‘Who wants pale, thin, pink flesh?’: Bharati Mukherjee, whiteness, and South Asian American writing
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502360600829024
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size I would like to thank Hugh Stevens and Robert Itillenbrand for their valuable comments on this essay. Notes 1. Although individual examples of this critical project appeared in the 1980s – for example, Peggy McIntosh, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’ (1988), reprinted in Race: An Anthology in the First Person, ed. Bart Schneider (New York: Crown Trade, 1997), pp. 120–26 – Whiteness Studies as a formalised academic field is generally agreed to date from the early 1990s and particularly from Toni Morrison's influential study, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). This coincided with the work of other commentators such as Shelley Fisher Fishkin; see Fishkin, ‘Interrogating “Whiteness”, Complicating “Blackness”: Remapping American Culture’, American Quarterly, 47.3 (September 1995), pp. 428–66. For critical surveys of Whiteness Studies, see Robyn Wiegman, ‘Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity’, boundary 2, 26.3 (1999), pp. 115–50; Christina Pruett, ‘The Complexions of “Race” and the Rise of “Whiteness” Studies’, Clio, 32.1 (2002), pp. 27–50; and Betsy Nies, ‘Whiteness Studies’ in The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 625–31. 2. See Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 1–2, 8–9; Susan Koshy, ‘Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness’, boundary 2, 28.1 (2001), pp. 154–94; and Gregory Jay (with Sandra Elaine Jones), ‘Whiteness Studies and the Multicultural Literature Classroom’, MELUS, 30.2 (Summer 2005), pp. 100–1. 3. Babb, Whiteness Visible, p. 9. 4. One might add that other colour labels for human skin – ‘black’, ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ – pose similar difficulties, although ‘brown’ as a term of self-description employed by South Asians is perhaps more accurate as a linguistic representation of optical ‘reality’; see Naomi Zack, ‘Black, White, and Gray: Words, Words, Words’, ‘Mixed Race’ Studies: A Reader, ed. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 154–55, 157. 5. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 42–44, 47–48. 6. Adrian Piper, ‘Whiteless’, Art Journal, 60.4 (Winter 2001), p. 62; see also R. Dale Guthrie, Body Hot Spots: The Anatomy of Human Social Organs and Behaviour (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976), p. 175. 7. Dyer, White, p. 44. 8. Compare E. Ann Kaplan, ‘The ‘Look’ Returned: Knowledge Production and Constructions of ‘Whiteness’ in Humanities Scholarship and Independent Film’ in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 325. 9. Raka Shome, ‘Whiteness and the Politics of Location: Postcolonial Reflections’ in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, eds. Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999), p. 124. 10. Dyer, White, p. 45. 11. See Samina Najmi, Representations of White Women in Works by Selected African American and Asian American Authors, unpublished PhD dissertation (Boston: Tufts University, 1997), p. 15; Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, ‘On the Borders Between US Studies and Postcolonial Identity’, Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, eds. Singh and Schmidt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), p. 35; Pruett, ‘Complexions’, p. 29; and Nies, ‘Whiteness’, p. 625. On the pinkness of Caucasian skin, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 51, 137, 162n; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (London: Picador, 1990), pp. 27, 46; Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (London: Granta, 1998), p. 172; Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 3; and V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (London: Picador, 2002; first published 1967), p. 160. South Asian British culture also defamiliarises white skin: see, inter alia, Kamala Markandaya, The Nowhere Man (New York: John Day, 1972), pp. 18, 34, 49, 51, 239–40, 246, 253, 275; Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1988), pp. 207, 437, 441, 449, 453, and Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–91 (London: Granta, 1991), pp. 129–30, where pinkness is connected to its traditional use for overseas British possessions on colonial maps; the first series of the BBC comedy sketch show, Goodness Gracious Me (1998), which satirically references ‘pasty’ skin; Suhayl Saadi, The Burning Mirror (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2001), pp. 23–24, 122; and Hanif Kureishi, Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (London: Faber, 2002), pp. 94–95. 