the oral tradition of literature” (“Latin American Testimonial Narrative,” p. 193); and de Valdés explains that the “narrative voice” of the testimonio “speaks for a commonality and not the singular subjective ‘I,’ ” so that “it is an ‘I’ that is ‘us’ ” (“Latin American Testimonial Literature,” pp. 386, 388). Walter makes the related point that the unnamed narrator of So Far from God “represents both a communal and an individual voice” (“The Cultural Politics of Dislocation,” p. 90). 59. Williams, “Translation and Mourning,” p. 83. 60. Sierra and Sosa-Riddell note that “a plethora of writing challenged the portrayal of Mexican-American women as apolitical and passive” (“Chicanas as Political Actors,” p. 305). 61. Jeanette Rodríguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. 79. 62. Therrien and Ramirez, “The Hispanic Population,” p. 6. 63. Zinn, “Political Familism,” p. 242. Zinn further argues that “participation of total family units in the Chicano movement” has necessarily resulted in “an alteration of traditional sex role relationships” within the families of activists in contemporary America (237). Kaup also notes that “home and familia are charged with significance as the place of belonging, the site of authenticity” (Rewriting North American Borders, p. 213); and Chávez asserts that “familial bonds helped Mexican immigrants to survive the often hostile American environment” (“Culture, Identity, and Community,” p. 226). 64. hooks, “Homeplace,” p. 42. 65. Lanza also references hooks’s essay and makes the argument that “the home space in Castillo’s novel is infused with political resistance” and offers the sisters “sustenance, security, and spirituality” (“Hearing the Voices,” p. 66). Delgadillo similarly asserts that within this novel the home functions as “a center of sur-

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vival, recovery, and self-knowledge” (“Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance,” p. 905). 66. Gail Pérez, “Ana Castillo as Santera,” p. 72. 67. Hepworth, “Chicano/a Fiction,” p. 196. 68. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 7. With respect to the Mexican American War, Anzaldúa claims that “in 1846, the U.S. incited Mexico to war. U.S. troops invaded and occupied Mexico, forcing her to give up [ . . . ] what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and California” (7). Moreover, as Martinez notes, “the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 — a U.S. American takeover of the land of what is now the southwestern United States — [ . . . ] formally allowed Mexican citizens living in this territory to become American citizens with all the accompanying rights” (Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity, p. 69). 69. Kaup, Rewriting North American Borders, p. 17. 70. In a related vein, Gail Pérez argues that the novel reformulates family as woman centered rather than mother centered and reformulates mothering by “making nurturing reciprocal” and “establishing a new relationship between the woman-centered home and society at large” (“Ana Castillo as Santera,” p. 67). 71. Delgadillo similarly notes that the novel depicts an “active formation of solidarity among women who are oppressed” (“Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance,” p. 905). 72. Lanza, “ ‘A New Meeting with the Sacred,’ ” p. 661. 73. Many critics have made similar points. For example, Madsen notes that “Fe attempts assimilation [ . . . ] into middle-class America” but it “kills her” and that Fe’s “denial of her family, her ancestry, and her Chicana self” is itself “a form of death” (Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature, p. 100); Gillman and Floyd-Thomas assert that “Fe epitomizes [ . . . ] the ‘assimilationist’ ” (163) in that she “unreflectively gave up her culture in order to assimilate into American society” (“Con un pie a cada lado,” p. 164); and Lanza argues that, “in Fe’s chase for the American Dream, she only finds infertility, deception, and ultimately death” and “is finally able to see her home as a source of comfort, wisdom and spirituality [ . . . ] only after the outside world has done its best to destroy her” (“ ‘A New Meeting with the Sacred,’ ” p. 72). 74. Delgadillo, “Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance,” p. 903. Delgadillo further suggests that Francisco’s “family history, economic opportunities, education, war experience, and social status all contribute to shaping a religious practice that is not primarily concerned with community, but with self-testing” (903). 75. Sauer, “ ‘Saint-Making’,” pp. 72, 78 – 79, 89n23. 76. Sauer similarly notes that the novel “begins with La Loca (and her faithful) triumphing over the Church” (ibid., p. 73). 77. As Domino Renee Pérez explains, “La Llorona traditionally serves as an allegory in Chicano culture, warning people, primarily women, how to live, act, and function within established social mores” and is thus clearly a “patriarchal construction” (“Crossing Mythological Borders,” pp. 49, 51). According to Cook, “The legend of La Llorona is connected to the fears and stresses inherent in the lives of Mexican-American women” (“La Llorona,” p. 127). Rebolledo also notes

212  Notes

that La Llorona “brought together Indian and Spanish folklore and legends” (Women Singing in the Snow, p. 62). 78. Domino Renee Pérez, “Crossing Mythological Borders,” p. 51, and “Caminando Con La Llorona,” p. 110. 79. Lovibond, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” p. 395. As Hélène Cixous specifies in “Sorties,” “ ‘the’ couple man/woman” is central to the extent that “hierarchization subjects the entire conceptual organization to man” (91). 80. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, pp. 16, 84, 88, 83. 81. Madsen, Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature, p. 99. 82. In a related vein, Delgadillo notes that “Caridad’s curanderismo and spiritual life, combining attention to her own health with a vocation for healing others, allows her to challenge her own marginality and to assume agency” (“Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance,” p. 908). 83. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, pp. 13 – 16. 84. Madsen, Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature, p. 100. 85. Gail Pérez, “Ana Castillo as Santera,” p. 58. 86. Delgadillo, “Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance,” p. 907. 87. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, pp. 183, 189. Eysturoy similarly notes that “the Chicana has been defined and confined within the mother/virgin/whore stereotypes of the past, both within her own Chicano culture and within the larger American context” (Daughters of Self-Creation, p. 24). 88. As Gutiérrez-Jones explains: “Rape is constructed by means of stereotypes emphasizing that violation happens to women who transgress culturally defined gender roles. Such representations argue that women bring rape on themselves by being outside the home, by wearing provocative clothing, or by acting in ‘nontraditional’ ways” (Rethinking the Borderlands, p. 113). 89. Gonzalez, “Love and Conflict,” p. 156. 90. Alarcón, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature,” p. 182. As TuSmith further explains: “In Mexican/Chicano mythology Malitzin (also know as La Malinche and Doña Marina) is the prototypical whore who betrayed her own people by sleeping with the enemy. According to the legend, as Cortés’s mistress, interpreter/liaison, and advisor, Malintzin used her multicultural/multilingual knowledge to ensure Cortés’s conquest of the Aztec Empire (from 1519 – 1527). The beginning of the mestizo race (Malintzin bore Cortés a son) is thus attributed to a people’s initial experience at the hands of an ‘evil’ woman” (All My Relatives, p. 159). In slightly different terms, González points to “the cultural trauma of being children of the raped one” (Contemporary Mexican-American Women Novelists, p. 3). 91. TuSmith, All My Relatives, p. 159 92. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, p. 64. 93. Aldama similarly argues that “Francisco’s submission to a masculinist whore/virgin paradigm leads to his own self-destruction” (Postethnic Narrative Criticism, p. 83). 94. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 19. 95. Clarke, “Lesbianism,” p. 128. 96. As Sauer notes, the novel stresses that women’s “commitment to each other

