Betsy Huang's Review

Given that race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and other categories of identity have emerged as key issues of debate in the current presidential election process, I thought I'd offer up my review of the graphic novel series, Eagle: The Making of an Asian American President, as a way to start a discussion about minority representation (political, cultural, literary).

Kaiji Kawaguchi. Eagle: The Making of an Asian American President. English Adaptation by Carl Gustav Horn. Translated by Yuji Oniki. Vol. 1-5. San Francisco: Viz Comics, 2000-2002.

(Originally published in the Fall 2007 issue of MELUS: Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.)

In his now famous keynote speech for the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama has said that an election is about our decision to participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope, and that hope, to him, is represented by “a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.” With aspirations for the presidency himself, the implicit suggestion of Obama’s remark is his hope that America would prove itself enlightened enough to elect someone “with a funny name” to the nation’s highest office. Kaiji Kawaguchi’s manga series, Eagle: The Making of an Asian American President, seems to have been conceived with these sentiments in mind. Eagle follows the fictional election campaign of Kenneth Yamaoka, a third-generation Japanese American seeking to become the 43rd president of the United States. Told primarily from the perspective of Takashi Jo, a Japanese journalist who is also Yamaoka’s illegitimate son, Eagle offers an entertaining and at times critically astute dramatization of U.S. electoral politics, covering everything from campaign debates and speeches to the melodrama of the candidate’s private life.

Despite the fact that Eagle was roundly praised by comics reviewers and awarded several Eisner Awards (the top prize in comics art), the series did not find a large audience in the U.S. market. And while it ostensibly foregrounds ethnicity as the organizing narrative theme, it has escaped the critical radar of ethnic literature scholars. This is, I suspect, in part because American comics readers find the story’s premise—an Asian American presidential hopeful—somewhat outlandish, and in part because academics have been slow to accept comics as a genre worthy of scholarly examination. But there is much about Eagle that warrants a closer look by virtue of the provocative hypothetical question it poses. As one character in the series so efficiently puts it, “How far will the first Japanese American candidate to enter a presidential election go?” (Vol I:68).

Very far, it turns out—at least in Kawaguchi’s optimistic view of the American political process. Eagle is, in many ways, a superhero romance disguised as a political thriller. The hero, Yamaoka, is endowed with superior intelligence, verbal eloquence, and loads of charisma.. A staunch defender of immigrant and workers’ rights and a supporter of liberal values, Yamaoka is a posterboy for the promises of the American Dream. We watch with incredulity, and perhaps with some glee, as he gives rousing speeches, wins debates, shores up support in droves, and smooths every wrinkle on his way to the presidency. We shake our heads with disbelief when Yamaoka lays out his platform of pipe dreams (financing Mexico’s economic stability in order to solve the immigration crisis, shutting down all U.S. military bases abroad, among others) and still climb steadily in the polls. In one particularly astonishing episode, he even manages to convince a group of Texan ranchers to support his call for tighter gun control! Indeed, reading Eagle often feels like an exercise in wish fulfillment. Wouldn’t it be uplifting if America has overcome its racist hang-ups and proved itself enlightened enough to put a non-white president—and one who espouses leftist politics to boot— in the White House?

Eagle, however, is not just a saccharine story about American optimism. Kawaguchi exposes the dark side of politics as well, particularly the ethically questionable sub-rosa machinations of the parties involved, the persisting symptoms of racial intolerance in American society that circumscribe ethnic political representation, and most significantly, the Anglo model of Americanness that high government offices are still expected to represent. As one character in Eagle points out, “‘Eisenhower’ is about as funny-sounding as [the names of presidents] have ever got. No ‘skis’. . . no ‘steins’ . . . let alone anything like ‘Yamaoka.’ Two hundred years since George Washington and in all that time there’s been exactly one president who wasn’t a white Anglo-Saxon protestant. And look what happened to him” (Vol. IV:197). Other scenes, such as the hate speech graffitied on Yamaoka’s home and the two assassination attempts at a campaign stop, effectively (if at times melodramatically) capture the potential for deep-seated racism to find open expression when ethnics gain visibility in institutions of power.

