Textual Practice 20(3), 2006, 529547

Ruth Maxey Who wants pale, thin, pink esh?: Bharati Mukherjee, whiteness, and South Asian American writing

Historically, white identity has often gone unidentied, unlabelled, and unracialised, as work within the interdisciplinary eld of Whiteness Studies has persuasively shown. This area of intellectual enquiry, which is now more than a decade old,1 hinges on two points of critical consensus. Firstly, whiteness is treated as the name for a wide-ranging form of global hegemony: political, legal, cultural, and economic. Secondly, within the United States context, it is viewed as an invention, both historic and current, since an apparently homogeneous white American identity is actually composed of many different ethnic groups.2 Bearing these points in mind, Valerie Babb has argued that a distinction should be made between white skin the common pigmentation we associate with those we call white and whiteness.3 In a similar manner to Whiteness Studies, but partially predating this branch of scholarship, South Asian American literature has interrogated white privilege through the destabilising processes of direct naming, satire, and a consistent return to the trope of white physicality. Indeed, although Bharati Mukherjee and such other writers as Meena Alexander, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Jhumpa Lahiri react to whiteness as a hegemonic political system, their principal means of negotiating white ethnicity is by focusing on precisely the physical aspects that Babb disavows blond or red hair, blue or green eyes and, often most of all, skin pigmentation. Across Mukherjees uvre, and in Alexanders Nampally Road (1991) and Fault Lines (1996), Divakarunis The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001), and Lahiris The Interpreter of Maladies (2000) and The Namesake (2003), Caucasian identity is constituted both as a colour pink or red which takes its place in the palette of human skin tones, and, paradoxically, as an unnatural, often undesirable, pallor: that is, as an explicit lack of colour. This article will begin by situating South Asian American literary treatments of white American corporeality within the context of other critiques of whiteness, both academic and artistic, and will suggest possible
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2006 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502360600829024

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reasons for their insistence on this theme. It will contend that, as a whole, this area of Asian American literary studies remains under-examined, before analysing the texts mentioned above. It will devote more space to Mukherjees work because it represents the most wide-ranging and complex engagement with these ideas, and will examine the diverse uses to which these authors put the device of pink, red or pasty skin and, to a lesser extent, Caucasian hair and eyes. The essay will conclude by exploring briey what role this Othering of white bodies plays in the racial politics of these literary texts, by asking why these authors feel free to depict white bodies in pejorative ways no longer permitted to Caucasian Americans representing brown or black physicality, and by considering whether these works ultimately reinforce negative white stereotypes. In tracing a lineage for these writers denaturalisations of the white body, critical discussions which draw attention to the problematic nature of categorising skin as white are especially instructive. Richard Dyer, for instance, points out that Caucasians are not literally white;4 that white is both a colour and not a colour (an idea in keeping with the pinkness/pallor paradox); that the skin shades of so-called non-white races can be just as white as those of Europeans and Caucasian Americans; and that, historically, other physical characteristics long noses, round eyes were markers of whiteness in African and Asian art.5 Adrian Piper notes, meanwhile, that other cultures dont associate the colour white with Euroethnics and refers to anthropological accounts in which people of other races describe Europeans as colourless . . . pale . . . pink or light.6 In a similar vein, Dyer regards as preferable other terms, like pink, olive and grey, to refer to what we now call white people, partly because they are less loaded, partly because this would break up the monolithic identity, whiteness. But we do use the one term . . . .7 These assertions, which recognise the difculty of dislodging white as the primary designation for Caucasians, arguably hold true in popular, political, and demographic discourse, yet they are contradicted by South Asian American writing with its frequent recourse to a spectrum of other colour-coded terms, and to pink in particular, as a means of signifying whiteness. In other words, not everyone does use the one term. By emphasising the varying chromatic aspects of Caucasian American physicality, the writers in question not only overturn the normative nature of whiteness in US society, but also render white characters as people of colour too.8 In so doing, their white readers are challenged to think about ethnic and racial difference and to reect upon their cultural position in more probing ways. Such a strategy is also about wresting power from white American culture by returning its traditionally oppressive gaze on its non-white Others. For Raka Shome, these white looking relations are historically and culturally learned9 while, as Dyer has observed,

