Melting pot is a metaphor, a metaphor that United States was once upbeat about. In the melting pot, heterogeneous substances lose their disparate elements to fuse into a homogenous unit. In the melting pot of US, people hailing from many different countries, who moved to the Promised Land seeking the Holy Grail of freedom, opportunities, and betterment, were expected to shed their distinctiveness and assimilate themselves into a new cultural identity—a homogenous and harmonious Americanness. It was an American dream that ended in tragedy. After toying with the symbol of melting pot vainly for nearly two centuries, America gave up on the idea and came up with a new metaphor—a salad bowl. In this multicultural bowl, people from different cultures retain their ethnic identities while complementing one another and thus contributing to the whole. America as a multicultural mosaic is another image that has gained currency, where the natives, settlers, and immigrant ethnic groups coalesce into and embellish a truly multicultural mosaic. Which brings us to the concept of ethnicity.

Ethnicity is a historical and social, and at times political, construct. It connotes shared cultural traits such as nationality, language, filiations, beliefs, traditions, besides certain physical distinctions, especially skin color and facial features. African Americans, American Indians, Latinos, and Hispanics in the US, for example, are ethnic groups.

Ethnicity is the primary grounding of one’s identity. Ethnicization unites people who share certain physical and cultural traits and at the same time sequesters them from others who do not. While the cultural heritage of an ethnic group becomes a fundamental part of its identity, in places where the group is in the minority, the same heritage becomes a marker, a discernible disparateness that makes it easier for the dominant section of the society to pigeonhole the diasporic groups into dehumanized, and often demonized, ‘others.’ In this sense, the diasporic identity is the safe haven and the diasporic identity is the blight. Ethnicity is used associatively and often interchangeably with race, perhaps because of the bad connotation that the latter engenders. However, unlike race, which is imputed by others based on the outward or visual aspects of a group, ethnicity is an identity sought and appropriated by the group itself based on its shared culture and legacy.

In the first paper, “Otherwise than Otherness: From Entities to Perspectives in Asian North American Studies,” Ming Xie argues that replacing the term ‘race’ with ‘ethnicity’ will only serve to reinforce the stereotype and hence impresses upon the need to see race and ethnicity not as “entities” cut and dried, but as “perspectives.” While appreciating Dirlik’s vision of “place-basedness” in order to avoid the danger of ethnic groups withdrawing themselves from their immediate environment, Xie stresses on the need for connecting oneself, from where one is located, to other locations, without losing one’s place-basedness.

A closer inspection of another ethnic group, the American Jewish community, would reveal their fixation with their Jewish identity, and naturally one of the leitmotifs in their contemporary creative exploration is about what constitutes the essence of Jewish identity. In the second paper, “Transgression and Liberation: Carnivalesque Elements in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint,” Rama Naga Hanuman Alapati shows how Roth carnivalizes and subverts, in the Bakhtinian tradition, the Jewish orthodoxy by giving free rein to Portnoy’s alternative voice that profanes and countermines the authority of official culture, using sexual and scatological instances, to liberate the Jewish experience as well as the literary canon.

If a literary text is a looking glass wherein the beholder discovers his own face, then it means that the text has no determinate meaning except for what the reader’s context brings to bear upon it and that the text gives no access to the author’s line of thinking. However, such aporetic reasoning cannot deny the exegetical value of a biographical approach to a text. In other words, it is possible to draw inferences about the author from the work and vice versa. For, like a reader brings his background to the text, the author too may bring his own experiences to impinge on his text. In the third paper, “Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight: A Vampire Tale?” Aiswarya S Babu shows how Meyer may have unconsciously let her Mormon-tinged beliefs and racial stereotypes color her vampire-teen romance the Twilight series.

Edward Said’s contention, in his polemical and definitive work Orientalism, that the western attitude towards the Middle East is marked by a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture,” may not hold water at least in the case of American author Herman Melville. In the fourth paper, “Scheherazade in Melville’s House: The Arabian Nights as an Oriental Resource for the American Novelist,” Jalal Uddin Khan and Abdul-Salam Hamad trace the influence of the celebrated Arabian Nights in the works of Melville and aver that Melville owes his sense of the romantic “other” to the fascinating yarn of stories-within-stories of the narrator-heroine Scheherazade.

Carl Jung, in his essay “Psychology and Literature,” mentions two modes of artistic creation—psychological and visionary. The psychological mode deals with materials drawn from the realm of human consciousness. The visionary mode, on the other hand, derives the material for its artistic expression from obscure sources that lie in the hinterland of man’s mind, perhaps from the abyss of time dating back to pre-human ages. For example, we have poetic and mythic materials common to all men, and literature based on such material is merely the archetype dressed in a particular style, carrying the “signature” of the writer and the consciousness of his age. In the fifth paper, “Expressionism in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra,” T Jeevan Kumar takes a closer look at Eugene O’Neill’s reinterpretation of Aeschylean trilogy Oresteia through the expressionistic prism, highlighting the disillusionment of the age and the fragmentation of personality in the post-WWI America that characterized O’Neill’s play. The Cantos of Ezra Pound is a long poem comprising one hundred and twenty sections written between 1915 and 1962. It is highly allusive and apparently follows no design. The absence of unity, incoherent framework, and obscure references, besides quotes in other European languages and Chinese characters in the poem, no doubt, pose a challenge even to ardent poetry enthusiasts. In short, as many aver, recourse to scholarly commentaries is almost unavoidable for a close reading of the poem. In the sixth paper, “‘Amor’ in Pound,” Hoshang Merchant provides one such, with examples from the poem, and shows how Pound exalted heterosexual love by elevating Woman to the mythic level she occupied in classical literature.

-- R Venkatesan Iyengar
Consulting Editor