The Ideology of Ethnicity: Literary Theories and Identitarian Essentialism

In most contemporary literary theory engaged in addressing the issue of the representation of race and ethnicity in works of literature past and present, a central preoccupation is that of identifying the ideological systems underlying not only the structural organization of the text as it is, but also the distribution of the positions (and of cultural authority) among the various actors in that complex communicative exchange the text activates and is a part of, involving not only authors and readers but also publishers, people working in the literary marketplace, school and university teachers and students, translators, critics and reviewers, and – last but not least – the literary theorists themselves. A variety of approaches has emerged, especially in the United States, along a spectrum ranging from the most relativistic and anti-essentialist attitudes, that tend to focus on the performativity of identity in the different subjects (especially the writers) and thus to obfuscate the hard (even if often hidden and silent) materiality of a history intersecting all sorts of systems of oppression (first and foremost the racialization of the other), to the almost aggressive stance of the defenders of an irreducible identitarian specificity that comes to be conceptualized as impenetrable to the understanding of everyone who is not a member of that given ethic community, implicitly denying the possibility of almost any kind of meaningful transaction among people belonging to different and impermeable spheres. Theories based on essentialist and normative notions of race found extreme realizations in the claim that only members of a given ethnic community or “race” are entitled to write about that community or “race,” or that literary texts written by them can be translated or even critically analyzed only by their “kin,” as it has happened in a number of occasion with African American authors (and as it has been criticized by otehr Afriocan Americna writers and intellecutals). This also entails the possibility of an ironic self-segregation, since it can lead to the conclusion that members of an ethnic community or “race” can write, critically discuss or theorize only about themselves and their own cultural productions. As a matter of course, these theoretical positions, aggressive and almost prejudicially oppositive as they may look, have a much more than understandable raison d’être in the need to defend the complex idiosyncrasies of “ethnic” literatures from the superficial, if not ideologically biased, simplifications, misreadings and appropriations by dominant culture – only the last instances of a long history of oppression and exploitation that in the United States (and not only there) has manifested itself in much more violent and abusive ways. But the essentialization of identity can easily lead, in the field of literary theory and criticism (but also in the education system at large), to the institutionalization of an ideology of inclusion/exclusion, entitlement/proscription, acceptability/inadmissibility that goes far beyond the rules of engagement dictated by political correctness. Such theories find some partial justification in the context in which they take shape, but hand their most extreme conclusions could compromise the very projects of equality they endorse and promote. In this perspective, the essentialist drifts of the ideology of ethnicity can also be regarded as one of the most perverse and insidious long-term after-effects of the ideology of racism, as an ironical late offspring of the segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal.” On the level of the theory of literature, this implies the application of all sorts of normative machineries, criteria of censorship and disciplinary measures, which ultimately result in the reduction of the “literary” to the “literal,” so that a literary work comes to be envisioned not as a contested terrain where different interpretations can help to better understand the various (and inherently contradictory) possibilities of signification the text may spark, but rather as a monolithic object whose only aim is that of either celebrating or disparaging this or that (cultural, ethnic, “racial”) identity, based on what the text tells us on the most superficial level – the essentialization of ethnic identity generates the essentialization of language and of its meanings.