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looking and being looked at reproduce racial power relations . . . To be seen as white is to have ones corporeality registered.10 When the lens is trained on Caucasian subjects in a South Asian American literary context, then, the white reader is forced to unlearn these traditional looking relations. In this way, the writers in question enact a form of writing back by using the right to represent and objectify. These gestures are new neither in American letters nor in postcolonial or ethnic American studies, as several critics have noted.11 Indeed, it has long been a preoccupation of African American writers and thinkers, in particular, to subject white people to what bell hooks has termed a critical ethnographic gaze.12 She writes that this arose historically as a response to white control of the black gaze. Black slaves, and later manumitted servants, could be brutally punished for looking, for appearing to observe the whites they were serving as only a subject can observe, or see;13 and in African American literature, the reversed gaze has also focused on the pigmentation of white bodies: inter alia, The Bluest Eye (1970) Toni Morrisons profound meditation on American attitudes to race contains a number of examples.14 South Asian and African American authors alike thus give the lie to whiteness as a lack of colour. Despite this long tradition, the literary dimensions of Whiteness Studies as they pertain to Asian American writers remain underresearched.15 Where critics have considered navigations of whiteness in this literature, they have assessed the reversed ethnographic gaze in works by biracial Chinese Caucasian writers, especially Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton),16 and the negative depiction of the (wicked) white stepmother in the novel, China Boy (1991), by the Chinese American author Gus Lee.17 Only rarely have commentators explored representations of the white body itself in this textual arena and, in such cases, they have generally highlighted the positive ways in which it is conceived. Sometimes this takes an aspirationally sexualised form, which recalls Frantz Fanons classic discussion of the crucial element of sexuality in black attitudes to whites.18 Analysing the complex relationship between Asian American male writers and the white female body, Sheng-mei Ma argues, for example, that longing for Caucasian women represents . . . the disadvantaged groups fallacy of assimilation . . .White bodies . . . become not only an exotic physical entity whose fair skin and corporeal features captivate in an essentialist manner Asian American men but also a political symbol within which lies the promise of power.19 Although it is labyrinthine,20 Ma does not suggest that this racialisation process presents white physicality in any negative way. Indeed, critics have been slow to discuss the often overwhelmingly pejorative aspects Caucasian corporeality takes on in the hands of certain Asian American authors,21 and to touch on this issue in South Asian American literature.

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In the racialised, gendered discourse of Mukherjee, Alexander, Divakaruni, and Lahiri they are all women, often writing about female characters the white physique is usually not a condition to which one would aspire. Indeed, it signies inferiority in several respects. Firstly, it is less appealing aesthetically and less attractive sexually, allowing the writers in question to challenge the pervasive ideal of beauty as white within American popular culture and, more widely, within Western art.22 South Asian American versions of Caucasian pallor or its inverse, pinkness, are also a corrective to the traditionally idealistic literary language applied by white writers to white skin: phrases such as peaches-andcream, alabaster, milky and ivory. As Mukherjee puts it: who wants pale, thin, pink esh . . . limp, curly blond hair, when you can have lustrous browns, purple-blacks?23 Secondly, pink or pasty skin is undesirable because it is inextricably linked, in a socio-cultural sense, to unearned privilege and often to racist systems of thought; and a Caucasian complexion (especially a pink or red one), along with greasy hair and coldly light eyes, regularly serves as a warning sign of danger to come. Thus Mukherjee and the other writers here share more with the traditionally class-inected disparagement of American whiteness implied by popular terms such as white trash, white bread, and redneck or the racially-charged honky and bubba terms which also complicate generalised notions of white privilege24 than with notions of a great white hope, blue-eyed boys, being in the pink of health or the pinkness celebrated as more varied and vital than black skin by such Anglo-American icons as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.25 How, then, do these writers employ the trope of white corporeality? I will begin by examining Mukherjees interrogations of whiteness, which are the most prominent and sustained within this discourse and reveal both a deep-seated distaste, and paradoxical affection, for the white body. Her disdain is linked to an ideological revulsion towards colonialism and, throughout her work, this is invariably expressed through the egregious inappropriateness of the Caucasian body in India. Her rst novel, The Tigers Daughter (1971), sets a precedent with British ex-colonials in India presented as abby and evil-looking; while the European missionary nuns who have taught Bengali protagonist Tara are ruddy with fat foreheads.26 White American visitors do not escape censure either: the aptly-named, caricatured Antonia Whitehead a big redheaded girl, who is ugly, an immense column of white esh27 embodies the ignorance and insensitivity of US neo-imperialism. The conation of white corporeality and colonialism lurks just beneath the surface in Mukherjees rst short ction collection, Darkness (1986). In Courtly Vision, an early European coloniser, Count Barthelmy, is depicted on an Indian miniature painting with a face . . . coloured an

