Acculturation as a Literary Theme

Overview

“Acculturation” is not a common term in literary studies; it has been used mainly in sociological and anthropological studies. The term did not find its way into The Oxford English Dictionary until 1989; it first appeared in the writings of an American geologist and ethnologist, John Wesley Powell, in 1880. Despite the fact that study of cultural modifications is international, the term is still primarily American. The study of acculturation has gone beyond the realm of cultural anthropology, and numerous studies have been conducted to define and conceptualize cultural adaptations between a subculture and the dominant culture. In a sense, acculturation is not a recent phenomenon in human history, nor is it a rare theme in literature. With the rise of the multidisciplinary approach to research and, particularly, the development of the concept of multiculturalism, acculturation has been a constant theme in scholarship.

Scholars and critics differ in defining the types, levels, and aspects of acculturation, but agree that acculturation occurs on two levels, individual and group. There are also three types of operation. In the first type, people of different cultures voluntarily adopt culture traits from one another because of prolonged contact. In the second type, the dominant culture imposes its ideas and values upon the people of nondominant cultures. In the third type, people from different cultures respect and appreciate one another’s cultures. It is essential, however, to make a distinction between “acculturation” and “assimilation.” “Acculturation” means a voluntary or forced acquisition of the culture of the dominant group. “Assimilation” indicates the disappearance of group identity through such actions as friendship and marriage outside the subgroup; such actions require a mutual effort of the dominant group and the subgroup. Although the term “acculturation” is often thought to refer to cultural modification, it more specifically refers to a process of cultural adaptation by minority people toward the majority people’s culture.

It is true both in sociocultural studies and literary writings that acculturation is seldom, if ever, explored in reference to European American acculturation into a culture not their own. People of non-European American origin, however, are typically expected, in North America, to acculturate themselves to the American way of life. As a literary theme, therefore, acculturation has always been explored within the context of Americanization.

Acculturation and Identity

Writers dramatize the contrasts and tensions of people, cultures, and societies manifested in the process of acculturation. The literary works that pursue the theme of acculturation can be grouped into three categories.

The first category is the acculturational experiences depicted by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville. These experiences are based on encounters between colonized natives (American Indians) and European colonizers. What is unique about this type of acculturation is that, as part of the Western overseas expansion, such acculturation was a unidirectional imposition of the minority but dominant culture upon the “host” but conquered society, and that such acculturation was a confrontation between two different racial and cultural identities. Disgusted with attempts to justify colonization by means of stereotypes such as that of the savage, Cooper and Melville were more keenly interested in the encounter, and interplay between the representative of indigenous culture and the representative of what may be called an advancing civilization. Even though both writers used some clichés of the time in portraying their “uncivilized” characters, critics generally believe that neither Cooper nor Melville was inherently hostile toward the Indians. While the acculturative process in Cooper’s Leatherstocking series and in Melville’s Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) mostly occurs in the form of natives learning to conform to European American standards, the European Americans do appropriate certain traits of native culture, typically some practical skills that prove useful under colonial conditions. In The Pioneers (1823), one of the five novels in the Leatherstocking series, John Mohegan is portrayed as a character who embodies the best qualities and upholds the best traditions of the Mohicans. His switch from a “savage” appellation to the common English name of John, his altered appearance, and his conversion to Christianity indicate a considerable degree of acculturation. The portrayal of Natty Bumppo, Cooper’s archetypal character of cultural synthesis in all five Leatherstocking novels, shows an acculturation from the opposite direction. Natty is by no means a loafing, uninterested colonist or even the descendant of such. As an effective agent of acculturation, he interprets, mediates, and appropriates both white and native practices.

Unlike Cooper, however, what Melville implies in his novel is the assertion that white men such as Tommo in Typee or Lem Hardy in Omoo lack the sincerity and capability to acculturate themselves to the native culture. As the Western visitors gone native, they are only hybrids, unable to achieve the authentic identity of a Natty Bumppo. To neutralize the polarization between cultures, as Melville illustrates in Omoo, both the “savage” and the civilized should meld through a reciprocal acculturation. Similar concerns and issues regarding the acculturation between the colonized and the colonizer appear in some British novels of the same era, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924).

