Ethnic trouble: ethnicization and American literature in the twenty-first century
Creators: name: McLeod, Miranda
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2022

description: “Ethnic Trouble: Ethnicization and American Literature in the Twenty-First Century” argues that ethnicization is an underutilized but essential framework with which to read twenty-first-century American literature. Scholars of ethnic American literature have long approached ethnicity as a dimension of self-definition for individuals and communities and as a theoretical category that enables societal recognition, cultural and economic alliance building, and political organization. However, ethnicization—or the seizure and reframing of ethnic identity by the state—is a key component in the lives and literatures of othered Americans, one that invites particular attention in a sociopolitical space marked by American state anxiety over declining global hegemony. Just as racialization reframes race as a process rather than a static fact, ethnicization invites an understanding of ethnicity as not only the product of cultural and historical realities, but also of processes of state control over othered bodies. As such, approaching ethnic American literature as a literature of the ethnicized allows us to examine those interethnic systems of oppression that are a cornerstone of the United States’ neoimperialism and identify contextually specific but translatable strategies of decolonial resistance.“Ethnic Trouble” reads fiction by Paul Beatty, Reyna Grande, Mohsin Hamid, Mat Johnson, Lisa Ko, Victor LaValle, Graciela Limón, and Luís Alberto Urrea for the recognition, description, production, and critique of American ethnicization practices. Encoded in these texts are strategies deployed by the US state to control, exploit, and/or expel othered people—strategies that specifically rely on the state’s recognition, interpolation, and discursive transformation of people’s ethnicities and, importantly, relationships between those ethnicities. Reading these texts as part of a literature of the ethnicized, rather than ethnic American literature, reveals such strategies through the narratives of characters that grapple—or fail to grapple—with their experiences of ethnicization. It brings attention to the ways the texts themselves can (re)produce American processes of ethnicization: in embracing hegemonic understandings of what it means to be a successful and valuable American, some of these texts participate in the work of reifying ethnicization. Others critique this process by actively forcing the (white) reader to engage in ethnicizing practices. And still others illustrate how state strategies of ethnicization are necessarily cloaked behind narratives of individual responsibility and multiculturalism. Taken together, this literature reveals the interdependence of all ethnicizing strategies, how in fact the state’s approach to any one ethnicized community cannot be extricated from its approach to others, and how literatures from different American subcultures can thereby be seen as interrelated not because of their non-whiteness, but because of their inclusion in one ethnicizing system.