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admonitory pink.28 Similarly, in The World According to Hsu, the racist attitudes which underpin imperialism are attacked through the repugnant physicality of the French hotel proprietress on the storys unnamed Indian Ocean island: her densely powdered our-white skin29 is a tting outward sign of her moribund existence, both literally (in her daily life) and, metaphorically (as a colonial relic in the postcolonial era). Mukherjees historical novel, The Holder of the World (1993), set at the beginning of Britains imperialist encounter with India, is actually her most postcolonial text, with disagreeable white physicality used as a repeated narrative device. Within the texts many references to Caucasian skin, it is either unpleasantly pale doughy, the colour of . . . snuff, dreary, blueveined and suety or unnaturally sun-ruddied, sun-blistered, and orid.30 Pink skin tone also suggests the leisured lives of expatriate wives: Martha Ruxton, insulated by privilege from the outside world after seven years in India, is still pink and blond, easily ushed.31 But it is the pallor of Cephus Prynne, chief factor of the British East India Company and a man who possesses blue eyes [which] blanch bleaker and a pale, malicious smile,32 which most chillingly embodies Mukherjees vision of antipathetic Caucasian-ness in the novel. Indeed, this physical portrayal demonstrates that blue eyes are almost as signicant as pink/pallid skin in the process of defamiliarising, and exposing the potential sinisterness of, the white body.33 Whereas James Baldwin writes in Notes of a Native Son (1955) that white colonialists encountered African astonishment at their arrival,34 Mukherjees textual strategies undermine any amazement Indians might actually have felt at experiencing the radically different appearance of white people. She recounts instead the colonialists historical mission to dehumanise Indians,35 and follows this by depriving Caucasian characters of any dignity. This happens at an explicitly physical level: they are stripped, ogged and reduced to the sum of their corporeal parts. Company factor Thomas Tringham even has his long nose cut off: a tting, gleeful punishment for the greedy curiosity of European expansionism. Mukherjees satire of British physicality in The Holder of the World also includes references to South Asian artistic representations of exaggerated, grotesque Caucasian-ness: a riposte to traditionally unattering European paintings of non-white Others. The fairest of Gods creatures on earth are depicted as emaciated, with sunken [eyes] . . . blue pits in a bony grey oval, mustardyellow hair, grey-blue skin and opalescent wrists crisscrossed with lapis capillaries.36 As Himani Bannerji has pointed out, racist notions about . . . [South Asian] difference . . . equates us with . . . physicality.37 Thus, by so relentlessly emphasising the shortcomings of the white body, Mukherjee turns the tables by foregrounding both Caucasian physique and the British physical reaction to India. The Holder of the World also