Notes  213

sustains them” and in the case of Caridad and Esmeralda presents lesbianism and “the exclusion of the male” as “both healing and spiritual” (“ ‘Saint Making,’ ” pp. 86, 84). Delgadillo locates another connection between Caridad and Esmeralda in that they have each chosen “a life dedicated to helping others — Esmeralda as a rape counselor and Caridad as a curandera” (“Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance,” p. 901). 97. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, pp. 15, 13, 14, 29. Delgadillo also references Allen when she notes that “the voice that calls to Caridad and Esmeralda as they descend, Tsichtinako or Tse che nako, is Thought Woman in the Keres cosmology, the female spirit and intelligence that is everywhere and is everything” (904). 98. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, p. 14. 99. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, pp. 80, 84. 100. Gail Pérez, “Ana Castillo as Santera,” p. 73. 101. Castillo notes in her essay “Toward the Mother-Bond Principle” that “the comadre has often served as a confidante and social ally” (191). 102. Walter, “The Cultural Politics of Dislocation,” 91. 103. Naples, Grassroots Warriors, pp. 11, 12. 104. Delgadillo notes in passing that the characters’ “hybrid spirituality becomes one with their political action” and “parallels the practice of liberation theology” (“Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance,” p. 889), but she does not explore this parallel in any detail. 105. Castillo, “Saintly Mother and Soldier’s Whore,” pp. 102, 101. 106. Medina, “Los Espíritus Siguen Hablando,” p. 190. 107. Jeanette Rodríguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. 148. 108. Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha/In the Struggle, pp. xi, 166. 109. Brown and Ferguson, “ ‘Making a Big Stink,’ ” pp. 157 – 158. 110. I thus want to emphasize that, although Sofi functions as the initiator of the movement toward change in Tome, the novel stresses that the changes that take place come from the people and community. Consequently, I wish to reorient Gillman and Floyd-Thomas’s claim that, “elaborating a vision for the future, Sofi implements a liberatory project in which each person in the community participates in order to make the future vision a reality and in which all are asked to contribute” (“Con un pie a cada lado,” p. 170) so as to ground the agency in the community rather than in Sofi; in my view, the community and not Sofi implements the project. I am thus in agreement with Toyosato’s notion that Tome’s “sense of community [ . . . ] is formulated through collective action and participation in communal concerns” (“Grounding Self and Action,” p. 306). 111. Gillman and Floyd-Thomas offer the related argument that “by using rituals of popular religiosity [ . . . ] the Tomé community is able to preserve their faith and traditions by making them accountable to their current socio-political concerns” (“Con un pie a cada lado,” p. 167). 112. Broyles-Gonzalez, “Indianizing Catholicism,” p.117. 113. Delgadillo, “Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance,” p. 911. 114. Ibid.

214  Notes

115. Ibid., p. 912. 116. On a similar note, Delgadillo argues that “the procession epitomizes the power of a hybrid resistance” (“Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance,” p. 912). 117. My argument thus strongly contrasts with that of Manríquez, who asserts that MOMAS “makes mothers a parody” and that “all the social good Sofi accomplishes is subverted by her presidency of the MOMAS” (“Ana Castillo’s So Far from God,” p. 45). 118. Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha/In the Struggle, p. 4. Kafka also notes that Chicana writers tend to choose “collective” rather than “individualistic solutions” to problems ([Out]Classed Women, p. xiv). 119. Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha/In the Struggle, pp. 197, 190. As Anzaldúa asserts, “Autonomy, however, is not separatism”; indeed, she argues that “we must struggle together” to “brew and forge a revolution” aimed at reconstructing society (introduction to “El Mundo Zurdo,” p. 196).

5. The Call to Love, to Assert Power with Others This chapter is a much expanded and more fully developed version of my article “Re-Imagining Agency: Toni Morrison’s Paradise” (African American Review 36, no. 4 [Winter 2002]), which I wrote and submitted before any critical articles on Paradise were published and/or available. Wherever possible, I have tried to go back and reference articles whose arguments overlap with mine. In expanding the article into the present chapter, I reframed my discussion of the novel by situating it much more specifically within the shifting politics of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. 1. Carson, “African-American Leadership and Mass Mobilization,” p. 4. 2. Boyd, “Radicalism and Resistance,” p. 51. 3. hooks, Salvation, pp. xxii, xxiii, 9. hooks reinforces her point about the dangers of the black power movement by noting that “black males [ . . . ] were conducting a war with white men over who could be the real man, the hard man, the big dick” (136). 4. Cole and Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk, pp. 84, 150 (the latter quoted from Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, p. 14). 5. hooks, Salvation, p. xxiii. 6. Cole and Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk, p. 4. 7. In a similar vein, Conner argues that Morrison’s novel offers “a cohesive and nurturing sense of love” as “the best, perhaps only, hope for healing a devastated world.” However, his argument centers on Morrison’s movement “away from the sublime” and toward “the tenets of the beautiful” (“From the Sublime to the Beautiful,” pp. 74, 51). 8. hooks, Salvation, pp. xviii, xxiii. 9. The novel’s notion of self-in-community has much in common with Nancy’s notion of community as a “being-in-common, which gives rise to the existence of being-self” (The Inoperative Community, p. xxxvii).

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10. As Stall and Stoecker argue, “Communities do not just happen. They must be organized” (“Community Organizing,” p. 730). See Chapter 1 for a fuller discussion of community and coalition work. 11. James, “Mothering,” pp. 51, 44. TuSmith also notes “the black community’s extended family network and communal child-rearing practices, which date back to slavery days if not before” (All My Relatives, p. 83). 12. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, pp. 119, 121, 129. 13. Collins, Fighting Words, p. 204. 14. Ibid., pp. 189, 188. 15. Widdowson also notes that the character of Misner is connected to the civil rights movement (“The American Dream Refashioned,” p. 327). 16. Morrison, Paradise, p. 82. All subsequent citations of Paradise will appear parenthetically in the text by page number. 17. Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest,” p. 127. 18. Painter, Foreword, p. ix. Also see Page for a more extensive discussion of the conflict between slavery and the American concept of “the frontier” as embodying “freedom” (Reclaiming Community, p. 1). 19. Hunt, “Paradise Lost,” p. 122. 20. As LeSeur asserts, the Disallowing is so traumatic precisely because it “is an example of men taking on the role of God, deciding who is worthy and who is not” (“Moving beyond the Boundaries,” pp. 12 – 13). Jones argues that the novel’s plot is thus “driven by a rejection from the social order” (“The Eye of a Needle,” p. 4). Widdowson suggests that “the novel is about the ‘failure’ of Reconstruction” (“The American Dream Refashioned,” p. 321). 21. hooks argues that “racism and sexism are interlocking systems of domination which uphold and sustain one another” (Yearning, p. 59). 22. Tally, “Reality and Discourse,” p. 43. Tally further notes that “the importance of one color has simply been substituted by another” (43). Jones similarly asserts that Haven’s and Ruby’s inhabitants “react to their own rejection by reperpetuating those differences — by re-investing in the myth of racial purity” (“The Eye of a Needle,” p. 5). 23. Min-Jung Kim, “Expanding the Parameters of Literary Studies,” p. 1036. 24. Castells, The Information Age, p. 356. 25. Bauman, Community, p. 142. 26. Clewell, “From Destructive to Constructive Haunting,” p. 135. Clewell further notes that the men “believe that only a radically unified community sustained by the same lineage, same experience, and same ways of thinking can protect them from the psychic and physical violence of future social injustice” (132). The sad irony, of course, is that they themselves perpetrate psychic and physical violence and thus social injustice. 27. Young, “The Ideal of Community,” p. 303. 28. Kearly similarly notes that Paradise demonstrates “the dangers of racebased notions of reproduction, notions of genealogy,” in that they “lead to abuse of women and children” (“Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” p. 3). 29. Davidson also notes that “Billie Delia is denigrated not for the stated moral