Beyond these merits, however, Eagle fails to provide a nuanced examination of the complexities of ethnic subjectivities and conflicts. For example, Yamaoka’s Japanese ancestry seems merely incidental. His Japanese ancestry is inscribed simply as an accident of skin color; it plays no part in his subject formation, nor does it serve as the basis for meaningful ties to particular ethnic constituencies. He may be an Asian American candidate, but he does not represent the specific interests of Japanese Americans nor any other ethnic group. Rather, he represents a broad-based pro-immigration stance modeled ostensibly on the “nation of immigrants” creed of John F. Kennedy, with whom Kawaguchi carefully associates Yamaoka throughout the novel as a means to universalize (that is, de-racialize) Yamaoka’s appeal.

Graphic representations of Yamaoka and other ethnic or mixed-race characters also look more Caucasian than Asian. For instance, the Hispanicity of Yamaoka’s adopted daughter, Rachel, is revealed through dialogue and not through visual cues. It should be noted that, as many manga aficionados have pointed out, this testifies more to the aesthetic tradition of manga art and Kawaguchi’s artistic conventionality rather than his failure to render Japanese physical features more convincingly. While this raises the difficult question of how race and ethnicity should be represented visually in the comics medium, it is nevertheless disconcerting for readers to be unable to visually distinguish between characters of different races in a graphic novel that foregrounds ethnoracial politics as its principle subject matter.

Yamaoka’s whiteness, however, is coded less through the way his features are drawn, and more through Kawaguchi’s erasure of his Japanese ethnicity in favor of an all-American personal history. There is, in fact, little that is ethnic about Yamaoka with the exception of his name. Grandson of model-minority Japanese immigrants, Yale graduate, college football star, decorated Vietnam War veteran, New York Senator, and ex-New York District Attorney, Yamaoka’s profile is a composite of American heroic archetypes. His transformation from an “ethnic” to an “American” is made complete by his marriage to the daughter of a powerful New England family, the Hamptons, an alliance that effectively replaces his immigrant family history with a patrician, Anglo-American one. Kawaguchi makes little mention of the history of Japanese in America, and no mention at all of Japanese internment camps—an elision that seems all the more egregious and ironic when we note that Kawaguchi has modeled Yamaoka’s New Deal-like social policies on Franklin D. Roosevelt, the very president who signed the executive order that authorized the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two.

Equally problematic is Kawaguchi’s association of the ethnic with female characters who threaten to spoil Yamaoka’s otherwise pristine, all-American profile. Yamaoka’s brief romance in Okinawa with Jo’s mother, Tomiko (whom he likens to “the South Pacific, something immutable” [Vol V:441]), and his alleged romance with Rachel’s biological mother, Maria, a Cuban American woman from the barrio, pose the most serious threats to his political reputation. These “illegitimate” ethnic women are pitted against Yamaoka’s legitimate white wife, Patricia, whom Yamaoka regards as a fitting partner because she is, in his words, “a soldier, someone with whom [he] could speak of dreams” (Vol. V:442). An opposition is thus established between the wealthy white woman who could empower him and the ethnic women who would cripple him—a formulation that betrays the masculinist and imperialist perspectives that undergird Kawaguchi’s representations of ethnic women.

If Eagle fails to provide a sophisticated critique of U.S. identity politics, it might be because Kawaguchi is a Japanese national who has never lived in the U.S. and who spent only a few weeks in various regions of the U.S. “scouting location” and researching political processes. Nevertheless, the level of detail about U.S. electoral politics that Kawaguchi manages to provide is quite impressive. Eagle also exemplifies in many ways a perfect marriage between genre and subject matter; after all, both comics and election campaigns are, in essence, a series of carefully “framed” spectacles for public consumption. Kawaguchi deserves high praise for his expert storytelling; the sensationalist plotlines (is Yamaoka responsible for Tomiko’s mysterious death? Is Rachel really his biological daughter?) are quite entertaining, and the roman-à-clef elements of the series, particularly the references to Al Gore and the Clintons (thinly disguised as “Al Noah” and “Bill and Ellery”) will no doubt elicit knowing smiles—or sneers—from the reader. Ultimately, a dialogic quality persists throughout the series, so that one is never quite sure if Kawaguchi is reinforcing or demystifying the powerful mythologies of the American Dream. This is what makes Eagle an interesting text; it can be read either as Kawaguchi’s realistic rendering of the limitations that still exist for Asian American political representation, or his capitulation to the notion that ethnic types are palatable only if they are refashioned into familiar American archetypes.