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proposes an alternative racial hierarchy in which Indians represent the perfected human form38 and in several of the stories in Darkness, as well as The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), it is a political issue to reveal the rich vitality of darker skin tones and to claim physical heterogeneity for South Asians. Overturning white myths of Asian homogeneity (and exclusively Caucasian physical multiplicity),39 Mukherjee thus applies a wide lexicon of warm adjectives to South Asian skin, which include copper, butterygold, and glycerine-and-rose-watered.40 Despite so many negative examples of white racialisation in Mukherjees work, she also depicts the Caucasian body favourably at times: that is, pink skin and blue eyes are bad in certain contexts, but not in others. Here the nexus of sexuality and colonialism, so central to Fanons conceptualisation of black attitudes to whiteness, cannot be separated from an understanding of Mukherjees complex relationship with white corporeality. Indeed, the appearance of those Caucasian Americans who have become sexually involved with South (and other) Asian immigrants is not presented pejoratively. In the novel Jasmine (1989), for instance, the pink skin and blue eyes of the white farmer, Bud, are tenderly described by Jasmine41 while Taylor, her other Caucasian lover, is not characterised in any physically disparaging terms. We are, however, back on familiar territory with Mr Skola, a culturally insensitive history teacher, who is (unsurprisingly) red-faced.42 Where pink is used of racially-aware white Americans, it is often defused by baby: hence Bill Moftt has a pink, baby face in the short story Jasmine, while Griff describes himself as pink and healthy as a baby in Fighting for the Rebound.43 The Anglo-American Beigh in The Holder of the World similarly comments on her own pinkness and that of other Caucasians: a museum curator is a pink-domed curiosity of a man, and she remarks on the melanoma-prone pinkness of her own skin, asking: do blonds really have more fun?.44 Beigh, and her historical alter-ego Hannah, are sympathetic, non-imperialistic white women and are therefore allowed to be both beautiful and not primarily dened by their Caucasian colourings. Thus, if white people possess a more sophisticated understanding of race and if they have conceded the aesthetic pre-eminence of Asians, they are spared negative racialisation by Mukherjee. For Alexander, the simultaneously pink and dreary nature of white skin is, once again, closely related to British colonialism. An old imperial clock in Nampally Road features a portrait of Queen Victoria in which the eyes are glazed, the crown stuck, and the surface of the picture as pale and listless as the buried side of the moon, although the monarchs cheeks were like apples from the Gulmarg Valley.45 The novels protagonist, Mira, also imagines the once-present British imperialists with pink cheeks pufng.46 Alexanders memoir, Fault Lines, uses white bodies to

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critique colonialism more harshly. Her anger towards this history is expressed through her fantasy of punishing red-faced imperialist men wandering around India . . . trying to make up facts about races.47 Just as pseudo-scientic information was used to underwrite the colonial project, so whiteness controls Alexanders education in Sudan and white physicality becomes a textual metonym for the arrogance of imperial pedagogy. This Anglophone system, which recalls Taras schooling in The Tigers Daughter, results in Alexanders guring of English as a pale skin . . . that I have had to tear, a white skin which cover[s] over my atmosphere, my very self;48 and in her essay, The Shock of Sensation (2000), it assumes a visual dimension through textbook pictures of little white children who . . . had pink cheeks and drank milk and ate mufns.49 In Divakarunis short story anthology, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, corporeal depictions of Caucasians are used to dene South Asian American identity more closely, and to signal the potential perils of assimilation through miscegenation, thus underscoring the merits of traditional culture, especially arranged marriage. In The Intelligence of Wild Things, the foreignness of Taruns unnamed white girlfriend alarms his older sister, herself safely married to a fellow Bengali. After her shock at discovering a photograph of the girlfriend, she reasons that Tarun had the right . . . to run around with a white girl . . . [and] not to tell me, but nonetheless nds herself imagining the girls red hair spread over the pillow. Her pale arms tight around my brothers brown back.50 When she questions him about the relationship, he answers in English rather than Bengali: coming so soon after the interracial coupling is revealed, this detail implies an irresistible slippage between intimacy with white people and loss of ancestral ways. For the hospitalised Aparna in What the Body Knows, the white doctor Byron Michaels exudes a blond boyishness and the pink, American skin51 of his handsome face is initially a magical, magnetic reason for getting better. On recovery Aparna returns home to her Indian husband and then discovers, on meeting Byron again, that the doctor is no different from other men.52 Intriguingly, she also comes to hate the colours she associates with the hospital cheery yellow, innocuous peach, cute pink53 all of which contain a distinctly Caucasian tinge. Ruchira, whose paintings in The Unknown Errors of Our Lives include a depiction of a pasty-faced British imperialist, initially voices her animosity towards Arlene, the pregnant, white ex-girlfriend of Ruchiras South Asian American ance, by noting the other womans too-pale freckled skin.54 As her feelings towards Arlene become more charitable, however, that same skin is gured as ivory instead.55 But the product of miscegenation the mixed-race baby Arlene plans to have, against the knowledge of Ruchiras lover is safely deferred by the story. In a nal story, The