216  Notes

reason that she is a “loose woman” but rather for the unstated reason that “she is light-skinned” (“Racial Stock and 8-Rocks,” pp. 6 – 7). 30. Krumholz notes that “the example of the New Fathers of Ruby challenges models of black nationhood based on the centrality and sanctity of manliness and fatherhood” (“Reading and Insight,” p. 7). 31. Min-Jung Kim, “Expanding the Parameters of Literary Studies,” p. 1021. 32. In a similar vein, Davidson argues that, “whatever the valid historical reasons for Ruby’s defensiveness, they do not justify the quasi-fascist impulses of men like Stewart Morgan” (“Racial Stock and 8-Rocks,” p. 4), and Widdowson asserts that the novel shows that “separatism is not a solution” (“The American Dream Refashioned,” p. 329). 33. Jones, “The Eye of the Needle,” p. 1. 34. Dalsgard, “One All-Black Town Worth the Pain,” pp. 2, 5. 35. Burwell notes that “a fear of contamination” can be one of the “conservative aspects of the utopian impulse” (Notes on Nowhere, p. 204). 36. Barber, “Participatory Democracy,” p. 921. 37. Guinier, Lift Every Voice, p. 252. As Rowbotham stresses, “Participatory democracy only works if everyone accepts a certain give and take, a respect for one another’s experience, a desire and need to remain connected” (“The Women’s Movement,” p. 76). 38. As Krumholz asserts, “The protection of women has often justified the oppression and possession of women” (“Reading and Insight,” p. 4). Davidson also notes that “no women are present when the men discuss K.D. and Arnette” and that “the town elders negotiate on behalf of the younger men and all the women” with the aim of “preserving the status quo” (“Racial Stock and 8-Rocks,” p. 2). 39. See my more extensive discussion of these issues in Chapter 1. The essays in Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, Women in the Civil Rights Movement, are particularly useful to an understanding of women’s roles in the civil rights movement. Also relevant is hooks’s notion that “sexism has diminished the power of all black liberation movements” (Yearning, p. 16). 40. Robnett, How Long? How Long? p. 137. 41. Evans, Personal Politics, p. 234. 42. Delanty, Community, p. 11. 43. Manning, The Common Thread, p. 40. Manning notes that “empathic feelings don’t necessarily lead to altruistic or caring behavior” (46) and that, “without an action component, empathy, in most situations, is little more than a nicety” (322). I am arguing that the character of Fairy DuPres acts in response to her feelings of empathy. 44. Similarly, Widdowson argues that “the wives and daughters of the main families” are “complicit in the general ideology of Ruby” (“The American Dream Refashioned,” p. 331), and Elia notes “the Ruby women’s allegiance to their kinsmen” (Trances, Dances, and Vociferations, p. 123). 45. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. xxxvii. 46. Mansbridge, “Feminism and Democracy,” p. 149. 47. Evans, Personal Politics, pp. 108 – 111.

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48. I thank Mindy Boffemeyer for reminding me that the embezzler designed his house with the specific aim of entertaining guests. 49. Krumholz also points to “the Convent’s second life as a Catholic school for Arapaho girls” as an instance of an “insidious colonizing tactic of religious domination, sexual repression, and cultural demolition through forced removals and education” (“Reading and Insight,” p. 3). 50. hooks, Yearning, pp. 22, 49. Although all the convent women are not African American, the novel builds upon the oppressive experiences and creative responses to those experiences of African Americans as it works to offer an alternative conception of community. 51. Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” pp. 357 – 358. Reagon further asserts that the aim of coalition work is to “stay alive” (357), which reinforces my argument that coalition work needs to be rethought in terms of survival and justice rather than in terms of winning. Similarly, Albrecht and Brewer argue in “Bridges of Power” that “working in a coalition is about survival” (3). 52. Similarly, Widdowson asserts that “the one thing they [the convent women] have in common is mistreatment by a society governed by male prerogatives” (“The American Dream Refashioned,” p. 330), and Min-Jung Kim notes that “what connects these women” is “psychic scars from interpersonal relations of power and social injustice” (“Expanding the Parameters of Literary Studies,” p. 1026). 53. Nicol, “Visible Differences,” p. 213. 54. Krumholz, “Reading and Insight,” p. 7. 55. Naples, “Introduction,” p. 5. 56. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, pp. 178, 3. 57. Elia argues that “Consolata teaches the Convent women the necessity of wedding spirituality with sensuality, the spirit with the body,” and that the novel highlights “the life-affirming qualities of women who create, preserve, and nurture the body and soul” (Trances, Dances, and Vociferations, pp. 131, 115). 58. In her review of the novel, Cliff connects the healing ritual to Consolata’s Brazilian roots, arguing that Consolata “recalls candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian belief system” (“Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” p. 85). 59. Page, “Furrowing All the Brows,” p. 5. 60. LeSeur, “Moving beyond the Boundaries,” p. 18. 61. Jaggar, “Toward a Feminist Conception,” pp. 131 – 132. 62. Guinier, Lift Every Voice, p. 292. 63. Kearly argues that the convent “women learn to convert pain into understanding and mutual nurturing” (“Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” p. 6). Page similarly notes that the “loud dreaming” creates “full empathy” and “intuitive fellowship” that allows the women to achieve “individual harmony as they acquire communal harmony” (“Furrowing All the Brows,” p. 5). 64. Gilligan, “Remapping the Moral Domain,” p. 483. 65. Bartky, “Sympathy and Solidarity,” p. 179. 66. Manning, The Common Thread, p. 36. 67. hooks, Salvation, p. 90.

218  Notes

68. hooks, Yearning, pp. 147, 27. 69. The novel thus endorses the general idea, noted by Page, that “Americans need to balance a sense of community with a healthy respect for diversity” (“Furrowing All the Brows,” p. 11). 70. hooks, Salvation, p. xvii. 71. Ibid., p. 11. Elia also notes that the Convent is a “space of nurturing, spirituality and recovery” that is “always open to outsiders” (Trances, Dances, and Vociferations, pp. 139, 140). 72. Levinas, Entre Nous, pp. 103, 5. 73. As LeSeur similarly notes, the convent community is “based on inclusion, not exclusion” (“Moving beyond the Boundaries,” p. 17). 74. hooks, Yearning, p. 27. 75. In the same vein, Kearly notes that the convent forms “a community where men do not have to rule, and where the rules for belonging do not have to be exclusionary” (“Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” p. 8). 76. Albrecht and Brewer similarly call for alliance building that would emphasize “power-with, rather than power-over” (“Bridges of Power,” pp. 4 – 5). 77. Laclau asserts that “all identity — all social identity — is constructed” (The Making of Political Identities, p. 1); and McRobbie argues that identity “is predicated on social identity, on social groups or populations with some sense of shared experience and history” (Postmodernism and Popular Culture, p. 58). 78. Messer-Davidow, “Acting Otherwise,” p. 29. 79. Melucci, Challenging Codes, p. 71. 80. Ackelsberg reinforces this point when she characterizes “coalition-building as a process through which we not only act together with others but develop and change our own identities at the same time” (“Identity Politics, Political Identities,” p. 8). 81. Schrag discusses “the emerging subjectivity” within the “space opened up by communicative praxis,” “a subject transfigured and transformed” (Communicative Praxis, p. 11). 82. Mouffe, “Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics,” pp. 372, 381. 83. Min-Jung Kim similarly argues that “the [convent] women’s departure from traditional modes of existence in itself provides sufficient reason for external control and regulation” (“Expanding the Parameters of Literary Studies,” p. 1033). 84. Dalsgard points out the parallel between “the Salem witch trials” and “Ruby’s scapegoating of its women outsiders” from the convent (“One All-Black Town Worth the Pain,” p. 5). 85. Elia, Trances, Dances, and Vociferations, p. 124. 86. Similarly, Jones argues that the change in Deacon at the end of Morrison’s novel “holds out hope for redemption” and “the opportunity for human love and for change” (“The Eye of a Needle,” p. 15); Page notes that the raid on the convent leads “Rubyites into healthy disarray and therapeutic soul-searching” that “drive them toward long overdue reconsiderations of who they are and who they want

Notes  219

to be” (“Furrowing All the Brows,” p. 7); and Davidson suggests that the novel’s ending provides some “hope that Ruby’s patriarchs can change” (“Racial Stock and 8-Rocks,” p. 9). 87. Elia links the disappearance of the convent women’s bodies to “African American folklore” in which “the disappearance of a body is one indicator of the magical powers of its inhabitant” (Trances, Dances, and Vociferations, p. 146). 88. Krumholz, “Reading and Insight,” p. 10. 89. Kennedy, Lubelska, and Walsh, Introduction, p. ix.

