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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
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Nimura, Tamiko. "In a Coalitional Mode: African American Literature, Asian American Literature, and the Politics of Comparison," English, Washington State University, June 2004.
This project contributes to African American and Asian American literary studies through the concept of coalition as trope and methodology to compare and contrast American ethnic literatures. This approach enables a generative theorization through and across racial categories of difference, without succumbing to weak versions of cultural pluralism. I argue that coalition has been misunderstood to mean a temporary alliance for a common cause, a safe space that minimizes difference. Women-of-color feminism challenges this definition: it argues that coalition must be negotiated as a long-term process, a dangerous space that engages difference. I bring this definition of coalition to bear on the politics of cross-racial comparative literary study. As a case study in coalitional literary work, I compare African American and Asian American literatures, recognizing the difficult nature of this cross-racial comparison and arguing that such a comparison generates a coalitional, interdisciplinary methodology for American ethnic studies. The introduction examines multi-ethnic literary studies, women-of-color feminist theories, and the fields of African American and Asian American studies for the ways in which they theorize identity as intersectional. Chapter One argues that Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo proposes a pendulum chronology for coalition politics, contending that coalition must be rethought as a non-linear, long-term process. Understanding that a useful coalition-politic grounds itself in interrogating the relationship between identity and injury, Chapter Two reviews postmodern understandings of identity as injury and contrasts these to the ways that Toni Cade Bambara’s novel, The Salt Eaters, extends post-positivist realist understandings of identity. Chapter Three examines discourses of coalition, multiculturalism and Blackness emerging from Chang-Rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker. Chapter Four analyzes the limits of liberalism and genre generated by the confluent 1953 publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Monica Sone’s memoir Nisei Daughter and Gwendolyn Brooks’ novella Maud Martha.
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