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Names of Stars in Bengali, an Indian matriarch tries to live with her daughter in America only to develop a ghostly pallor, her skin . . . leached of its usual almond sheen . . . puffy and whitish like the skin of an ocean creature that has been removed from its habitat.56 Disorientation and deracination are expressed through this image of an unnatural external whiteness, which also relates more subtly to the age-old associations of paleness with death.57 White ethnicity as both an absence of colour and a variety of hues is associated with familial estrangement in Lahiris short ction collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, and particularly in Mrs Sens. This story presents the strange, drab, and ostensibly emotionless nature of white Americans, as seen through the eyes of the eponymous protagonist, a homesick Bengali in New England. Travelling home on a bus, she experiences the unspoken disapproval of a Caucasian woman, characterised only by her gnarled, colourless hands and crisp white bag.58 Eliot, a local white boy in Mrs Sens care, also begins to see his environment through the Indian womans reversed gaze: in contrast to the orange paisleys on her sari and the coral gloss of her lips, his own mother looks odd in her cuffed, beige shorts . . . her cropped hair, a shade similar to her shorts . . . lank and sensible.59 When his mother dismisses Mrs Sen and gives Eliot a latchkey, he looks out at grey waves receding from the shore60 in a moment of pathetic fallacy which encapsulates the apparent coldness of white American family relations. Lahiris novel The Namesake similarly explores white physicality through a range of perspectives and chromatic details. The Gangulis, new Bengali immigrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts, observe the wiry rust-coloured beard of their neighbour and the stringy yellow hair of his wife,61 details which recall the lank hair of Eliots mother in Mrs Sens. Similarly, in Nampally Road, Vanessa, Siddharths English girlfriend, is blond, lank-haired62 and in Fault Lines, Alexander recalls the hair all scraggly and grey63 of her white Australian teacher. Mr Worthington in Mukherjees The Tigers Daughter is pale . . . with a slight trace of dandruff;64 the white American Leni Anspach in her next work, Wife (1975), possesses greasy, yellow hair;65 and Cephus Prynne in The Holder of the World has hair hanging lank from a receding hairline.66 Not only are designations such as yellow and rust more stark and estranging than blond or red (in themselves uniquely Caucasian hair colours), but in each of these cases, a lack of hair lustre also signals a more troubling deciency: of satisfactory moral, religious or family values and of respect for other cultures. Whiteness as seen through the eyes of the Gangulis American-born son, Gogol, varies at different stages of The Namesake. At school, his sensitivity about his status as racially and culturally Other is implied through

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the exaggerated Caucasian-ness of his teachers: the pastel tones of Candace Lapidus a . . . woman with short white-blond hair . . . frosted blue eye shadow and a lemon yellow suit and Mr Lawson: wiry . . . with . . . reddish brown hair [and] . . . penetrating green eyes.67 Both impose their white American-ness on Gogol: Ms Lapidus by insisting that the Gangulis follow American naming traditions and Mr Lawson through his shamelessly preppy demeanour.68 As Gogol later makes his way through a classic version of the white American world Ivy League education, work as an architect in New York it is the allure of Caucasian women which is emphasised instead. In this largely anomalous move within South Asian American writing, the detail of their pallor is nonetheless still paramount. An attractive . . . cashier thus has skin as pale as paper; Ruth, Gogols rst girlfriend, has a pale peach . . . complexion (a traditionally positive image which recalls Divakarunis aberrant use of ivory to describe Arlene), while Maxine, his next love, has dirty blond hair and greenish eyes.69 Her white privilege, unconsidered and uncontested, ultimately fails to accommodate Gogols background and his most mature relationship is, signicantly, with a fellow Bengali American. In conclusion, what role is played by these techniques of (largely pejorative) white racialisation? We have seen that pink skin and other denaturalising images of white corporeality play a signicant role in this body of writing and that this is a recent intervention in a long tradition of American, and postcolonial, literature. Indeed, one might argue that the move to racialise those who look different from ourselves simply reects a generalised, ancient human tendency. The use of the white body specically to signal an undesirable or unpleasant Otherness is, moreover, not limited to the work of black and Asian American writers and thinkers, or indeed to the United States. Babb has pointed out that within Europe, Graeco-Roman writers stigmatised North Europeans as barbarian and ape-like, and that disparaging racialisations of the Caucasian physique also belong to the medieval Islamic and classical Chinese traditions.70 It is worth noting, too, that the trope of pink skin is deployed to disparaging effect by white British gures as a marker of class, gender, and sexual difference.71 Although these white-inscribed objectications of whiteness prove how widespread pink, in particular, is as a signier of negative difference, they emerge nonetheless from a very different set of historical and cultural conditions to the South Asian American literary strategies we have witnessed and for which several explanations might be posited. These persistent techniques of physical Othering through returning the traditionally dominant white gaze achieve a stronger sense of self for ctional characters and for their creators. Furthermore, within the United States, one could contend that this allows South Asian writers to carve a readily-identiable

