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"Floreani, Tracy"
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Fifties Ethnicities
Fifties Ethnicities brings together a variety of texts to
explore what it meant to be American in the middle of \"America's
Century.\" In a series of comparative readings that draws on novels,
television programs, movie magazines, and films, Tracy Floreani
crosses generic boundaries to show how literature and mass media
worked to mold concepts of ethnicity in the 1950s. Revisiting
well-known novels of the period, such as Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man , as well
as less-studied works, such as William Saroyan's Rock
Wagram and C. Y. Lee's The Flower Drum Song (the
original source of the more famous Rodgers and Hammerstein
musical), Floreani investigates how the writing of ethnic identity
called into question the ways in which signifiers of Americanness
also inherently privileged whiteness. By putting these novels into
conversation with popular media narratives such as I Love
Lucy , the author offers an in-depth examination of the
boundaries and possibilities for participating in American culture
in an era that greatly influenced national ideas about identity.
While midcentury mass media presented an undeniably engaging vision
of American success, national belonging, and guidelines for
cultural citizenship, Floreani argues that minority writers and
artists were, at the same time, engaging that vision and implicitly
participating in its construction.
eBook
Leaving the Dark Room in a Lighter Mood
Like Rock Wagram, the protagonists discussed within this chapter strive for identities in public celebrity that will provide them with greater cultural legitimacy as defined within their visual culture contexts. While Rock’s shifting relationship to ethnic categories ultimately allows him a large measure of social mobility and participation within mass culture (albeit a complicated one), the character Sarah Jane Johnson of Imitation of Life and the protagonist of Invisible Man find themselves in situations similar to that of Maud Martha because of the historically racializing determinants at work within American culture. Unlike Maud’s interior, relatively private fantasy of social mobility,
Book Chapter
The Celluloid Fantasy
Like many novels about Hollywood, William Saroyan’s Rock Wagram (1951) tells a story of the deal making and social life in movieland. What moves the narrative, however, is not an exposé-style focus on the workings of the place itself, but a complicated exploration of the title character, an Armenian American from Fresno, California, who becomes a movie star just before World War II. A character who embodies complicated images of self, he demonstrates that the inclusion afforded by ethnicity (vs. race) is more complicated than it seems. The ways in which the title character’s images of self play out within
Book Chapter
The Land of Plenty
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Chin Yang Lee’s The Flower Drum Song (1957) both engage in contemplations of the ways in which mass culture forms hail individuals into a space of national participation. Though the two novels are very different from one another in terms of narrative development, language, audience, and the ideology of citizenship, they both rely on mass culture within the narrative structure and theorize the role of mass culture as instrumental to postwar American identity formation. Both were also adapted into contemporaneous visual narratives, Lee’s as a popular Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical (1958–59) and Hollywood
Book Chapter
What’s for Sale
On the day that I first read Gwendolyn Brooks’s only novel, Maud Martha (1953), I had finished the graphic scene of Maud’s daughter’s birth in a tenement apartment when I decided to take a break. That day, I watched a broadcast of the I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy enters the hospital to give birth.¹ I was struck by the difference between these two birth scenes created within the same year: Maud Martha’s like something out of the tradition of blood-and-tears literary Naturalism; Lucy’s an ultrasterilized birth, to the extent that Lucy disappears completely from the episode once she
Book Chapter
Introduction
In Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin writes, “I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”¹ Part of what makes the period after World War II so fascinating is that the oppressive and the rosy seem to have existed simultaneously and consistently in balance for so many years. When I began this project years ago and would mention that I was examining narratives about ethnicity in the 1950s, the response from colleagues and friends was often
Book Chapter
Guest Editors' Introduction
(2010); as well as other writing that remained unpublished or uncollected at the time of Ellison's death in 1994. [...]as the contents of this special issue suggest, Ellison studies is also American studies. According to J.J. Butts, Ellison drew upon his FWP research on Harlem's history and vernacular culture to challenge the ideas of modern citizenship embedded in the New Deal's planning discourse. [...]in Jack Whitten's Black Monolith II (For Ralph Ellison) (1994), the irreducible multiplicity of African American identity appears in a form that could certainly be called Ellisonian: a mosaic whose tiles are syncretized from molasses, copper, salt, coal, ash, chocolate, onion, herbs, rust, eggshell, razor blade, and acrylic paint.
Journal Article