Rezensionen 114 Mita Banerjee, Race-ing the Century. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005 (American Studies Vol. 124). Andrzej Antoszek Race-ing the Century by Mita Banerjee is a comprehensive and insightful study of the development, evolution and current face of ethnic articulations and representations in the US and their relations with the dominant white culture. Engaging in her monumental project, the author has successfully managed not only to portray the advancement of the field but also to look deeper below the surface of popular perceptions of and perspectives on ethnic studies, which often limit their scope to Latino/ a, Chinese, or African American literatures and cultures. Despite the fact that the author thinks that the range of the project might be too broad for some readers, it is exactly the reach of the study that makes it so panoramic and thus valid. Banerjee bravely, but quite justifiably, crosses the border of the theoretical and strictly literary discourse, allowing more room for various representations of popular culture. She is right in stating that without incorporating such voices into the current debate on race, ethnicity and the relations between dominant and “minor” cultures, and without treating these opinions on a par with more academic and traditionally “respected” contributions, one not only imposes artificial boundaries on the field but also estranges oneself from the domain that is founded as much on everyday experience as it is on scholarly work. The growing popularity of ethnic studies in recent years has of course promoted the advancement of hyphenated American agencies, politics and themes, but has also led to the emergence of issues that the field has to address to retain its credibility. It seems that a more thorough discussion of the repetitiveness and exhaustion of certain themes might be needed as well as answers to the questions of whether overusing (and sometimes even abusing) the life experiences of the writers may serve as one of the most important criteria of ethnic fictions’ status and validity. One may also wonder whether some voices are right in suggesting that certain canonical ethnic works - like the most-often taught novel in recent years, The Woman Warrior - may actually reproduce and thus reinforce ethnic and racial stereotypes (for instance the picture of the China girl discussed by Banerjee, too) due to the (academic) discourse’s unwillingness to engage in a discussion about whether critique could be seen as an anti-ethnic or even racist gesture. With Banerjee’s study, the reader will be able to develop a critical perspective on the aforementioned problems, but also to look at the historical evolution of the field, a view that ethnic studies aficionados often lack in developing their interest in what is undoubtedly absorbing and compelling but also fashionable and to some extent exotic these days. Including a wide spectrum of voices and representations in the study - ranging from William Faulkner to Josephine Baker to El Vez - is a conscious and well-executed strategy aimed at fighting some stereotypical and limiting perspectives and representations of hyphenated Americans. The apparent eclecticism of Banerjee’s project constitutes one of the few successful attempts in the field of ethnic studies to preserve and present the ever-changing and very dynamic nature of race relations. It is very important indeed that the author does not seem to favor any particular AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 1 Rezensionen 115 author, literature, or culture, or that she does not hierarchize any mode or channel of cultural representations; for Banerjee, mural painting may be as important as the writing of William Faulkner, yet putting the equation mark between the supposedly “low” and “high” art is what some distinguished voices of American culture have already done: in his great American novel Underworld, Don DeLillo puts the sophisticated New York artist Klara Sax on the same level as Ismael Munoz, a NYC subway graffiti legend. Careful readers will immediately appreciate that, despite the author’s metafictionally playful statement that some may consider the project a failure due to its vast disciplinary scope, the work is in fact a very systematic and well-thought-out walk through the history and representations of ethnic studies, forcing the reader to look at the field with a very fresh eye and to realize its depth, complexity, and diversity. Divided into three parts, Race-ing the Century seeks to demonstrate that - to quote the author - “race is an integral part of all our daily lives” (9) and that “each mainstream culture will have an overall attitude towards cultural difference, an attitude that will manifest itself in various ways.” (11) Part I, dedicated to textual representations of ethnic issues by such canonical voices as Toni Morrison, Louis Chu, or Maxine Hong Kingston, brings to the fore the very absorbing question of the relationship between texts and what Banerjee defines as “extra-textual” reality. The author rightly claims that such texts should be juxtaposed and measured against the reality they may refer to rather than become independent cultural artifacts situated on a different ontological level than the world around, or seen as carriers of various theories of cultural studies whose relationship with the here and now is not necessarily very obvious. She is also prompt to notice that deconstruction - one of postmodernism’s flagships holding the promise of a new interpretation - may become precarious for the political agenda if it is limited to deconstructing without, however, reconstructing: “[deconstruction] is problematical if it proves untranslatable into a political agenda.” (14) A very interesting example of the clash between a (theoretical) reading of a text and the text itself is Banerjee’s article on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where she claims that reading the novel through Homi Bhabha’s theory of the aporetic may in fact lead to a misconstruction of the masterpiece. Part II of the study discusses the relations between dominant (white) norms and ethnic difference, universality and whiteness, as well as ways of resisting the prerogatives of the controlling authority. The author believes that most of these resisting impulses come from or are triggered by popular culture that “may provide us with articulations of identity which are as yet inconceivable to literary theory.” (5) However, here one also needs to bear in mind that, much as popular culture is democratic, egalitarian and representative, it is frequently based on kitsch, appropriation and very lowbrow appeal, and sustained by more or less veiled agencies of power, namely predominantly white capitalism. One may wonder, too, whether those following the fashions and crazes of pop culture really become more open-minded and susceptible to the problems of race or ethnicity, or whether their objectives may be limited to experiencing pleasure and being cool. Therefore, the author’s statement that “the norm sympathizes with the ethnicity to the extent that it becomes itself ethnic” (14) is as promising as it is debatable at the moment. However, the examples Banerjee uses in her analysis of popular culture representations are very accurate and far from the Rezensionen 116 clichéd manifestations of today’s pulp fictions; she writes about Josephine Baker, the movies The Birth of a Nation and Falling Down, and mural arts. Part III of Race-ing the Century continues the investigation of popular culture focusing in particular on the ethics of impersonation (Elvis vs. El Vez), “the debasement of original iconicity” (14); Banerjee posits that impersonation may alienate normative strategies from themselves thus turning such representations into positive race-ing impulses. And in this case the message is carried by another powerful medium of popular culture: music. The author believes that both popular and elite culture can change the way one thinks - indeed a very humanist and affirmative assumption - and, therefore, they should embody the multiple (meaning multi-racial and multi-cultural) representations of which reality is composed. There probably is no better illustration of this point than the figure of the Mexican Elvis. Race-ing the Century by Mita Banerjee is a thorough and excellently written study of ethnic cultural representations which introduces an unusually wide perspective on the problems of dialogues and clashes between cultures, ways of resisting and deconstructing dominant discourse, and the democratization of various representations promoted and sustained by popular culture. Some readers may find the lack of typical chronology, and author’s refusal to look separately at Chicano, Native American, African American, Asian American, and mainstream productions slightly unusual, an aspect Banerjee herself acknowledges as problematic. Probably the book could also benefit from a discussion on contemporary African American (? ) hip hop music, a field where the politics of power, race, and de-constructing are very visible. Yet, the author might decide to explore it in another study, equally voluminous and illustrative as Race-ing the Century. Andrzej Antoszek English Department / American Studies Catholic University of Lublin Robert B. Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005. Ulf Schulenberg During the reign of analytic philosophy or logical positivism from the late 1940s to the 1970s, pragmatism seemed to be erased from the American intellectual map. Since the early 1980s, however, pragmatism’s fate has changed decidedly. It can be said that Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) initiated that change. The much-discussed revival of pragmatism has led to debates and sometimes bitter controversies whose effects can be detected across disciplinary lines (as the volume edited by Morris Dickstein, The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture [1998], AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 1