UC San Diego

The Unsung Stream : the Ethnic Continuum in U.S. Literature and Film, From John Rollin Ridge to John Sayles challenges the historical position of ethnic literature as perennially marginal and resistant. It traces a continuum in the historical construction of U.S. crime/western texts and their theoretical connections to specific contemporary aspects of the genre. It finds that critical concepts of identity and cultural adaptation applied to much ethnic cultural production today are not only outdated and static, but lead to the critique of ethnic productions from a disproportionate sociological optic at the expense of its historical-literary value. My argument reexamines the concept of assimilation as well as paradigms that construct pathological identity, namely double consciousness, hybridity and mestizaje. I posit an alternative framework of a fluid subjectivity that does not take for granted ethnic subject identities striving toward unification of multiple selves, but sees multiplicity as equilibrious in many U.S. ethnic subject identities. I question long-accepted critical views of Ridge, arguing that he and his work have been consistently misread -- Ridge as a bigoted "assimilationist," his work as conservatively apologist for U.S. imperial practices, and Joaquín Murieta as a work of little literary merit. Some commonly held critical assertions regarding Ridge's material striving and his family's uncomplicated "assimilative" agenda are questioned. I examine Ridge's use of literary conventions and the tropes therein that share continuity with today's crime/western filmic productions. I use Raymond Williams' concept of "structure of feeling" wherein lived experiences of particular historical moments emerge in cultural products and interact with a dynamic hegemony, and Antonio Gramsci's concept of counter and alternative hegemonies, where Ridge's work occupies a dynamic space in the hegemonic structure; one that works over time to alter such hegemonic components as consensual or "common sense" knowledge as it functions in U.S. culture. The unsung stream challenges the now traditional, hegemonic approach to U.S. ethnic literature - a sociologically based approach, implicative of pathological identity dynamics, and a critical habit of regarding U.S. ethnic cultural productions as discursive reflections of the dominant, that is, as marginal, and/or merely responsive/resistant, of which the critical history of John Ridge and his novel are emblematic