6. Conclusion 1. Kaup and Rosenthal, Introduction, p. xiii. 2. Bhabha, “The Third Space,” p. 211. 3. Kaup and Rosenthal, Introduction, p. xvi. 4. Bhabha, “The Third Space,” p. 211. 5. Manning, The Common Thread, p. 33. 6. Abu-Jaber, Crescent, p. 19. 7. Delanty, Community, p. 118. 8. Kahf, E-Mails from Scheherazad, p. 83. 9. Delanty, Community, p. 155. 10. Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 228. 11. Manning, The Common Thread, pp. 322, 326.

220  Notes

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Bibliography  235

Index Abrahams, Naomi, 24, 25 Abu-Jaber, Diana, 191 Ackelsberg, Martha A., 219n80 activism, 27, 114, 144 – 145, 173, 192; communal modes of, 22, 23, 113, 148; and kinship, 189; local forms of, 22, 133; and private/public spheres, 22, 124 – 125; and spirituality, 113 – 114, 134, 144, 146 – 147; and survival, 142; women’s, 25, 27 Adams, Tom, 35 African Americans, 32 – 33, 74; and cultural hybridity, 4; and heritage, 151 – 154, 218n50, 220n87; and homeplace, 125, 169 agency: communal and coalitionbased modes of, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 35 – 38, 39, 45, 55, 66, 86 – 87, 88, 113, 115, 141, 166, 173, 176, 185, 188, 189, 214n110; dynamic forms of, 2, 76; hybrid forms of, 4 – 5, 37 – 38; importance of coalition to, 2, 144, 155, 166; importance of community to, 2, 40, 70 – 71, 76 – 78, 82, 91, 94, 95, 109, 111, 114, 123, 149, 153; individual, 39, 40, 45, 51, 60, 61 – 63, 64, 70 – 71, 76 – 78, 90, 95, 96, 109, 114, 115, 144, 149, 173, 174; individual, 23, 114, 149, 153; as local, 11; and potential for material change, 2; reconceptualization of, 2, 5, 42, 73, 74 – 78, 110 – 111, 119, 124, 135, 147, 152, 183, 187, 193, 204n78; and socio-material realm, 11, 37, 73, 91, 96, 108, 115, 142 – 144, 188, 191; as temporary, 11; theoretical destabilization of, 2, 9, 10, 115, 155, 177, 188 Albrecht, Lisa, 218n51, 219n76 Aldama, Frederick Luis, 213n93 Alger, Horatio, 99

Alinsky, Saul D., 24, 198n73 Allen, Paula Gunn, 75, 82, 102, 104, 105, 214n97 American dream, 18, 20, 40, 46, 50, 53, 70, 80, 97, 131, 157, 212n73 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 114, 116, 126, 209 –  210n26, 210n50, 212n68, 215n119 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 20 Aquino, María Pilar, 208n4 Aristotle, 15 Asian Americans 32 – 33, 39 – 40, 41, 52, 70, 74, 201n38; and cultural hybridity, 4 assimilation, 50, 59, 101, 126, 185 – 186, 187, 212n73; Americanization, 48, 51 – 52, 56 – 57; forced, 82, 168; resistance to, 135 – 136, 195n6 Baier, Annette, 19 Baker, Ella, 27 Barber, Benjamin, 27 Bauman, Zygmunt, 17, 196n40 Beauvoir, Simone de, 4 Benavides, Gustavo, 209n19 Beverly, John, 122, 211n57 Bhabha, Homi, 187 binarism, 31, 43, 97, 113, 119, 127, 135, 148, 168, 178 – 179, 213n93; racial, 1, 59, 157 – 158; reinforcement of, 28; self/other duality, 56, 141 – 142; virgin/whore dichotomy, 116, 134, 139 – 140. See also rationality Black Panthers, 152, 159 black power movement, 27 – 28, 151 –  154, 156, 158, 159, 181, 215n3, 217n30; hierarchical politics and structures of, 27 – 28; and pride, 6; women’s role within, 27 – 28 Blakely, Edward, 78

Blanchot, Maurice, 16, 77 borders, 114, 115, 126, 148, 149, 158, 164, 168, 169, 173, 178, 179, 180 Bow, Leslie, 202n42, 202n45, 202n48, 202n52, 203n71, 204n78 Braidotti, Rosi, 196n19 Brewer, Rose M., 218n51, 219n76 bricolage, 4, 7 Broughton, John, 31 Broyles-González, Yolanda, 145 Burwell, Jennifer, 217n35 Camus, Albert, 4 capitalism, 19, 35, 52 – 53, 85, 95 – 96, 120 – 121, 147, 188; and competition, 18; and othering, 9; and social mobility, 18, 19, 46, 49, 84, 120, 157, 160, 165 Carmichael, Stokely, 27, 28 Castells, Manuel, 158, 195n14 Castillo, Ana, 3, 4, 37 – 38, 113 – 149, 185, 189, 210n40, 210n49, 211n57, 211n58, 211 – 212n65, 212n70, 212n73, 212n74, 213n82, 213n93, 213 – 214n96, 214n97, 214n110 Catholicism, 113, 116, 117 – 118, 126, 128, 129 – 130, 131 – 132, 133, 134 – 137, 139 – 140, 143, 145, 146, 148, 168, 172, 176; folk forms of, 116 – 118, 129 – 130, 131 – 132, 145 – 146, 208n2, 209n19 Chávez, Ernesto, 211n63 Cherokee, 74 – 76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 88, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99 – 100, 101 – 110, 207n77 Chertkoff, Jerome M., 33 Chicano power movement, 115 – 116, 209n9, 209n12; and pride, 6 Chicanos/as, 115 – 116, 117 – 119, 122 – 123, 124, 126, 132 – 133, 136, 140, 142, 149, 209n8, 209n9, 213n87 Chinese Americans, 39 – 42, 44 – 45, 70, 73; and Chinese cultural tradition, 40, 41 – 42, 47 – 51, 53 – 54, 56 – 61, 63 –  65, 66 – 69, 70, 200n17; and Confucian tradition, 32 – 33, 40, 47 – 49, 54, 60 – 61, 70, 201n26, 203n68; and

238  Index

cultural marginalization, 43, 44, 55; and cultural negotiation, 49 – 55, 57 – 58, 61, 66, 67 – 69, 73, 202n45, 203n60; stereotypes of, 44, 61, 62 Christenson, James A., 23 Chu, Patricia, 48, 50 – 51, 69, 70, 203n68, 203n74 Cisneros, Sandra, 116, 119 civil rights movement, 1, 34, 39, 42, 151 – 154, 156, 160, 162 – 163, 166, 167, 181, 185, 199n117; critical discussions of, 26, 27; and idea of community, 14, 21; misogyny within, 27; role of women within, 26 – 27 Clarke, Cheryl, 140 – 141 class stratification, 1, 46, 73, 76, 77, 79, 109 – 110, 120 – 122, 124, 127 – 128, 163 – 164, 203n64; and gap between rich and poor, 14, 15 – 16 Clay, Henry, 19 Cleaver, Eldridge, 152 Clewell, Tammy, 216n26 Cliff, Michelle, 218n57 coalition: as communal critique, 32; differences within, 32, 33, 36 – 37, 83, 155 – 156, 183; as dynamic process, 25 – 26, 32, 35 – 37, 39, 110 – 111, 144 – 146, 155 – 156, 167, 181, 183; failures and limitations of, 26 – 28, 32, 33 – 35, 156; hybrid conceptions of, 13 – 14; and material existence, 37, 144 – 146, 155; nonhierarchical, 11; processes of, 3, 11, 25 – 26, 36 – 37, 70, 144 – 146, 151, 154 – 156; reconceptualization of, 13, 32, 36 – 38, 39, 74 – 77, 144 – 146, 151 – 154, 183, 185, 193; scholarship on, 33 – 34 coalition building: creative reconceptualization of, 1 – 2, 151, 155 – 156; as fluid process, 26; and identity, 219n80; as interconnected with community building, 26 coalition politics, 10, 26, 28 – 29, 31, 36; critical discussions of, 26; as masculinized, 28