Acculturation and Choice

The second category is the depiction of the two-directional acculturation between Europeans and Americans. Around the turn of the century, a substantial number of Americans, many of whom were writers and artists, lived in Europe. At the same time America itself experienced a tremendous influx of immigrants from Europe. Works such as Henry James’s The American (1877) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) present adventures of Americans who acculturate themselves to the codes and customs of the Old World in order to maintain a niche in its upper-class circle. For the generally poor immigrants to America, acculturation was not easy either. The nostalgia, deprivation, and hardship of immigrant acculturation are vividly featured in works such as Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918) and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955). One work of this category that is particularly noteworthy is the trilogy written by William Carlos Williams: White Mule (1937), In the Money (1940), and The Build-Up (1952). In this trilogy, Williams offers readers a close look at the ambivalent feelings the immigrants had toward, and the hard choices they made between, the Old and New Worlds. What the Stetcher family goes through represents a standard Americanization story, an acculturational process full of dreams, conflicts, hard choices, compromises, and frustrations.

Acculturation and Ethnicity

The third category is the exploration of a more mutual acculturation between European American and non-European American cultures, with the issue of ethnicity as the focus. Readers may also find the literary treatment of similar themes in other regions’ literature, especially in postcolonial writings. Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964), Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), Samuel Selvon’s The Housing Lark (1990), and Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing (1991) are examples of this category of acculturation stories. No country, however, has produced more literary works addressing ethnic identity as a dimension of acculturation than the United States. Considering the United States’ identity as a melting pot and the fact that the life of most of its citizens is affected in one way or another by acculturation, there is nothing surprising about the volume, diversity, and intensity in the literature of acculturation in the United States. After 1965, there was a sharp increase of minority population in America. This increase has been the result of immigration: Immigrants bring languages and customs that differ from the values of the dominant population. The act of immigration turns people into “ethnics” and leads to cultural disorientation. There is a duality in immigrant identity that is based on the doubling of social realms. Immigrants have to deal, typically, from an economic, social, and political position inferior to that of the dominant group, with the dilemma of straddling both the old and the new culture. A broad range of literary works explore this theme with ethnic concerns and sensitivities, from the Jewish American novels by Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth to novels, poems, plays, and autobiographies by African American, Asian American, and Latino American writers.

Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep captures the fear and pain in Jewish acculturation by dramatizing the trauma of David Schearl, a Jewish boy, who lives with his newly arrived immigrant parents in New York and tries desperately to belong, to choose between the values of the old and the new, and to master his own destiny in his adopted country. This seems to be a cruel test for many boys and girls in writings of what might be called the American ethnic Bildungsroman, such as José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959) and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975). One novel that has attracted much critical acclaim is John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), which portrays two Nisei brothers of a Japanese American family struggling with tough choices in their acculturation during World War II. One brother, Ichiro, is put in jail and, consequently, becomes an outcast, simply because he chooses his Japanese heritage and refuses to fight the Japanese on the American side. The younger brother, Taro, does the opposite, joining the U.S. Army, but, as a result, he loses all his ties with his family.

For years, people have been led to believe that to be successful in America one must be acculturated to the European American culture and that maintaining one’s culture impedes the process and one’s subsequent success. Many writers contend, however, that this has not held true for minority people. In their view, even when minority people have the desire and capacity for acculturation, the society prevents it. Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1943) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) describe the endless ordeal of minority people who are subject to discrimination, abuse, and injustice. Their emotional state is characterized by confusion, anxiety, alienation, loss of identity, and resistance to contact with society.

Bibliography

Buenker, John D, and Lorman A. Ratner, eds. Multiculturalism in the United States: A Comparative Guide to Acculturation and Ethnicity. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Herskovits, Melville J. Acculturation: The Study of Culture Contact. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958.

Sachs, Susan. "American Dream, No Illusions; Immigrant Literature Now about More Than Fitting In." The New York Times, 9 Jan. 2000, section 1, p. 21.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Sollors, Werner, ed. The Invention of Ethnicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.