- Betsy

Steve Levin's Review

Steve Levin, the newest member of the Department, is having his review of Khaled Hosseini's latest novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, published in Khath, and he's kindly agreed to give us a preview. Hossieni, you may recall, published The Kite Runner a couple of years ago, and it's been made into a film, which is playing even now at the Amherst Cinema. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm eagerly awaiting the local premier this week of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Instead of continuing to wander off topic, though, I'll give you Steve's review, which introduces me to "New Orientalism," a concept I'll have to incorporate into my own theoretical lexicon, since it makes so much sense:


It is impossible to read Khaled Hosseini’s latest novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, without also considering the monumental popularity of his first novel, The Kite Runner. Published in 2003, The Kite Runner moved to the top of U.S. bestseller lists largely through word of mouth, became a favorite of book clubs and reading groups, and of course now has been adapted to a feature film that seems at once to avoid and to exemplify the hallmarks of a Hollywood treatment: the film employs, for example, a cast of unknown Afghan and Iranian actors but, in the style of a Hollywood epic, oversimplifies political and historical events as a way to accentuate elements of melodrama and sentimentality.

As with The Kite Runner, Splendid Suns weaves together dramas of personal struggle and regional politics. The novel focuses on two women, Mariam and Laila, and the staggering hardships they endure as both domestic and national subjects: in their own families they are marginalized as daughters and wives, and in the public sphere they act as signifiers of national identity for the Soviets, the Mujahideen, and the Taliban (the novel offers a more favorable portrait of gender equality under the Soviets, but also shows that Soviet forces, following a common strategy of colonial rhetoric, invoke gender politics as a way to defend the legitimacy of their expansion in the region).

Mariam is the daughter of a wealthy businessman in Herat who, seeking to placate his three wives by sparing the family the shaming presence of an illegitimate child, arranges Mariam’s marriage to a shoemaker in distant Kabul. The suitor, Rasheed, forces Mariam to wear a burqa—because “a woman’s face is her husband’s business only”--and lashes out viciously when she proves unable to fulfill his idealized expectations for a proper wife.

The story of Laila, a neighbor of Mariam’s, initially appears to offer a somewhat hopeful contrast to the depiction of Mariam’s conjugal incarceration. As a modern girl in Kabul, we follow her on adventures that resonate with Marjane Satrapi’s portrayal in Persepolis of a child coming of age in a city claimed by multiple political factions and constantly under siege (in Satrapi’s case, Tehran in the 1980s). Laila’s father encourages her independence and stresses the importance of education; that the schoolteacher compels students to espouse their ideological allegiance to the Soviets seems more a minor annoyance than a threat to their autonomy. And although Laila’s mother reinforces the unequal valuation of sons and daughters by neglecting Laila and reserving all of her affection for two sons fighting on the front for, as she sees it, Afghani national pride, with the Mujahideen against the Russians, Laila draws support from a close friend, Tariq, and his cosmopolitan family.

Yet the fighting that ensues after the collapse of the Soviet regime in the 1990s throws her life into turmoil. Through a surprising turn of events, Laila too eventually falls victim to Rasheed’s predations, and from 1992 to the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 she and Mariam do their best to survive in the face of horrific domestic violence and suffocating public restrictions. Through the portrayal of their subjection, we gain a window into the social landscape that materialized for women with the ascent of factional fighting in Kabul and the Taliban’s idiom of Islamization, which proscribed work, travel, and education.

Hosseini has been applauded for humanizing Afghanistan for western audiences and, with Splendid Suns, for bringing to the fore the graphic abuses women have suffered both in Afghanistan and generally as pawns in the muscular politics of nationalism. Yet Hosseini’s work also has been cited by some critics as a prototypical example of “New Orientalism.” This mode of representation, outlined most prominently by Fatemeh Keshavarz (an Iranian literature specialist at Washington University) and Hamid Dabashi (Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University), represents all Muslims as either good or bad. “Good” Muslims are inevitably modern while “bad” ones reflect stereotypes of blind devotion and social and sexual repression. Such representations prove comforting to western audiences because they sidestep history and serve to redeem a western ideal of modernity. Read through the interpretive frame of New Orientalism, we might observe that the only choice available to Mariam and Laila to escape the repressive sexual politics of Islam lies in embracing a familiar mode of cosmopolitan modernity: secular, consumerist, and universal.