coalition work, 32 – 33, 113, 159, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 187; and community dependency, 12, 15, 154 – 155, 170, 172, 174, 183, 185; as grounded in the material and local, 27 Cole, Johnnetta Betsch, 152 collective well-being, 3, 11, 15 – 16, 21, 25, 33, 40, 43, 46, 47, 53, 77, 82, 83, 86, 90, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102, 106, 109, 113, 118, 119, 127, 128, 142, 143, 145, 159 – 160, 176 – 177, 178, 190, 218n51; as constructed, 12; importance of community to, 41, 52, 70 – 71, 75, 76, 80, 97, 98, 110 – 111, 115, 121, 148, 149, 153 – 154, 174, 183, 189, 196n32 Collins, Patricia Hill, 25, 108, 154, 155, 156 colonization, 73, 74 – 76, 82, 101, 113, 116 – 117, 126 – 127, 140 – 141, 168, 185 –  186 communication: and accessibility, 86, 119, 120, 186; and healing, 171 – 177, 218n63; and language gap, 46, 60, 69, 125; and voice, 44, 46, 54, 63, 70, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 131, 132, 141, 146, 162, 168, 175, 211n58; and “unspeakable,” 46 communism, 67, 133, 143 communitarianism, 14, 21, 188, 196n22, 197n61; and feminism, 21; in nineteenth century, 19; and radical pluralism, 21 community, 15, 23; absence of, 2 – 3; building of, 25 – 26, 151, 155 – 156, 172, 188, 198n73; difference within, 1, 7, 12, 17, 32, 36 – 37, 55, 70, 76 – 77, 83, 88, 154 – 156, 170, 172, 174; disruption of, 126 – 127, 154; as dynamic, 3, 8 – 9, 11, 15, 22, 25, 37, 39, 55, 70 – 71, 77 – 79, 83, 94, 107, 151, 154 – 156, 169 – 170, 174, 177, 188; as grounded in material realm, 11; hybrid conceptions of, 2, 13 – 14, 37 – 38, 39, 40 – 41, 67, 70 – 71, 73, 74, 75, 114 – 115, 185, 186 – 188, 193; longing for, 16, 20 – 21, 155, 164 – 165,

167, 188, 191, 192; nonhierarchical, 11; and place, 15, 21, 23, 26, 35, 49, 102, 127 – 128, 166; as potentially oppressive, 41; reconceptualization of, 1 –  2, 37 – 38, 39, 69, 70 – 71, 73, 74 – 78, 88 – 90, 101, 106 – 107, 109 – 111, 128, 151 – 154, 176, 183, 185 – 189, 193; revaluation of, 13; and self-redefinition, 8; as social construction, 12, 15, 21, 25; strategies and processes of, 155 –  156; sustenance of, 8, 10; as temporary, 8, 15, 21, 22; and wholeness, 54, 94 community and individuals: 80, 82 – 83, 94, 95, 96, 102, 106 – 107, 115, 118, 122, 123, 127, 149, 152 – 154, 170, 176, 188, 197n62, 215n9; dialectic between, 8, 12; dichotomous distinctions between, 21; interchange and interdependence between, 12, 17, 18, 23; mutual creation of, 12 – 13, 23 Conner, Marc, 215n7 consciousness raising, 31 – 32, 152 – 153, 156, 177 constructive tension, 114 – 115, 117 constructivism, 6, 11 Cook, Barbara J., 212 – 213n77 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 75, 82, 101 – 102 Corlett, William, 17 Crawford, Vicki, 26 cultural diversity, 1, 87, 95, 186 – 188, 190, 193 cultural fragmentation, 15 – 16 cultural genocide, 74, 101, 103, 168 cultural hybridity, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 32 cultural mixing, 31, 39, 40 – 41, 47, 49, 50 – 54, 55, 57 – 58, 66, 70, 76, 88, 104 –  106, 113 – 114, 116, 126, 129 – 130, 135, 136, 146, 149, 185 – 188, 193; potential of, 5 cultural paranoia, 2, 14 culture: colonization of, 74, 82, 101 –  102, 104 – 106, 204n2, 207n83; de­ valuation of, 113, 129, 136, 186, 187; as dynamic, 54, 70 – 71, 129; repro-

Index  239

duction and transmission of, 54, 68 – 69, 101, 103, 106, 130 Dallmayr, Fred, 12, 30, 196n22 Dalsgard, Katrine, 219n84 Dariotis, Wei Ming, 109 Davidson, Rob, 216 – 217n29, 217n32, 217n38, 219 – 220n86 Davis, Rocio G., 200n12, 200n14, 203n73 De Vos, George A., 201n26 Delanty, Gerard, 5, 8 – 9, 15, 16, 21 – 22, 77, 191, 192, 196n32, 197n62 Delgadillo, Theresa, 138, 145 – 146, 211 –  212n65, 212n71, 212n74, 213n82, 213 –  214n96, 214n97, 214n104, 215n116 DeLillo, Don, 14 – 15 Deloria, Philip, 75, 104 – 106 DeMarr, Mary Jean, 205n33, 205n37 democracy, 180, 190, 195n14, 198n82; ideals of, 16, 161 – 162, 217n37; participatory, 26 – 27, 28; populist, 119 – 120 dialogue, 147, 148, 154, 172; between individual and group interests, 12 Diani, Mario, 37 Docherty, Thomas, 198n91 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 79, 84, 85, 206n41 Elenes, C. Alejandra, 211n56 Elia, Nada, 217n44, 218n57, 219n71, 220n87 Elizondo, Virgilio, 209 – 210n26 emotion, 78, 92, 115, 117, 128, 134, 138, 199n102; as devalued, 31; as political activity, 31; use of in consciousness raising, 32. See also rationality emotional connection, 39 – 40, 42, 43, 46, 60, 81 – 82, 176, 189, 193 empathy, 11, 81 – 83, 90 – 93, 95 – 96, 141, 154, 163, 165, 173, 175 – 176, 178, 189, 190, 192 – 193, 205n29, 206n51, 217n43 Enlightenment ideology, 3, 19 – 20, 30, 75, 135, 136, 189 equality, 17, 153, 155, 157, 172, 193; and

