THE TERMS OF OUR CONNECTION: AFFILIATION AND DIFFERENCE IN THE POST-1960 ...

292 Pages·2012·1.36 MB·English

THE TERMS OF OUR CONNECTION: AFFILIATION AND DIFFERENCE
IN THE POST-1960 NORTH AMERICAN NOVEL

Jennifer M. James

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2012
© 2012
Jennifer M. James
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT
The Terms of our Connection: Affiliation and Difference in the Post-1960 North American Novel

Jennifer M. James

In this dissertation, I consider a neglected legacy of the long 1960s (1959-1975): the
struggle to form lasting connections across seemingly irreparable social divides. Through a
comparative analysis of North American novels by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Margaret
Atwood, Linda Hogan, Tim O’Brien and Susan Choi, I identify a common story their works all
share: the narrative of affiliation. These novels of affiliation, I argue, represent the creation of
lateral bonds of attachment among individuals of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities
and classes. As a transgressive and unruly form of interpersonal relationship, affiliation works to
bridge divisions by joining together the contradictory feelings of erotic desire and friendship.
Defining an overlooked sub-genre of the post-1960 North American novel of development, this
project illuminates the heterogeneous bonds of solidarity that undoubtedly arose during the sixties,
yet have been continually silenced by national discourses of identity and multiculturalism. In the
wake of neo-liberalism, 1960s collective projects for social change, including the New Left, the
civil rights movement, Black Nationalism, feminism, and the Asian American movement, among
others, appear historically and ideologically separate, and even antagonistic. In stark contrast, this
dissertation illuminates the common ethics of affiliation that aligned these disparate movements
and was built from collaborative, immanent and provisional attempts at repairing suffering and
disparity. Positioned not within, but alongside the fraught history of the sixties, this project offers
a new portrait of the adjacent, subterranean modes of experimental living that animated the era.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction 1

2. Chapter 1: Making Love, Making Friends:
Affiliation and Repair in James Baldwin’s Another Country 52

3. Chapter 2: Cut Adrift: Improvising Affiliation in Toni Morrison’s Sula 100

4. Chapter 3: Improbable Companions:
Interspecies Affiliation in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing 145

5. Chapter 4: Broken Affinities: The Ends of Affiliation
in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods 191

6. Chapter 5: A Far-Off Horizon:
Visions of Affiliation in Susan Choi’s American Woman 239

7. Bibliography 275

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation would not have come into being without the support and vision of a number of
people and institutions. I am pleased to acknowledge the many friends, colleagues, faculty and
students whose guidance and insights contributed to the felicitous completion of this project. First
and foremost, I have been tremendously blessed to work with the best advisor a girl could ever ask
for. The astute, compassionate guidance and seemingly infinite generosity of Marianne Hirsch has
made this dissertation a success, above all else. For conversation, feedback, and priceless advice, I
thank the many professors with whom I have studied, including Rachel Adams, Bob O’Meally,
Sharon Marcus, Nancy K. Miller, Jonathan Arac, Catherine Biers, Julie Crawford, John Gamber,
Beth Povinelli, Gary Okihiro, Gayatri Spivak, Monica Miller and Ivy Schweitzer. I am indebted to
my colleagues at Columbia, in particular my academic sisters and brothers Saskia Cornes, Alicia
DeSantis, Jess Fenn, Melissa Gonzalez, Alvan Ikoku, Sherally Munshi, Kate Stanley, Sonali Thakkar,
and Autumn Womack, with special thanks to Sherally, Sonali and Autumn for their close and patient
reading of a number of chapter drafts. My students in “Re-Reading the Sixties: Sex, Love and
Gender,” “Sex and Intimacy in the 1960s,” and “Toni Morrison and her New York Circle” gave me
inspiration and energy as I worked to crystallize the project’s main ideas and render my writing
accessible to a variety of readers.
I would like to acknowledge the participants and respondents at the Dartmouth Futures of
American Studies Institute, the Columbia University Seminar in Cultural Memory, the Columbia
Americanist Graduate Colloquium, and the Columbia Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Graduate Colloquium for generously reading and responding to my written work. I also would like
to thank the panelists and audience members at a number of academic conferences, including the
2011 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Conference, the “Re-Vision in
Contemporary Women’s Writing” panel at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association
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Conference, and the 2009 Conference “James Baldwin: In His Time/In Our Time” at Suffolk
University. I have greatly appreciated the opportunity to participate in and learn from the dynamic
conversations that took place in the “Engendering Archives” working group at Columbia’s Center
for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. I’d also like to acknowledge the English Department
faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus and my future colleagues at Pacific
Lutheran University for their attention and insightful comments on my work.
As the years have gone by, I have been truly thankful to receive much needed logistical and
administrative support from the wonderful staff of the Columbia University English Department, in
particular Joy Hayton, Pamela Rodman, Virginia Kay and Valencia Ortiz. In addition I’d like to
acknowledge the help and quick thinking of Vina Tran and Page Jackson at the Institute for
Research on Women and Gender. I gratefully acknowledge Studies in American Fiction for permission
to reprint sections of Chapter 1, which will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of the journal. I would
also like to thank my former professors at Smith College and Dartmouth College who helped me
achieve my academic goals, in particular Maria Banerjee, Ann Rosalind Jones and Mary Jean Green.
Special thanks to my good friend Jess Hotchkiss, whose support and companionship helped me
survive many an academic crisis. Thanks as well to those kind souls who offered up their homes for
retreat and shelter, especially Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer and my aunt Kathryn James Morgan.
Finally, I am so grateful for my wonderfully supportive parents, Mike and Diana James, whose
constant encouragement, advice, life lessons, and general inspiration have made my dreams tangible
and attainable for the past 33 years.
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For my parents, Mike and Diana James,
whose tall-tales of the sixties continue to haunt my imagination.