These positions—one that celebrates Hosseini’s humanism and one that critiques the absence of historical complexity and calls for respectful representations of cultural difference (rather than affirmations of western modernity)--reflect, in my view, a complex double-bind for many contemporary global writers. Any representation critical of particular national contexts risks being absorbed into political agendas beyond the writer’s control. How does a writer balance the concerns of the local and global? How does one portray the social struggles of women in Afghanistan without also falling into the trap of what postcolonial critics have described as “colonial feminism”—the invocation of women’s rights to justify invasion by an outside power?
Our evaluation of these questions may come down to how we see this problem of “humanizing” Afghanistan. If the writer’s task is to present a picture of Afghanis as “ordinary” people who, contrary to ethnocentric stereotypes, have hopes and dreams and heartbreaks, then Hosseini succeeds in offering a vivid glimpse into an often misunderstood region. Yet if humanizing means expanding our sense of the political and historical determinants that have produced the contested and imagined nation of “Afghanistan,” and challenging readers not to remain in denial about particular aspects of these histories, Splendid Suns perhaps proves less successful. Although the novel excoriates the violence perpetrated by the Soviets, the Mujahideen, and the Taliban, it remains mostly silent on the ways in which these groups were largely enabled by a long history of British colonialism and U.S. interventionism. Only by suppressing this history can cosmopolitan modernity emerge as a triumphant corrective for the violence perpetrated against Mariam and Laila. The story Hosseini tells is moving and indeed full of human drama—sacrifice and courage and pain and loss, as some favorable reviews have said—but the question persists as to whether it does anything to restore suppressed historical memories that might unsettle western audiences, or whether it should.

--Jay

Luxembourg

A little while ago I asked Tali Sachs, one of our senior English majors, to talk a little about her experience on a summer research scholarship in Luxembourg this past summer. She has graciously complied, with a brief description and a short essay. Give it a look:

This past summer, I had the privilege of making the journey across the Atlantic to serve as a student envoy at U.S. Embassy Luxembourg, as one of Clark University’s Summer Research Scholarship recipients. At the prospect of spending the summer living and working in Europe I was, of course, excited, scared, and most of all, clueless. I had no idea what I would find. As it turns out, I found something that changed my outlook on life drastically. I found an experience that placed me as a foreigner, alone, in an environment that is not so fond of Americans. To make it even more difficult, I was working for my country, a country that I love dearly for its strengths and its ideals, but a country that has a long way to go until it reaches maturity. My experience cemented my dedication to helping this country reach its full potential both within and beyond its borders.
While in Europe I diligently kept a travel journal. Below is the entry written on the most influential day of my entire stay in Luxembourg and the surrounding countries. Being an envoy for the U.S. put me in a rather unique position: I was at home inside the walls of the embassy and a foreigner without. It was my duty, along with everyone else working for the State Department, to promote the United States of America despite our individual opinions of specific issues, policies, and people. For me, specifically, this involved presenting a grand image. I worked for Protocol, which means it was my job to help implement and arrange events welcoming Europeans and to make sure that our ambassador and other diplomats were comfortable reciprocating similar events.
One of these events was the Memorial Day Ceremony, held on Saturday, May 26, 2007. This ceremony put my life both as an American and as a member of the human race into perspective. For the first time I truly understood what it meant to be an American and why Americans are often met with and thought of with disdain by the rest of the world. It was on this day that I understood that loyalty to my country had nothing to do with a politician or a policy, but with the ideals of the country’s foundation. Administrations change, world climates change, every year, every day brings a different opinion. Americans fighting on opposite ends of the spectrum of idealism are just as American as their counterparts. This country’s ability to survive and withstand such opposing opinions is what makes it beautiful and great. It’s what makes me love it more than any other.

