Mark McGurl’s The Program Era is a wonderful book, and I’ve mentioned it several times before on this blog, but it does use the problematic label “ethnic fiction” to describe a broad swathe of writers from Philip Roth to Maxine Hong Kingston, essentially anyone who writes about characters from marginalized identities. In McGurl’s defense, he more often uses the phrase “high cultural pluralism” than “ethnic fiction,” but still, the fact that he feels the need to employ the latter term to explain the former reveals, sadly, that it still has a relevance in our literary world, despite the fact that writers of color today write works of such variety that it’s absurd to try and lump them together under such a reductive label.
I myself encountered quite a bit of this as an emerging writer when submitting my work to literary agents, many of whom told me I needed bring out the “Muslim” and “Pakistani” elements of my characters. One of them even put it as bluntly as they could, saying that the main reason a reader would pick up a work by a non-white writer is to be introduced to an unfamiliar culture. My novel, alas, was ultimately too American, and my brown characters too “white.” Needless to say, none of these agents were people of color.
I understand, of course, that these agents all had the best of intentions—they wanted my work to sell and they were doing what they thought would help publish more writers of color. But their approach assumed that I’d be writing exclusively for a white audience. And this, in microcosm, is my problem with the label “ethnic fiction.” Beyond just the term, the very idea of the category assumes a white audience, as if there’s something so different about marginalized perspectives that novels that feature them must be placed in their own separate category. White writers get to be minimalist or postmodern (Mark McGurl’s other two categories for post-war American fiction), but writers of color are inevitably always writers of “ethnic fiction.”
At first, this view appears to be the inverse of the infamous joke from the recent reboot of Roseanne about missing the television shows featuring black and Asian families (“They’re just like us! There, now you’re all caught up.”): instead of emphasizing how underneath the racial difference everyone’s just American, the label “ethnic fiction” assumes that any experience of a person of color is so different that it deserves its own special category. But, really, these views are two sides of the same coin—because lurking behind that idea that a white reader will pick up a book by a writer of color only to explore an unfamiliar culture is the truth that if a culture is too unfamiliar, too strange, too different from the normative, bourgeois American experience, this hypothetical white reader will be made too uneasy. The result is that the ideal work of “ethnic fiction” is one that introduces a white reader to an unfamiliar world, emphasizes the cultural differences between them and their protagonist, but ultimately reassures the white reader that beneath these cultural differences, the ethnic protagonist still possesses the same “universal” human values.
For me, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia is the best example of a novel written by a writer of color that emphatically resists the label of “ethnic fiction” and in fact actively subverts it by dramatizing the very tension I’ve been describing about the role of identity in a work of art. The novel’s protagonist, Karim, is a mixed race young man living in the suburbs of London, and he declares in the novel’s wonderful opening line, “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.” The “Buddha” of the title, though, is not Karim but his father Haroon, who leaves his wife and becomes a yoga teacher, performing an exaggerated Indian identity to gain cultural capital among the British well-to-do. Karim is put off by his father’s decision to adopt this false identity, but as the novel progresses, he too finds himself performing his ethnicity for a white audience to further his acting career, specifically by creating an exaggerated depiction of his family friend Changez (the funniest character in the novel, a hapless and inept immigrant repeatedly cuckolded by his new wife Jamila). It’s an unethical and self-serving decision on Karim’s part, and through it Kureishi critiques not only the expectations white audiences have for artists of color but also the willingness of people of color to participate in this system for their own cultural advancement.
There have been many people (most famously Zadie Smith) who’ve written about how The Buddha of Suburbia spoke to them in a way that other novels didn’t. Here I will simply add my own voice to that chorus. I didn’t come across Kureishi’s novel until 2017. I’d finished my own novel and was frustrated at the feedback I was getting from agents about bringing out its “ethnic” elements. Despairing, I seriously considered it, rationalizing the decision as a necessary sacrifice for my literary career. But reading The Buddha of Suburbia, I understood not only that it would be wrong of me to do this, but also that there was plenty of room in the world for a novel that subverted traditional notions of “ethnic fiction.” And so, I refused to compromise and kept my novel as it was—and eventually it did find a home, with a press whose founder, a writer of color himself, understands the need to complicate this thing we insist on calling “ethnic fiction.”