12. bell hooks, ‘Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination’ in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 167. 13. Ibid., p. 168. On the white gaze, compare, too, Fanon, Black Skin, pp. 109–10, 112, 113–4, 116; and Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (London: Vintage, 1999), pp. 36–37, 97, which conversely notes that white eyes fail to see black people, illustrating the classic racist paradox of the invisible/highly visible subject. On the general importance of ‘the gaze’ in maintaining power relations, compare Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon and trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. 162; and Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion and trans. Robert Hurley et al. (London: Allen Lane, 1994), p. 339. See also Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 30–31, 33–39, on the specifically gendered and sexualised elements of the cinematic gaze. 14. See Morrison, Bluest Eye, pp. 5, 14, 37, 68, 93, 97. 15. In this rich, rapidly expanding field, critics have generally considered two main issues. One is white writers' representations of whiteness and their reliance on characters of other races – see, for example, Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Rebecca Aanerud, ‘Fictions of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in US Literature’ in Displacing Whiteness, pp. 35–59; and Myriam Perregaux, ‘Whiteness as Unstable Construction: Kate Pullinger's The Last Time I Saw Jane’ in Literature and Racial Ambiguity, eds. Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 71–91. The other is whiteness in African American literature: see, for example, Anna Maria Chupa, Anne, the White Woman in Contemporary African-American Fiction: Archetypes, Stereotypes, and Characterisations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990) and Jane Davis, The White Image in the Black Mind: A Study of African American Literature (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000). 16. See Jinhua Emma Teng, ‘Miscegenation and the Critique of Patriarchy in Turn-of-the-Century Fiction’ in Asian American Studies: A Reader, eds. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Min Song (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 95–110; Dominika Ferrens, Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 97, 102–7; Helena Grice, Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American Women's Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 133–34, 144–48, 151; and Guy Beauregard, ‘Reclaiming Sui Sin Far’ in Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History, eds. Josephine Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 346. 17. Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, ‘Going for the Knockout: Confronting Whiteness in Gus Lee's China Boy’, MELUS, 29.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2004), pp. 413–26. Citing Carole Boyce Davies' work on black writing, Malcolm sees ‘whiteness’ in the text as founded ‘not primarily in skin colour but in the conjunction of Caucasian racial characteristics with … participation in the domination of others’, ibid., p. 423n (emphasis added). 18. Fanon, Black Skin, pp. 41–82. Compare, too, how a sexual dimension alters Chinese diasporic perceptions of whiteness in Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet (London: Paddleless, 1999), pp. 67, 142–43, and Gish Jen, Typical American (London: Granta, 1998), p. 11. 19. Sheng-mei Ma, Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 65–67. The writers Ma discusses include Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenidos Santos, John Okada, and David Wong Louie. 20. Ibid., p. 77. 21. Thus Najmi's study, while conceding certain exceptions (Representations of White Women, p. 203), chiefly emphasises favourable representations of white women. 22. For critiques of this cultural norm, see Morrison, Bluest Eye; Wendy Chapkis, ed., Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance (London: The Women's Press, 1988), pp. 44–46, 60, 69–70; and Marita Golden, ‘whitegirls’ in Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write about Race, eds. Golden and Susan Richards Shreve (New York: Anchor, 1995), pp. 26–29, 33. 23. Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories (London: Virago, 1989), pp. 6–7; and compare Morrison, Bluest Eye, p. 149. 24. See Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, ‘What is “White Trash”? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States’, in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, pp. 168–84, for a stimulating discussion of ‘white trash’ in America. For a contrary view, see Samina Najmi and Rajini Srikanth, eds. White Women in Racialised Spaces: Imaginative Transformation and Ethical Action in Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 3–4. For intra-white racism, see Henry David Thoreau, Walden in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume B: American Literature 1820–1865, ed. Nina Baym (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), pp. 1914–17. Note, too, the ancient stigmatisation of red-haired people, particularly in Europe; for historical accounts, see Annie Mollard-Desfours, Le Rouge, le dictionnaire des mots et expressions de couleur du XXe siècle (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000), pp. 304, 362–64; and for a psychological study (of anti-blond prejudice, too), see Dennis E. Clayson and Micol R. C. Maughan, ‘Redheads and Blonds: Stereotypic Images’, Psychological Reports, 59 (1986), pp. 811–16. 25. See Babb, Whiteness Visible, p. 32, and Dyer, White, p. 50. 26. Bharati Mukherjee, The Tiger's Daughter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 8, 160, 37. 27. Ibid., pp. 164, 183, 188. 28. Bharati Mukherjee, Darkness (Markham, Ontario: Penguin, 1985), p. 195. Compare pink skin as a warning sign in Jen, Typical American, p. 158, and Mukherjee, Middleman, p. 25. 29. Mukherjee, Darkness, p. 46. 30. Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), pp. 23, 108, 181, 109, 110, 179. 31. Ibid., pp. 116, 111. 32. Ibid., p. 130. 33. Compare Fanon, Black Skin, pp. 43, 52; Naipaul, Mimic Men, p. 247; Morrison, Bluest Eye, pp. 13–14, 34–36, 38, 105, 138, 143, 154–55, 159–62; Markandaya, Nowhere Man, pp. 52, 60, 237, 264; Bharati Mukherjee, ‘An Invisible Woman’, Saturday Night (March 1981), p. 38; Mo, Sour Sweet, p. 142; Mukherjee, Middleman, p. 182; Chapkis, Beauty Secrets, pp. 60, 69–70; Chupa, Anne, the White Woman, pp. 13, 18, 32–3, 45, 97; Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee, Days and Nights in Calcutta (St. Paul, Minnesota: Hungry Mind Press, 1995), p. 242; and Saadi, Burning Mirror, pp. 25, 31. 34. Cited in hooks, ‘Representing Whiteness’, p. 167. 35. Mukherjee, Holder, p. 150. 36. Ibid., pp. 181, 207. 37. Himani Bannerji, ed., Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1993), p. x; compare, too, Grice, Negotiating Identities, p. 133. 38. Mukherjee, Holder, p. 104. 39. Mukherjee's strategy here can be linked to a wider Asian American project in which, for example, Jen, Mona, pp. 10–11, 21, 37, 89, 170, 197–98, 227, 256, 298, emphasises the subtlety of East Asian and African American skin tones, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 59–60, explicitly invokes Chinese physical diversity through her discussion of the multiple shades of Chinese hair. Compare, too, Morrison, Bluest Eye, pp. 44, 64, 72, 80, 132, 145, 149; Markandaya, Nowhere Man, p. 269; Naomi Wolfe, ‘The Racism of Well-Meaning White People’ in Skin Deep, p. 38; Ma, Immigrant Subjectivities, p. 66; and Zack, ‘Black, White’, p. 157n. 40. Mukherjee, Darkness, pp. 44, 97, 171. 41. Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine (London: Virago, 1989), pp. 11–12. 42. Ibid., p. 29. 43. Mukherjee, Middleman, pp. 132, 91. 44. Mukherjee, Holder, pp. 9, 95, 7. 45. Meena Alexander, Nampally Road (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), pp. 18–19. 46. Ibid., p. 96. 47. Meena Alexander, Fault Lines (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2003), p. 94. Compare the ‘red-faced officers’ Mukherjee recalls from her Indian childhood in Blaise and Mukherjee, Days and Nights, p. 223, and the detail of a British colonialist's ‘coarse red leathery face’ in Markandaya, Nowhere Man, p. 106. 48. Alexander, Fault Lines, pp. 73, 118. 49. Meena Alexander, ‘“The Shock of Sensation”: On Reading The Waves as a Girl in India, and as a Woman in America’, Meridians, 1.1 (Autumn 2000), p. 184. 50. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (London: Abacus, 2001), pp. 37, 53. 51. Ibid., pp. 133, 135. 52. Ibid., p. 142. 53. Ibid., p. 140. 54. Ibid., pp. 223, 227. 