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place for themselves within so-called minority writing and within a particular version of American history and culture. South Asian American writing is still relatively new and, despite the critical acclaim a number of these authors have received, they still strive to make their voices heard. African American literature springs to mind as a particularly important precursor in this regard. Critiques of the white body are inextricably linked to the achievement of black selfhood in works by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and Alice Walker, as Anna Maria Chupa and Jane Davis have separately argued.72 This literary tradition, which so often evokes a racially segregated world and the concomitant need to overturn grinding social oppression, sheds light on white corporeality for more direct and urgent reasons than the texts discussed here, whose subversion of whiteness is arguably both less frequent and less overt. Intriguingly, despite their more or less conscious debt to black American literature, these writers do not generally respond to the African American body. Although many parallels exist between them, each of the writers in question deploys white corporeality to different ends. For Mukherjee, it is a recurrent anti-imperialist device which remains crucial to readings of her work. In her case, it is especially problematic, however, because it is also consistently paradoxical: white people are both the enemy (stage villains in the case of some of her colonialists) and the beloved (perhaps not irrelevant here is the fact that her own husband is Caucasian). Indeed, the racialised white body is both a hideous incarnation of the detested institution of colonialism and a necessary element in the assimilation, Americanisation, and miscegenation she extols in so much of her writing. Alexander also employs white physicality to critique British colonialism but, as distinct from Mukherjee, this remains an incidental aspect of her writing as a whole. For Divakaruni, techniques of negative white racialisation are a means of protecting Bengali culture within the United States, while Lahiri uses them to expose unconsidered white American privilege and emotional froideur, especially through the eyes of rstgeneration immigrants; and both authors present South Asian traditions as superior, in a rather essentialised manner, to those of white America. Broadly speaking, however, all these writers portray skin as pink or red or, conversely, as unpleasantly pale; eyes as coldly blue; and hair as thin or greasy in direct relation to racist and colonialist attitudes. In this context, Caucasian physical features often serve as an external reection of base inner emotions such as anger, pride, the will to dominate, and the desire for sexual violence or physical brutality.73 More precisely, these external attributes are an encoded narrative means of expressing moral condemnation and, in an allegorical sense, appearance is made to speak for behaviour. These writers are thus enacting classic physiognomic