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INTRODUCTION

On August 15, 2009, Frank Rich published a New York Times Op-Ed commenting on the anniversary
of the Woodstock Festival and the third season of the celebrated, 60s-themed television series Mad
Men. Explicitly connecting the sixties with the “oughts,” Rich writes of witnessing a moment akin
to the 1960s, a “pivot point of our history, with a new young president unlike any we’ve seen before,
and with the promise of a new frontier whose boundaries are a mystery. Something is happening
here, as Bob Dylan framed this mood the last time around, but you don’t know what it is.”1 As
Rich’s article suggests, the study of the Sixties is like entering a seemingly undiscovered, yet
paradoxically well trod, territory. The “something that is happening here” in 2012 holds an uncanny
resemblance to the raucous horizon of possibility we associate with the sixties. Yet this “new
frontier” is in fact, not quite new, but a moment of re-vision, where we are looking back with a new
perspective on the conflicts over race, class and gender that animated the era. As the hopes and
disappointments of the 2008 presidential election have proven, we are faced with a crucial need to
enrich our understanding of the ways social life has transformed since the sixties. I aim to provide
the beginnings of such an account in this dissertation.
This dissertation addresses the overlooked psychic and affective experiences that contribute
to the development of non-normative interpersonal, familial and communal structures of relation
during the sixties. In the following pages, I approach fiction as a dynamic space to explore an
alternative cultural imaginary of affiliation I believe animates the period. Attending to this neglected
legacy of the long 1960s (1959-1975), this project analyzes how novels of the era represent its
struggles to form lasting affiliations across seemingly irreparable social divides. Through a

1 Frank Rich, “’Mad Men’ Crashes Woodstock’s Party,” New York Times, 15 Aug 2009, 18 April 2012.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16rich.html?pagewanted=all.
2
comparative analysis of novels by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Tim O’Brien
and Susan Choi, I identify a common story their works all share: the narrative of affiliation. These
novels of affiliation represent the cultivation of lateral bonds of attachment among individuals of
different races, ethnicities, genders and sexualities. Defining an overlooked sub-genre of the post-
1960 North American novel of development, these texts illuminate subversive modes of
companionship and crossing that were central to collectivity during the era, yet have been
continually silenced by national discourses of neo-liberalism and multiculturalism. Together they
demonstrate that cross-difference circles of solidarity envisioned in the 1960s and after develop
concomitant to transgressive modes of interpersonal relationship that joined together the
contradictory feelings of erotic desire and friendship.
The novel of affiliation illuminates the common affective and relational desires that animated
seemingly separate and distinct leftist and minoritarian movements. During the 1980s, the
insurgence of group-based identity politics in part developed as a means of resisting the celebrated
rise of liberal individualism; these movements crucially revived a sense of community and identity
for marginalized groups during a period when conservative legislatures demolished key structures of
redistribution and equal protection that had been forged during the long 1960s. However, the
political nature of these identities, which focused on shared genealogies of inheritance and
essentialist notions of the family, culture and the self, made the creation of viable modes of cross-
difference solidarity often difficult to visualize. In contrast to this identitarian memory of the sixties,
I hope to illuminate the decade’s enduring queer politics of intersectionality that has its genesis in
intersubjective bonds of affiliation.
In its emphasis on what Kimberle Crenshaw terms a politics of intersectionality, my reading
of affiliation is indebted to a Black feminist genealogy that continues to remind us that the hard
“lessons” of the ‘60s don’t easily mesh with national political agendas. Looking back to the work of
3
Audre Lorde, for example, illuminates the power that comes from confronting the uncomfortable
tensions that emerge when different races, ethnicities and genders come together. A reappraisal of
Lorde’s early 1980s writings can provide a window into the way the 1960s haunts us in the cyclical
recurrence of the politics of difference in North America. Those hegemonic structures of power
that Lorde fought against in the early eighties were part of a conservative reprisal against the
revolutionary legacies of the sixties – mainly the Reagan era’s systematic destruction of equality-
seeking social welfare programs at home and the resurgent imperial power of the United States
abroad. Lorde’s poetry and theory are central to what Roderick A. Ferguson calls a “queer of color
critique” that emerged from lesbian identified black feminists in the mid-1970s, which gives power
to this dissertation’s comparative analysis of racial, gender and sexual formation during the 1960s
and after.
On August 27, 1983, a quarter of a million people participated in the second “March on
Washington for Jobs, Peace and Freedom,” which commemorated the original mass demonstration
led by Martin Luther King twenty years before. Among those who attended was Lorde who had
been recruited by the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gay Men to speak. She accepted
with trepidation this momentous offer to be one of the first out lesbians to testify to the shared
values inherent in the civil rights and gay liberation movements at this historic public forum. In her
remarks, Lorde made a strong claim for the necessary bonds of solidarity between gay and straight
African Americans in their continued pursuit for a more just and egalitarian society. After first
recognizing how the black civil rights movement had pledged to support the burgeoning gay rights
movement, of which two legislative bills were proposed in Congress at the time, she continued: “not
one of us is free to choose the terms of our living until all of us are free to choose the terms of our
living… We know we do not have to become copies of each other in order to work together. We
know that when we join hands across the table of our differences, our diversity gives us great