240  Index

inequitable power relations, 30 Espiritu, Yen Le, 52 ethical theory, 14, 15, 18, 25 ethics of care, 17, 25; vs. language of justice and rights, 30 – 31 ethnicity, 1 – 2, 4 – 5, 7, 17, 45, 70, 79, 87, 88, 100, 110, 121, 170 – 171, 185, 186 – 188, 191, 193, 195n1, 197n58, 219n69; and authenticity, 66 – 67; and binarism, 1, 59, 157 – 160, 170 –  171; and biologism, 7, 56, 65 – 66, 67, 74, 93 – 94, 101, 103, 106 – 107, 114, 216n28; fluidity of, 5, 7, 65 – 67, 93 – 94, 114 – 115, 117, 170 – 171, 186 –  187; and functions of, 7; hybridity, 7, 31, 39, 40, 67, 73, 75 – 76, 114 – 115, 135, 136, 186 – 188, 193; marginalization based on, 7, 52, 55, 113, 115, 126, 136, 142, 154, 186; and mixedrace lineage, 76, 101, 104, 114 – 116, 186 – 187; and passing, 65 – 66, 93 –  94, 186; and place, 66 – 67, 94, 102, 103, 126, 187; and race relations, 152; reconceptualization of, 67; as social construction, 6 – 7, 65 – 66, 67; and socio-material existence, 6 – 7, 40, 56, 77, 110, 114, 152 Evans, Sarah, 28, 34 Eysturoy, Annie O., 213n87 Fagan, Kristina, 108, 205n24 family, 39, 40, 42 – 43, 81, 83, 104, 151; and biologism, 49 – 50, 55, 65, 68, 69, 70, 73, 81 – 82, 84, 87 – 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 101, 102, 106 – 109, 110 – 111, 118, 127, 163, 171, 188 – 190, 202n42, 204n80, 205n36; disruption of, 126 –  127, 154; as dynamic, 89 – 91, 92, 94, 102, 108 – 111; extended, 24 – 25, 35, 49 – 50, 52, 54, 55 – 56, 57, 59, 63 – 64, 68 – 70, 73 – 74, 76 – 77, 78, 79, 80, 84, 87, 89 – 95, 97, 98 – 99, 102, 106 – 111, 113, 201 – 202n40; legal status, 97, 101, 103, 107, 109, 188 – 189, 207n67;

nuclear, 54, 64, 68, 79, 84, 92, 96, 99, 103, 108 – 109, 128, 188 – 189; patriarchal structure of, 47 – 49, 53, 60 – 61, 62 – 64, 69, 70, 84, 89, 116, 118 – 119, 125, 126, 151, 207n80; and place, 89, 92 – 93, 102, 127; reconceptualization of, 47, 52, 60 – 61, 80, 113, 114. See also mothering feminist theory, 4; and creative engagement with issues of subjectivity and agency, 11; and difference, 9 – 10; and reconceptualization of coalition and community, 14, 15, 25, 32, 34, 78, 189, 196n40, 199n102; and theoretical destabilization of humanism, 9; usefulness to explorations of ethnicity, 9, 11 fiction: as aimed toward survival, 31; and emphasis of agency as collective, 31; and engagement with concrete world, 8, 9, 14; as feminist practice, 10, 12, 31; and formal experimentation, 4; as inflected by ethical theory, 25; as inflected by feminist theory, 9, 14, 25, 31; and reconceptualization of community and coalition, 13, 17, 28, 31, 32; and reconceptualization of justice, 31; and reconceptualization of subject, 31; and rejection of private/public duality, 24; utopian gesturing in, 3, 70 – 71, 108, 146 Fisk, Milton, 30 Floyd-Thomas, Stacey M., 212n73, 214n110, 214n111 Fluck, Winfried, 19 Franklin, Benjamin, 19 Fraser, Nancy, 11 friendship, 17 – 18, 55, 68, 69 – 70, 86, 89, 90, 92, 106, 164, 199n102, 203n59 gender, 76, 77; and activism, 23 – 25, 26 – 28, 114; and binarism, 31, 43, 49, 116, 134 – 135, 139 – 140, 141 – 142,

213n93; and labor, 79 – 80, 125; and leadership, 26 – 28, 124, 162, 167; as socially constructed, 61; and sociomaterial existence, 79 – 80, 109 – 110 genocide, 1, 76, 82, 101 geographic mobility, 5, 19, 80 Gilligan, Carol, 30 – 31, 173 Gillman, Laura, 212n73, 214n110, 214n111 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 4 Godfrey, Kathleen, 75, 101, 104, 106 González, Maria, 213n90 grass roots movements, 35, 132, 152 –  153 Guinier, Lani, 198n82 Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl, 213n88 Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, 152 Hagehorn, Jessica, 203n60 Hamilton, Charles, 28 Hamilton, Patricia, 50 Haraway, Donna, 32 Hartog, Hendrik, 30 hegemony, 36 – 37, 82, 108 – 109, 164, 168; in consciousness raising, 32; resistance to, 74, 76, 101, 110 – 111, 135 – 136, 155, 173, 195n6 Held, Virginia, 25 Hepworth, Candida, 116 Heung, Marina, 49, 51, 201n20, 204n77, 204n80 Ho, Wendy, 41, 49, 56, 57, 71, 201n38, 201 – 202n40 Hobbes, Thomas, 15 Hogan, Linda, 74 – 76 hooks, bell, 82, 152, 153, 169, 173, 215n3, 216n21 hope, 40, 45 – 47, 50 – 51, 53, 55, 60, 64, 65, 66, 70 – 71, 75, 90, 123 – 124, 149, 153, 166, 180 – 181, 182 – 183, 193, 195n14, 201n22, 203n59, 215n7 Hum, Sue, 59, 66, 67 human rights, 17, 20, 30, 82, 113 – 114, 189, 190, 191 – 193, 197n58

Index  241

humanism: and agency, 34, 36, 189, 191 – 193, 195n17; and destabilization of the self-determining subject, 9, 31. See also subjectivity hybridity, 40 – 41, 50, 66, 71, 74. See also ethnicity; spirituality hybridization processes, 1 – 2, 149, 188 identification with others, 7, 32 identity: communal, 6; and community, 16; as constructed, 219n77; destabilization of, 5; and fluidity, 5; hybrid, 66; as plural, 11; positive forms of, 6; reconceptualization of, 5, 8; as social construction, 11; and socio-material realm, 11, 20; as temporary, 11 individualism, 39 – 40, 43, 50, 53 – 54, 59 – 60, 77, 78, 80 – 81, 82 – 83, 84, 95 –  96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 106 – 109, 118, 119, 122, 131, 136, 149, 153, 176, 177, 188, 205n24, 206n58, 212n74; and accompanying structures of domination, 32; anticommunal forms of, 18; and fostering of human dignity, 20; freedom of, 15; as gendered, 19; and language of equality, 17; link to manhood and public realm, 19; and market enterprise, 18, 19; privileging of in the U.S., 7 – 8, 13, 28, 30; reconceptualization of, 18 individuality, 16 – 17, 50 – 51, 53 – 54, 77, 106 – 110, 149, 188, 197n62, 201n20; retention of within community, 13; as wedded to others, 20 infanticide, 48 interdependence, 17, 20, 23, 39 – 40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 53 – 54, 64, 69, 70 – 71, 77, 78 – 79, 80 – 81, 83 – 84, 87 – 88, 90 – 92, 94, 97, 102, 109 – 110, 119, 127, 129, 130, 148, 149, 153, 166 –  167, 171 – 174, 153, 175, 189 – 190, 192 –  193, 200n9, 213 – 214n96

242  Index

Jaggar, Alison, 43, 199n102 James, Stanlie, 154 Johnson, Lyndon, 22 Jones, Jill C., 160, 216n22, 219 – 220n86 Joseph, May, 7 Kafka, Phillipa, 202n48, 203n55, 215n118 Kahf, Mohja, 191 Kaup, Monika, 186, 187, 211n63 Kearly, Peter R., 216n28, 218n63, 219n75 Kim, Elaine, 200n1 Kim, Min-Jung, 218n52, 219n83 Kimmel, Michael, 19 King, Deborah, 199n117 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 151 – 152, 153, 156, 162 – 163, 166, 181 Kingsolver, Barbara, 74, 206n58, 207n83; The Bean Trees, 3, 4, 37 – 38, 73 – 96, 109 – 111, 185, 189, 205n24; Pigs in Heaven, 3, 4, 37 – 38, 73 – 80, 87, 93, 95 – 111, 185, 189 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 39, 44 Krumholz, Linda J., 170 – 171, 217n30, 217n38, 218n49 Krupat, Arnold, 74, 204n2 Kuo, Eddie, 49 Laclau, Ernesto, 219n77 Lanza, Carmela Delia, 128, 211 –  212n65, 212n73 Latin Americans, 32 – 33, 113 – 114, 115, 119 – 124, 142 – 144 Lauret, Maria, 6 Lee, Peter Ching-Yung, 47 LeSeur, Geta, 216n20, 219n73 Levinas, Emmanuel, 17, 20, 77, 81, 92, 175, 192 Li, David Leiwei, 202n42, 202n48 liberation theology, 32 – 33, 115, 142 – 143, 208n4, 214n104 Lichterman, Paul, 8, 18, 21, 23 Ling, Amy, 48, 200n17 love, 17, 152, 153, 178, 182, 192 – 193; and

