Representations of the Military in 20th Century Ethnic American Literature

The U.S. military has long been vital to the ways in which individuals’ and groups’ relationships to the U.S. nation-state have been imagined. For example, in his now tirelessly cited study of nationalism, Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson emphasizes the significance of military service for constructing an imagined affiliation for a diverse citizenry.He reminds us that wars fought for the nation provide a shared experience for citizens, whether they are wars against foreign enemies or even a domestic civil war.Anderson also asserts that memorials to soldiers killed in the service of the nation link the dead and the yet unborn in a shared collective, which secularizes a role religion played in the past, substituting the nation-state for the church. His history affirms that militarism has long been a tool of official nationalism and a venue for visual pageantry that reaffirms the power and glory of the nation-state. Anderson even figures “willingness to die for one’s country” as the traditional measure of one’s commitment to a nation, and, indeed, historically military service has been one of the paths to legal citizenship in the United States.

In addition to considering the enormous weight of military service in the national imagination, we should consider the ways experiences of military force and military service have long characterized racial and ethnic minority life in the United States. U.S. military force has been deployed against every major ethnic minority group in the nation.In various, complex, historically specific situations, the U.S. military has served as a tool to kill, terrorize, oppress, imprison and seize land and/or property from Native Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans and Asian Americans. Many literary representations of military service by ethnic Americans may be read as critiques of ideology in which ethnic minorities are nationalized yet simultaneously excluded from full citizenship in the nation.

However, members of ethnic American groups historically excluded from full citizenship have proudly served in the U.S. military since the American Revolution, earlier in small numbers within integrated enlisted ranks, then in large segregated units during World War II, and last in disproportionately large numbers during the Vietnam War and other wars fought primarily by soldiers drafted or recruited from the American working-class. For many members of ethnic minority groups, U.S. military service has become an avenue for socio-economic mobility and a path to legal citizenship in the U.S. nation-state.Many literary representations of military service by ethnic Americans may be read as attempts to expand existing constructions of American identity by writing previously excluded groups into the national body.

Literary representations of the U.S. military in Ethnic American literature are also part of an ongoing national discourse on whiteness, white privilege, citizenship and national identity. For example, in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (2006) George Lipsitz argues that in the United States white privilege has been constructed and preserved legally, institutionally and socially, which has resulted in a conflation of American identity and white identity that historically has excluded ethnic minorities from full, equal citizenship in the U.S. nation-state. Certainly, in ethnic American literature, representations of soldiers nationalized by service in the U.S. military yet simultaneously excluded on the basis of ethnic or racial identity contribute to the national discourse on whiteness, white privilege, citizenship and national identity.

These representations of military service are also part of an ongoing national discourse about class struggle. Anderson, Lipsitz and other scholars of nationalism, such as Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, agree that the exclusion of ethnic minorities from national identity on the basis of race is simultaneously a reflection of class struggle. In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (1988), Balibar and Wallerstein in suggest that imagination of a national community is constructed through both language and race, resulting in a notion of kinship that Balibar coins “fictive ethnicity.”  Balibar and Wallerstein point out that through this conception of shared identity, the “nation” as a historical construct is used to project present institutions and antagonisms into the past (often a mythical past).  For example, Wallerstein observes that the inclusiveness of national identity often expands and contracts according to the present need for labor for the lowest paid, least rewarding jobs. Certainly, in ethnic American literature, literary representations of disproportionately large numbers of ethnic soldiers drafted and recruited into the enlisted ranks of the U.S. military and their often racially-inflected experience of service contribute to the national discourse on the relationship between race and class struggle.

It is no wonder, considering the complex history of ethnic Americans’ service in the U.S. military that representations of the U.S. military in ethnic American literature are also complex and embark on a wide variety of political projects. What is surprising is that no book-length examination of representations of the U.S. military in ethnic American literature has yet been published.

An extensive search of the MLA Bibliography’s database of peer-reviewed journal articles, covering over 600 sources, produced only six articles giving critical attention to representations of the U.S. military in Ethnic American texts. Four of these were close readings of a single text, one was a thematic exploration of Black Rough Riders, and the most comprehensive was an article by Perry D. Luckett, “The Black Soldier in Vietnam War Literature and Film” (1990). Similarly, a search of book listings in the WorldCat database produced many historical descriptions of experiences of ethnic soldiers serving in the U.S. military, collections of oral narratives of ethnic soldiers, memoirs of ethnic experiences of war, an anthology of war-themed writings related to Chicano/a experiences of Vietnam, Aztlan and Vietnam, by George Mariscal, and novels and short-stories that feature the theme of war. However, the search uncovered no book-length critical study of representations of the U.S. military in Ethnic American literature.

The multiple ethnic literary traditions represented in this project emerge out of incommensurable histories of different US ethnic groups, yet they are all characterized by attempts to grapple with constructions of US national identity through representations of the U.S. military. The comparative methodology of this project allows me to consider the complexity and variety of ways in which literary representations perform political work as the texts articulate individual and group relations to American identity and the US nation-state through representations of the US military, both as a national institution and as a site of individual identity construction.

In the course of my research, I will attempt to answer the following questions: How do these texts represent U.S. military service as a performance of American-ness (national identity) that fails to mitigate the legal exclusion and social stigmatization of racial and ethnic identity? Conversely, how do these texts represent U.S. military service as a performance of Americanness (national identity) that does mitigate the legal exclusion and social stigmatization of racial and ethnic identity?  What is the relationship between genre and politics in first-person narratives of ethnic American U.S. military service? How do representations of the U.S. military in ethnic American literature rewrite national histories and contest existing representations of the nation?