55. Ibid., p. 233. 56. Ibid., p. 261. 57. See Dyer, White, p. 74, and Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), p. 162; and compare Najmi, Representations of White Women, pp. 147–48; and Chupa, Anne, the White Woman, pp. 38, 44–45, 94. 58. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies (London: Flamingo, 2000), p. 132. 59. Ibid., pp. 112–13. 60. Ibid., p. 135. 61. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (London: Flamingo, 2004), p. 31. 62. Alexander, Nampally Road, p. 14. 63. Alexander, Fault Lines, p. 95. 64. Mukherjee, Tiger's Daughter, p. 66. 65. Bharati Mukherjee, Wife (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), p. 148. 66. Mukherjee, Holder, p. 108. See also Markandaya, Nowhere Man, p. 231. 67. Lahiri, Namesake, pp. 57, 88. 68. Ibid., p. 88. 69. Ibid., pp. 102, 110, 128. 70. Babb, Whiteness Visible, p. 17; compare also Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 270–73, 295–96. 71. See Tim Lott, The Scent of Dried Roses (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 36, 140, 206, in which pink skin establishes Otherness within the traditional British class system. Compare, too, Tim Jeal, Baden-Powell (London: Pimlico, 1989), p. 108, where he cites the use by Robert Baden-Powell of ‘pinkish’ as a derogatory means of separating the male and female forms, thus relegating women to a status of sexual and aesthetic inferior. Pink is, of course, also used as a synonym for homosexual culture, while ‘pinko’ in conjunction with ‘leftie/liberal’ is a traditional political insult. 72. See Chupa, Anne, the White Woman, pp. 18, 32–33, 40, 42, 44–45, 72, 94, 97; and Davis, The White Image, pp. xiv, 58–59. 73. Compare Teng, ‘Miscegenation’, pp. 99, 104–6. 74. See Grice, Negotiating Identities, p. 131. 75. See Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Heart of Whiteness’, Callaloo, 16.4 (Fall 1993), p. 802. 76. Kaiser Haq, ‘Translator's Introduction’ in Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, Originally in Persian, of a Visit to France and Britain, trans. Kaiser Haq (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2002), p. 12. 77. Compare Morrison, Bluest Eye, which represents something of an Ur-text in this respect. See, too, Grice, Negotiating Identities, p. 145. 78. See Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Feminist Politics: What's Home Got To Do With It?’ in Feminist Studies / Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 198–200, 202–3, 206, 208; and Golden and Shreve, Skin Deep, p. 3. 79. Najmi and Srikanth, White Women in Racialised Spaces, p. 14. Najmi, Representations of White Women, pp. ii, 15, 190, argues, however, that white women appear more often than men in works by writers of colour because, traditionally marginalised, they are a better constituency with whom to forge alliances in the fight against mainstream American patriarchy and racism. 80. Rafael Pérez-Torres, ‘Tracing and Erasing: Race and Pedagogy in The Bluest Eye’ in Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison, eds. Nellie Y. McKay and Kathryn Earle (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1997), p. 22. 81. Kaplan, ‘The “Look” Returned’, p. 319; compare, too, Davis, The White Image, pp. 16, 150–151. 82. hooks, ‘Representing Whiteness’, p. 170. See also Chupa, Anne, the White Woman, p. 11. 83. George Yancy, ed., What Whiteness Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 16. 84. See Najmi and Srikanth, White Women in Racialised Spaces, pp. 6, 24n; and Vijay Prashad, ‘How the Hindus Became Jews: American Racism after 9/11’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 104.3 (Summer 2005), pp. 583–84. For generalised accounts of racism towards South Asians in America, see Sucheta Mazumdar, ‘Race and Racism: South Asians in the United States’ in Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary, eds. Gail M. Nomura, Russell Endo, Stephen H. Sumida and Russell C. Leong (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1989), pp. 29–30, 32–34; and Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 72, 106. 85. Compare Najmi and Srikanth, White Women in Racialised Spaces, p. 15. 86. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 125. This is, of course, a common complaint about Whiteness Studies in general; see, for example, Pruett, ‘Complexions’, p. 44; Nies, ‘Whiteness’, p. 630; and Jay, ‘Whiteness Studies’, p. 102. 87. Grice, Negotiating Identities, p. 131.
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