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practices.74 The difference is that the white supremacist racial theories upon which physiognomy traditionally depended are consistently inverted here. It is also worth noting that some commentators regard a heightened awareness of skin colour as a particularly South Asian phenomenon,75 with Kaiser Haq even arguing that Indian culture has the longest history of colour prejudice . . . None is more aware of subtle differences of shade than the Indian.76 Tellingly, these authors are women, often describing women. One could contend that this is because South Asian immigrant women are forced (more than their male counterparts) to see themselves as Other ` vis-a-vis white American norms of beauty; and because they have been doubly objectied as both female and non-white by traditional white looking relations.77 Similarly, they have been both highly visible, as sexual commodities to colonial men, and correspondingly invisible to those mens white wives. Caucasian women have been complicit in white male racism, both in American and European colonial contexts,78 and in seeking to overturn patriarchy while insufciently challenging their own racial privilege.79 This behaviour is punished in literary terms (by Mukherjee in particular) through their generally unfavourable racialisation. Sexuality and feminism are thus crucial prisms through which to understand these formulations of white corporeality. The writers in question also claim agency through a range of attitudes to assimilation, particularly as embodied by interracial relationships, and representations of the white body thus depend on whether each writer is pro- or anti-assimilation. Mukherjee admires the white body when the Caucasian in question becomes involved with, and concedes the superiority of, someone of another race and when European colonialism has been placed at a safe historical distance. Alexander suggests the relative normality of interracial love affairs and marriages through her novel, Manhattan Music (1997), but when white people fail to show cross-cultural respect, they are presented as physically ill-favoured. Divakarunis conservative position in her short ction is that interracial coupling should be avoided, a point underscored textually by the ineluctably alien physicality of Caucasians. Lahiri, too, illustrates the perils of such relationships, while also encouraging them, albeit more cautiously than Mukherjee or Alexander, and The Namesake ends by endorsing American racial syncretism through its hopeful presentation of Gogols sisters planned marriage to her biracial partner. Do these authors reinforce negative white stereotypes and why do they enjoy greater freedom than Caucasian American writers depicting Asian or African American physicality? Although their representations of white America are rich, paradoxical and problematic, there is certainly a schematic, and somewhat racist, element to their physiognomic conceptions

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of whiteness in which the tropes of pink skin, lank hair, and cold eyes are repeatedly used. In other words, such authorial strategies do essentialise Caucasian Americans and in Mukherjees case, this occurs in one text after another over a lengthy period. It is also worth noting that, although Mukherjee felt the need to do this as early as 1971, Divakaruni and Lahiri demonstrate that there has been little abatement in the trend. South Asian American literary activity largely dates from the increased growth of the community itself in the wake of US immigration reforms post-1965. It is thus still young as a literary movement. Moreover, as Rafael Perez-Torres has pointed out, cultural self-representation among multicultural groups . . . is relatively new . . . The ability to name and describe ones own experience . . . was hard-won.80 These writers are at greater liberty, then, to practise reverse racialisation (and racism) because they are responding to the long-standing racial discrimination of both British colonialists and mainstream American society. It is unsurprising, therefore, that some critics have deemed the process of unfavourable white stereotyping necessary. Discussing representations of white women by black directors in Australia and America, E. Ann Kaplan writes that stereotypes of whiteness . . . might enable white female spectators to sense by analogy the pain of the long tradition of stereotypes of blackness.81 She suggests that this is an indispensable stage of black empowerment, especially in light of continuing, racially-based inequalities within Americas evolving ethnic body politic. Similarly, hooks argues that these stereotypes . . . are not to tell it like it is but to invite . . . a projection onto the Other that makes them less threatening.82 As George Yancy points out, white privilege still remains largely unchallenged in many aspects of daily life in America and racism continues to impact in multiple ways on its citizens of colour.83 Indeed, South Asian Americans are still subjected to white racism and incomprehension, particularly following the events of September 11th, 2001.84 Although Whiteness Studies has already done much to question systems of white domination, there is still a long way to go; and literary treatments of these issues are likely to reach a wider audience than academic discussions.85 At the same time, by focusing so insistently on the white body as a means of combating white dominance and this is surely what motivates their general exclusion of black (as well as Hispanic and East Asian) physicality these writers risk a reconsolidation of hegemonic norms86 and sometimes fail to reect the full complexity of American racial politics. But it is also evident that the project of defamiliarising and deposing whiteness is crucial to these authors because they are responding to a society where white privilege is still so rmly entrenched and still so directly predicated on differences at the epidermal level and on the physiognomic currency of racism87 which circulates as a result. Their fresh and

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uncompromising techniques of white racialisation have thus injected an innovative strain into an important area of American discourse. University Nottingham 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. 12026 Whiteness Studies as a formalised academic eld is generally agreed to date from the early 1990s and particularly from Toni Morrisons inuential 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. 42866. For critical surveys of Whiteness Studies, see Robyn Wiegman, Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity, boundary 2, 26.3 (1999), pp. 11550; 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. 62531. 2 See Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 12, 89; Susan Koshy, Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness, boundary 2, 28.1 (2001), pp. 15494; 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 difculties, 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. 4244, 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.