community, 152, 153, 166 – 167, 174 –  176, 178 – 179, 189 – 190, 199n102 Lowe, Lisa, 54 MacKinnon, Catherine A., 31 – 32 Madsen, Deborah, 116, 135 – 136, 212n73 Maffesoli, Michel, 54 Mails, Thomas, 101, 207n77, 207n80 Manning, Martha, 91, 193, 206n51, 217n43 Manríquez, B. J., 215n117 Mansbridge, Jane, 29, 167 Martinez, Jacqueline M., 212n68 Martinez-Brawley, Emilia, 15 materialism, 14, 18 – 19, 77, 78, 131, 133, 170 Matsuda, Mari J., 204n82 Mayo, Marjorie, 16, 197n61 McAlister, Melanie, 41, 203n64 McRobbie, Angela, 219n77 media, 5, 120; and emphasis of conflict and celebrity, 27 Melucci, Alberto, 8, 176, 195n6 memory, 102 – 103, 122 – 123, 125, 171 –  176, 202n46, 202n47 Mermann – Jozwiak, Elisabeth, 210n49 Mestizos/as, 114, 117, 135, 142, 186 Mexican Americans: dispossession and colonization of, 6, 32 – 33, 74, 113, 116 – 117, 126, 140, 212n68; and cultural hybridity, 4; and heritage, 113 – 114, 115, 116 – 121, 126, 127, 129 –  130, 131, 133 – 134, 135 – 137, 139, 145, 149, 209 – 210n26, 212 – 213n77, 213n90; and machismo, 119, 136; scholarship on, 118, 140; significance of family to, 118 – 119, 124 –  125; stereotypes of, 124, 125, 210n38, 211n63 Miami Theory Collective, 34 Michaels, Walter Benn, 18 migration: 73, 185 – 186, 191 – 192, 202n52; consequences of, 1, 5; dia-

sporic, 7; and immigration, 40, 42, 44, 46, 51, 57, 67, 70; and slavery, 6, 157, 160 misogyny, 40, 42, 44, 48, 58 – 59, 116, 121 – 122, 133, 152, 161 – 162, 176 – 177; resistance to, 48 – 49, 121 – 122, 134, 155, 177, 198n77, 200n9 Morrison, Toni, 3, 4, 37 – 38, 151 – 183, 185, 189; utopian gesturing in, 219 –  220n86 mothering: and activism, 23 – 25, 32 –  33, 35, 40 – 43, 46 – 66, 68 – 71, 76, 80, 81, 95, 97, 106 – 107, 116, 124, 142, 146 – 148, 171, 198n74, 215n117; as agency, 82; and othermothering, 32 – 33, 154 – 155, 176, 216n11; reconceptualization of, 127, 146 – 148, 212n70; and single status, 14, 64, 79 – 80, 83, 85, 86, 89 – 90, 96, 97, 98, 106, 110, 118 – 119, 125, 127 Mouffe, Chantal, 10, 12, 21, 32, 177 Moya, Paula M. L., 209n8 Mueller, Carol, 27 multiculturalism, 4 – 5, 95, 101, 104, 106, 107 – 111, 187 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 18, 215n9 Naples, Nancy, 22, 23 – 25, 142, 198n74, 198n77 Native Americans, 32 – 33, 73, 75 – 76, 82, 93 – 94, 99; and cultural hybridity, 4; dispossession and colonization of, 6, 73, 75, 76, 82, 97, 101, 103, 168, 207n77, 218n49; and heritage, 96, 99, 101 – 104, 105, 106 – 110, 167 –  168; idealization and stereotyping of, 75 – 76, 101 – 102, 104, 105, 106; Indian Child Welfare Act, 93 – 94, 100 – 101, 207n67, 208n92; scholarship on, 74, 101; and wider community, 74 – 75, 102, 103, 105 nature, 30, 75, 106, 135, 145 – 146, 198n91 negotiation, 162, 187; of cultures, 49 – 

Index  243

55, 57 – 58, 61, 66, 67 – 69, 73, 202n48; of differences, 148, 155, 161, 176 – 177 New Left, 34, 151, 153 – 154, 167; hierarchical politics and structures of, 28; and idea of community, 21; women’s role within, 28 Novy, Marianne, 205n36 nurturing, 49, 55, 80, 83, 86, 87 – 88, 106 – 107, 116, 139, 148, 149, 154, 155, 160, 163, 165, 189 – 190, 193, 196n40, 199n102, 200n10; as activist response, 25, 31, 171 – 172, 174; as agency, 82; in community, 59, 64, 89, 90, 94, 99, 102, 131, 166 – 167; devaluation of, 172; in family life, 42 – 43, 47, 81; as political activity, 31, 78; revaluation of, 3, 18. See also ethics of care Olmos, Margarita Fernández, 211n58 oral tradition, 44, 120, 136, 211n58 Page, Philip, 218n63, 219n69, 219 –  220n86 Pahl, Ray, 17 – 18, 55, 86, 87, 203n59 Painter, Nell, 157 Pérez, Domino Renee, 134, 212 – 213n77 Pérez, Gail, 118, 125, 137, 208n2, 212n70 Pineda-Madrid, Nancy, 118 political consciousness, 115, 134; as construction, 32 Porta, Donatella della, 37 postcolonialism, 13, 34, 77 poverty, 14, 124, 143, 145 – 146, 160, 198n74, 205n20, 206n41 power: alternative modes and mechanisms of, 54, 84, 106 – 110, 113, 119, 126, 137, 140, 141, 149, 166 – 167, 172, 175 – 176, 181 – 183, 190; and collusion, 42, 140, 162 – 163, 165, 217n44; and equality, 53 – 54, 61 – 62, 70, 78, 95, 106, 110, 113 – 114, 115, 119, 121; with (vs. over), 29, 126, 153 – 154, 159, 167, 176, 181 – 183, 219n76 praxis, 4, 9, 114, 115, 123, 149; commu-

244  Index

nal, 144; and spirituality, 145; and subjectivity, 219n81 Pressman, Steven, 79 private/public spheres, 9, 24 – 25, 31, 41, 42, 43, 78, 113, 114, 115, 129, 147, 154, 189, 200n10, 201n38, 211 – 212n65, 212n70, 212n71; and association of public with political, 23; hierarchical opposition between, 13, 19, 124 – 125 Progressive movement, 78 protest, 133, 145, 152; violent forms of, 152 Pynchon, Thomas, 14 – 15 Quintana, Alvina E., 209n12 racial demographics, 1, 6 racial difference, 2, 5, 94, 156 – 160, 166, 170, 186, 191, 216 – 217n29; racism, 1, 44, 56, 58 – 59, 69, 74, 82, 100, 103, 104, 115, 121 – 122, 151 – 152, 154 – 161, 166, 176 – 177, 179, 180, 185 –  186, 191, 198n77; internalization of, 59, 66 – 67, 156 – 58, 216n22; xeno­ phobia, 56, 191. See also ethnicity Radhakrishnan, R., 13, 34 rape, 76, 81, 82, 97, 121, 130, 138, 139, 140 – 141, 147, 152, 213n88 rationality, 148, 149; and competitive intellectualism, 28; instrumental reason, 9, 28 – 29, 198n91; western privileging of, 28, 130, 134 – 135, 136, 147, 148, 149, 172, 200n10, 218n57 Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 169, 218n51 Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 122, 123, 212 –  213n77 Reynolds, Guy, 208n103 Riker, William H., 29 Robinson, Terry W., Jr., 23 Robnett, Belinda, 27, 162 Rodgers, Harrell, Jr., 85, 97, 205n20 Rodríguez, Jeanette, 209 – 210n26, 210n32 Rodriguez, Richard, 4 – 5

