.
Americans, according to this script, somehow still succeed and achieve. This reductive formulation further shows how ethnic and racial difference is not necessarily a barrier, thus showing up (and perhaps even shaming) other racial groups perceived to be underperforming.
The Postracial Aesthetic
Because the Asian American writers in this study take on narrative perspectives or characters that do not mirror their own ethnoracial ancestries, these works might be taken as examples of what the literary critic Yoonmee Chang has called a “postracial aesthetic.” Chang defines the postracial as “literature written by Asian American writers that does not contain Asian American characters or address Asian American experiences” (201–02). Chang engages a lengthier reading of Nam Le’s opening short story from The Boat (2008), “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” to show how the postracial operates through an “ethnic abnegation” (202), as writers turn away from their Asian ethnic backgrounds as direct sources or inspirations for their creative work. Chang asserts that “this rejection frees the author from the ostensible shackles of ethnic particularity and difference to examine transcendent universal themes, like ‘love and honor and pity.’ For Asian American authors, the postracial more specifically frees them from writing orientalist caricatures and reductive ethnographies—from the ‘Chinatown’ book” (202). Le himself cannot be defined so strictly as Asian American due to his Australian national origin, but the story’s setting in Iowa and its thematic content is more broadly applicable to minority writers. As read by Chang, the main character from the opening short story, presumably modeled on Nam Le himself, is an example of a writer seeking to break free from the bonds of autoethnographic and autobiographical fiction. Le’s collection as a whole seems to follow the pattern of the writer who has broken free from the expectation that he write from his own ethnoracial viewpoint, as many of the stories take on perspectives of racially unmarked characters or those of different ancestral backgrounds from Le (who is of Vietnamese descent). At the same time, the final story, “The Boat,” adheres to a Vietnamese context and engages one of the more common concerns of that ethnic experience by relating the harrowing refugee flight from the homeland in the wake of war. The inclusion and the sequencing of “The Boat” suggests that the postracial aesthetic is itself a questionable fantasy and that some established forms and themes of ethnic-minority writing cannot simply be disregarded as unoriginal or superficially pandering to an audience hungry for the ethnoracially authentic narrative voice.
But the larger problem with any postracial aesthetic is the assumption that constructing “universal themes” ultimately enables a writer, Asian American or not, to ever be free from the “shackles of ethnic particularity and difference.” Even as a writer seems to move beyond narrating a particular story from the viewpoint of a character who strongly mirrors his or her own ancestry, deeper analytical inquiry reveals a fictional world imbued by the often brutalizing forces of power based on material realities and external referents. In other words, universal themes might appear in the fictional world, but always and only alongside very specific social contexts that have always been the concern of cultural critics and scholars involved with race and ethnic studies.
For one concrete example within the realm of Asian American fiction, let us turn to Tony D’Souza’s novel Whiteman (2006). The narrator and titular “whiteman,” Jack Diaz, travels to Côte d’Ivoire as a volunteer for Potable Water International (PWI), an international humanitarian aid organization that helps tribal villages find reliable sources of clean drinking water. D’Souza, a biracial Asian American writer, does not situate the first-person narrative through a storyteller whose ethnoracial background overlaps with his own but rather focuses it through the main character’s challenging journey surviving in the rural backcountry of West Africa. Whiteman might be seen as exemplary of postracial Asian American fiction.14 One could say that D’Souza has freed himself from the bonds of his own “ethnic particularity” as it relates to the fictional world, giving him the potential grounds to explore more universal themes. On one level, the novel is very much about the practical application of universal themes, especially in relation to human rights. Article 25 of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, drives the goals of many international relief and humanitarian organizations. D’Souza’s fictional organization, PWI, has some clear real-world analogs such as Global Water, water.org, and Water Health International, all with similar aims.
But, on another level, even as Jack seeks to advance the aims of universal human rights, these lofty goals collide with the social contexts of Côte d’Ivoire. For instance, D’Souza’s construction of the fictional world demands to be read alongside racial tensions involving the northern and southern tribes within the nation-state. The regime of biological essence and racial difference exported into Côte d’Ivoire through the colonial process is central to the country’s regional tensions, as elucidated by Ruth Marshall-Fratani (13). Key to Marshall-Fratani’s theorization is that Ivoirians ultimately appropriated colonial ideologies of race to try to define what an authentic and essential national subject could be. Because Côte d’Ivoire is one of the most diverse countries in West Africa, the attempt to define the authentic Ivoirian subject has been bloody, intense, and conflicted. Within Whiteman, D’Souza represents this complicated milieu through the religious tensions existing among various populations. Not long after settling in the Worodougou region, Jack details the rift between Côte d’Ivoire’s Muslim northerners and Christian southerners as emerging in part through French postcolonial influence; the resulting clashes over citizenship set the stage for violence over issues of belonging and racial difference. For the local individuals, national disenfranchisement occurs in multiple ways, including lack of access to health care and the unequal distribution of federal funds for vital infrastructure projects (15). At the same time, Jack’s anger is obvious, and he places his political investments with those who reside in the Muslim-majority north. Thus, his commitment to social justice extends far beyond the desire to install new well pumps and provide clean water. However, given the chaotic national and international situation, Jack never gets to fulfill his main goal as a member of PWI. By the time the novel concludes, Côte d’Ivoire’s civil war has begun, and the eight remaining members of PWI must make a perilous journey to a neighboring country to be evacuated.15 We see how the institution of universal human rights finds unstable grounding in the midst of chaotic nation-state formation.
The novel’s structure further enables one to consider the link between formal conventions and social contexts. Whiteman can be considered a “dissensual bildungsroman,” specifically detailing the challenges of developing any “egalitarian imaginary” in a postcolonial and neocolonial Ivoirian context (Slaughter 28). While Jack begins the novel as an ostensible adult, every chapter illustrates how much he must learn in order to adapt to and understand the Ivoirian cultures that surround him, suggesting that he still requires maturation. Despite some acculturation to Côte d’Ivoire over the course of the novel, Jack’s experiences leave him unfulfilled, especially as evidenced by his journeys after he is forced to leave the country. He “wandered another half year around the far reaches of the continent” and “tried, and mostly succeeded, to enter every war-torn nation there was: Burundi, Angola, Congo, Zimbabwe” (D’Souza 278). But Jack finally divulges that he never found what he was “looking for” and finally came “home” (278). This last sentiment reveals the interruption of Jack’s identity quest, a reflection perhaps of his limited power as an individual to effect positive change. If the novel’s setting in Côte d’Ivoire brings with it the residues of its French colonial past, the war-torn nations that Jack later visits gesture to the larger history of European colonization, as Burundi, Angola, Congo, and Zimbabwe were respectively colonized by Germany, Portugal, Belgium, and England. The constructed narrative perspective, the “I” of Jack Diaz, is one haunted by his individual failures and the larger scope of political instability on the African continent.
As race relations collide catastrophically within the postcolonial milieu of Côte d’Ivoire, the novel depicts, without romanticizing, how Jack’s persistent attempts to portray life there are indelibly marked by social inequalities. Though D’Souza does not necessarily choose to narrate the novel from the perspective of a mixed-race South Asian American character, Whiteman offers us a storyteller who realizes the shortsightedness of his humanitarian mission in the face of the