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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 Reections 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; rst 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, 23940, 246, 253, 275; Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1988), pp. 207, 437, 441, 449, 453, and Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 198191 (London: Granta, 1991), pp. 12930, where pinkness is connected to its traditional use for overseas British possessions on colonial maps; the rst 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. 2324, 122; and Hanif Kureishi, Dreaming and Scheming: Reections on Writing and Politics (London: Faber, 2002), pp. 9495. 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. 10910, 112, 1134, 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

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14 15

16

17

18

19

20 21

Cinema, Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 30 31, 33 39, on the specically gendered and sexualised elements of the cinematic gaze. See Morrison, Bluest Eye, pp. 5, 14, 37, 68, 93, 97. In this rich, rapidly expanding eld, 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 Pullingers 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). 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. 95110; Dominika Ferrens, Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 97, 1027; Helena Grice, Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American Womens Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 13334, 14448, 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. Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, Going for the Knockout: Confronting Whiteness in Gus Lees China Boy, MELUS, 29.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2004), pp. 41326. 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). 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, 14243, and Gish Jen, Typical American (London: Granta, 1998), p. 11. 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. Ibid., p. 77. Thus Najmis study, while conceding certain exceptions (Representations of White Women, p. 203), chiey emphasises favourable representations of white women.

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22 For critiques of this cultural norm, see Morrison, Bluest Eye; Wendy Chapkis, ed., Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance (London: The Womens Press, 1988), pp. 4446, 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. 16884, 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 siecle (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2000), pp. 304, 36264; 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. 81116. 25 See Babb, Whiteness Visible, p. 32, and Dyer, White, p. 50. 26 Bharati Mukherjee, The Tigers Daughter (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 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. 1314, 3436, 38, 105, 138, 143, 15455, 15962; 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, 6970; 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.

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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 Mukherjees strategy here can be linked to a wider Asian American project in which, for example, Jen, Mona, pp. 10 11, 21, 37, 89, 170, 19798, 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 WellMeaning 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. 1112. 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 ofcers Mukherjee recalls from her Indian childhood in Blaise and Mukherjee, Days and Nights, p. 223, and the detail of a British colonialists 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. 14748; 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. 11213. 60 Ibid., p. 135. 61 Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (London: Flamingo, 2004), p. 31.

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62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79

80

81

Alexander, Nampally Road, p. 14. Alexander, Fault Lines, p. 95. Mukherjee, Tigers Daughter, p. 66. Bharati Mukherjee, Wife (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), p. 148. Mukherjee, Holder, p. 108. See also Markandaya, Nowhere Man, p. 231. Lahiri, Namesake, pp. 57, 88. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., pp. 102, 110, 128. Babb, Whiteness Visible, p. 17; compare also Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 27073, 29596. 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. See Chupa, Anne, the White Woman, pp. 18, 3233, 40, 42, 44 45, 72, 94, 97; and Davis, The White Image, pp. xiv, 58 59. Compare Teng, Miscegenation, pp. 99, 1046. See Grice, Negotiating Identities, p. 131. See Arjun Appadurai, The Heart of Whiteness, Callaloo, 16.4 (Fall 1993), p. 802. Kaiser Haq, Translators Introduction in Mirza Sheikh Itesamuddin, 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. Compare Morrison, Bluest Eye, which represents something of an Ur-text in this respect. See, too, Grice, Negotiating Identities, p. 145. See Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminist Politics: Whats Home Got To Do With It? in Feminist Studies / Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 198200, 2023, 206, 208; and Golden and Shreve, Skin Deep, p. 3. 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 ght against mainstream American patriarchy and racism. Rafael Perez-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. Kaplan, The Look Returned, p. 319; compare, too, Davis, The White Image, pp. 16, 150151.

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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. 2930, 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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