Rosenthal, Debra J., 186, 187 Rowbotham, Sheila, 34, 198n82, 217n37 Ryan, Maureen, 108 sanctuary movement, 86 – 87, 88 Sarachild, Kathie, 153 Sauer, Michelle, 131 – 132, 213 – 214n96 Schehr, Robert, 108 Schrag, Calvin O., 219n81 Scott, Joan Wallach, 12 Segura, Denise A., 209n9 self-help groups, 35 self-made man, 19 separatism, 6, 7, 15, 16, 17, 75 – 76, 104, 144 – 145, 151 – 154, 156 – 165, 169 – 170, 174, 177 – 180, 187, 215n119, 217n32; and American exceptionalism, 160; constructive, 169, 178 – 179; and convent, 219n71, 219n73, 219n75 sexuality, 158 – 159, 163, 168 Shanahan, Daniel, 20, 39 Shanley, Mary Lyndon, 207n67 Shear, Walter, 201n22 Sierra, Christine Marie, 211n60 Singer, Marc, 43 – 44, 201n21 Sklodowska, Elzbieta, 210 – 211n53 slavery, 16, 48, 140, 151, 154, 156, 185 –  186; slave trade, 6 Slote, Walter, 49, 201n26, 203n68 social injustice, 25, 61 – 63, 79, 89, 109 –  110, 115, 116, 121, 138, 153, 154, 155, 174, 176 – 177, 203n55, 203n71, 218n52; as fluid, 30 social justice, 33, 70, 76, 78, 80, 84, 86, 88, 95, 96, 108, 115, 157, 160, 166, 183, 187, 193, 196n32; alternative forms of, 29, 34 – 35, 113 – 114, 148, 149; and community, 22 – 23, 36, 37, 91 – 92, 110 – 111, 189 – 190; as fluid, 29 – 30; and individualism, 30; and material change, 22, 50 – 51. See also ethics of care social movements, 8, 28, 185, 188; and coalition building strategies, 26; and community, 21 – 22; critical

discussions of, 26; and difference, 10; failures of, 26, 35; hierarchical politics and structures of, 11, 26, 34 – 35, 151 – 162, 199n117, 209n12; intersections of community and, 22, 26, 27; reliance on humanist subject, 26; role of women within, 23 – 25, 26 – 28, 199n117; social settlements, 78 solidarity, 21 – 22; as responsibility for the other, 17 Sollers, Werner, 5 – 7, 195n1 Sosa-Riddell, Adaljiaa, 211n60 Souris, Stephen, 200n12 spirituality, 1, 32 – 33, 113, 121, 124, 127 –  128; and authority, 132, 134 – 137, 143, 148 – 149; communal, outwardly directed, 131, 134, 137, 142 – 147; feminist, 113 – 114, 130, 131 – 132, 134, 141 –  142, 143; hybrid forms of, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 145, 146, 148, 149, 210n32, 214n104, 215n116; Latin American, 142 – 144, 218n58; Mexican American 134, 145; Native American, 104 – 106, 113 – 114, 132, 134, 141, 168, 214n97; reconceptualization of, 113 – 114, 115, 116 – 117, 129 – 130, 132, 134 – 137, 141, 143 – 146, 149; and ritual, 54 – 55, 56, 104 – 105, 145 – 146, 148, 172 – 173, 177, 214n111; and socio-material existence, 113, 114, 124, 129 – 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138 – 139, 141, 142 – 147, 149; and supernatural powers, 130 –  131, 133, 134 – 138, 147, 180 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 13 Stall, Susan, 24 Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony M., 209n19 Stoecker, Randy, 24 subjectivity, 125, 127, 197n58; and agency, 31 – 32, 35 – 36, 37, 61 – 63, 65, 69, 70 – 71, 125, 127, 128, 155, 166, 176, 213n82; communal and coalitionbased modes of, 4, 7, 31, 35 – 36, 37, 71, 122, 136, 142 – 144, 155, 166, 176; as dynamic, 10, 31, 35 – 36, 37, 135, 138,

Index  245

155, 170, 176, 177, 188; hybrid forms of, 4 – 5; individual, 20; and intersection of subject positions, 4, 10, 13, 31, 32, 35 – 36, 37, 58 – 59, 77, 83, 115, 121, 142, 149, 155, 171, 176, 177, 181; reconceptualization of, 2, 4, 5, 31, 155, 176 – 177, 188, 195n17, 196n19, 204n78; and self/other, 17, 56, 109, 141 – 142, 143, 186, 187; theoretical destabilization of, 9, 10, 31, 36, 177, 188, 195n17, 196n19 survival: collective, 11, 22; dependence on community for, 7, 14 Tally, Justine, 216n22 Tan, Amy, 3, 4, 37 – 38, 39 – 71, 73, 185, 189, 200n1, 200n4, 200n10, 200n12, 200n14, 200n17, 201n20, 201n21, 201n22, 201n26, 201n38, 201 –  202n40, 202n42, 202n45, 202n46, 202n47, 202n48, 202n52, 203n55, 203n59, 203n64, 203n68, 203n71, 203n73, 203n74, 204n77, 204n78, 204n80 testimonial narratives, 122 – 124, 128, 210 – 211n53, 211n57, 211n58 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 19 totalitarianism, 16, 47 Toyosato, Mayumi, 214n110 Tronto, Joan, 43, 83, 172, 196n40, 200n9, 200n10 Tu, Wei-Ming, 48 TuSmith, Bonnie, 7, 209n8, 213n90, 216n11 Utopian social vision, 8, 21, 106, 113, 115, 120 – 121, 122 – 123, 132, 156, 182, 188, 190, 207n83, 217n35; extended family model of, 70 – 71, 80, 90, 108 – 109, 110 – 111; Native American model of, 101 – 102, 104 – 105; and power of connectedness, 25 Valdés, María Elena de, 211n58

246  Index

validation, 122 – 123, 128, 129, 141, 148, 166, 187 Vinacke, W. Edgar, 33 violence, 26 – 27, 29, 76, 113, 120, 122, 123 – 124, 125, 126 – 127, 130, 131, 132, 138, 139, 147, 151 – 152, 166, 175, 181 – 183, 191 – 192, 216n26; and nonviolence, 153, 156, 161, 162 – 163, 166, 167, 180, 181 – 183 Voltaire, 4 Wallis, Jim, 88, 205n29 Walter, Roland, 211n58 War on Poverty, 22 – 23 Warrior, Robert Allen, 107 Weaver, Jace, 75, 101, 103 Wegar, Katarina, 109 Weil, Marie, 23 Werhane, Patricia, 20 white majority in the U.S., 1, 4, 93 – 94, 110, 186 whiteness, 9, 93 – 94, 100, 109 – 110, 117, 186, 195n16 Widdowson, Peter, 216n15, 216n20, 217n32, 217n44, 218n52 Williams, Gareth, 211n57 Willis, Meredith Sue, 107 women’s movement, 21, 31, 34, 39, 42, 152 – 154, 177; diversity in, 21; splintering of, 9 – 10 women’s suffrage, 78 Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia, 51, 202n45 X, Malcolm, 151 – 152 Ybarra, Lea, 210n38 Young, Iris Marion, 12, 21 Yuan, Yuan, 51, 202n45, 202n46, 202n47 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 32 Zinn, Maxine Baca, 211n63