May 26, 2007
In Memoriam
I spent the last two days standing over General George S. Patton’s grave. Originally, he was buried like everyone else, among the soldiers, undistinguished from all the other crosses and stars. It was a Luxembourger who was walking among the graves one day and stumbled upon his. She thought it was wrong that he wasn’t given a more, let’s say, “elevated” position in the cemetery. I suppose the government agreed, and so his body was moved to a large memorial just in front of plot B, the first one you’re confronted with upon waking into the graveyard. It’s chained off and on top of it is a quote from General, and later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower: “All who shall hereafter live in freedom will be here reminded that to these men and their comrades we owe a debt to be paid with grateful remembrance of their sacrifice and with the high resolve that the cause for which they died shall live eternally.” But I think I like the idea of him being among his men better. After all, a soldier is a soldier just like a human is a human and we’re all in it together. I find it ironic that he didn’t die the way I think he would have liked, and also, just a day before he was meant to go home to America. A truck took him out on a leisure trip, shooting pheasants and not men.
Surprisingly, this memorial service actually moved me to tears. I guess it’s because I was standing on liberated ground, something Americans don’t ever get to do if we don’t leave our little bubble of the New World. The Battle of the Bulge was fought here and there are five thousand American graves to show for it, veterans to remember it, and millions of grateful Europeans who lived through it and millions more who were born afterwards who somehow take their freedom much less for granted than the kin of those who allowed that freedom to be. Thinking about it, I know why I was so moved. It’s because we do take it for granted despite our rhetoric. “Freedom” has become a word used so much in American society that we have desensitized ourselves to what it actually means, and in doing so we have lost sight of creating and maintaining a reality of that freedom. Sadly, I feel, we are letting it slip away under the false pretense of itself, or rather, what it has become. We have let it slip away by our apathy, and by our extreme ability to pretend that everything is wonderful when the world is anything but.
We have to wake up. As a nation. Because the world does not love us. We’re juveniles and it’s not our fault. We’re young, not 231 years old. In the face of nations, we’re infants, so how can we be expected as a society to have that maturity? We’re still in the blissful fantasy of childhood but the world, as always, comes upon us quickly and we try to ignore it for as long as we can, unfortunately waiting too long. Perhaps we will learn from our mistakes.
That graveyard, like any in its league is not only one of soldiers, but of a dying American Dream. That may be revived if we realize that we are not separate from the world but a part of it and that the oceans on either side of us are not as wide as they used to be. I love that Dream and I want it. I want to own it and see it realized again and again and again. I want to run my fingers over the embroidered stars of our flag and I want that flag to stand for a country that exists and a country that I love in all ways, in both idea and in reality. I want people to understand that love of soldiers need not be support of a war, and that love of country need not be love of its current administration.
I stood in the sun too long but it was worth it. For the honor of those fallen soldiers, of ones not fallen, and of ones to come, I am willing to give up a little skin while they have given up so much more for me and for you.

--Jay

We're B-a-a-a-ck!

So, we've been back for a week now, and I hope everyone has the classes they want (or need). We're set for the beginning of the new semester, now that the Dog Days of December are behind us: the daylight is getting a little longer day by day (though one couldn't really tell, given all the snow we've had). I'm hoping to post more regularly, now that my semester is set; and I'm anticipating a number of other participants in the blog: I've been cajoling both students and faculty to submit some good and intriguing stuff (photos delightfully accepted!). Again, let me encourage all of you who might access the blog to comment or get in touch with me (jelliott@clarku.edu) if you want me to post anything for you.

In the meantime, Dania, here's a few more web-speaks for you:

IMO: In my opinion

IMHO: In my humble opinion

btw: (too obvious: by the way)

GBCW: Goodbye Cruel World [in other words, you all can take your blog and stuff it!]

OTOH: On the other hand [curiously, "on the one hand" is exactly the same, so one doesn't see it in blogs!]

Time to go ponder the primaries on CNN. . . .

--Jay

lmao

Sup?

Every holiday season when I don't read or write enough and am instead bombarded by cyber mumbo jumbo, I am led to consider the short and long term effects of cyber literacy. In fact, I am increasingly feeling I cannot keep up with the fast pace and unpredictability of this world. Maybe I am getting old but when I recently had to ask a friend of mine what "Lmao"*, "rofl" and "Lmfao"* meant- after putting off asking out of pride- I knew I was losing it, the 'it' I had back in high school. Yet here I am blogging, though I was never a journal-writing, diary-confiding type o' gal.

When Walter Ong suggested that literacy restructures consciousness, he had a point. Subsequent to my cyber literacy I have had to think harder to spell things correctly while using pen and pape, and that's just one case in point. I am inclined to drop my 'g's at the end of words like chillin, goin, doin which is so not kool, sorry cool. Ong argued that knowledge of writing affects expression, but that the reverse also occurs. Writing helps organize thoughts prior to putting them on paper and in ways that orality alone supposedly didn't/doesn't. While not implying some inherent superiority to literacy over orality, especially since the latter preceded the former, I buy into Ong's general thesis. My cyber literacy- while largely empowering, educational, furturist (yadayadayada) and just really kinda kool- may be the enemy of my good old reading and writing skills. I am not sure I should just sit back and lmfao* while that happens.

For the primitive like me, a KEY:
*lmao- laugh/laughing my ass off
*lmfao- laugh/laughing my fat ass off
*rofl- rolling on floor laughing
lol- laugh/laughing out loud
sup- what's up?