E3W Literature | University of Texas

James Kyung-Jin Lee
Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004
ISBN:0816641811
254 pages
Price: $19.95

Reviewed by Alba Newmann

James Kyung-Jin Lee’s Urban Triage examines the tensions inherent in 1980s fiction that addresses urban American constructions of race. Whether in texts like Hisaye Yamamoto’s “A Fire in Fontana” (1985) or Alejandro Morales’ The Brick People (1988) that look to events within a community’s past to frame contemporary questions of racial and economic identity, or in others like John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990) that situate their narratives within the contests of the 1980s themselves, Lee finds evidence of “urban triage” throughout: the parsing of urban areas and residents to determine who will receive attention and aid, and who will be left behind – driven by political, economic, and spatial conditions into destitution, or “social death.”

The tension within these narratives arises not only from the severity of conditions under which individuals in the stories labor, but from the authors’ anxieties about their own triaged roles: chosen as “models” – the representatives and beneficiaries of “multiculturalism” – they are, at the same time, distanced from the communities they might hope to aid, and may, ultimately, be complicit in perpetuating a system in which the few are raised up so that the rest may be forgotten. The inclusion of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) serves, at least in part, as a counter-example, in which the few are cast down as token proof of egalitarianism, so that white privilege in general can continue uninterrupted. Still, Lee finds constructions of whiteness no less informed by the model of triage than those of Asians, Blacks, or Latinos.

Urban Triage negotiates a broad interdisciplinary terrain, supported by Lee’s thorough research and his attention to the formal and political ramifications of the texts he discusses (including, in some cases, the concomitance of the formal and the political). Grounding his claims within a history of the economic and social ramifications of the Reagan era, Lee draws also on literary and ethnic studies, Marxist critical approaches, and urban theory. As the chapters progress, he places increasing emphasis on the physical histories of the cities in which the fictions are set (Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York, principally), and on explicit analysis of the ways in which money and policy impacted the urban spaces occupied by people of color. This focus culminates in his discussion of Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990). Ultimately, however, it is not the specifics of “urban redevelopment” or “creative destruction” that seem most compelling to Lee, but the larger spatial trope of separation that concerns him. Spatial boundaries both represent and produce the reification of privilege and poverty, as well as the disruption of potential alliances between individuals and communities that could be defined by common goals rather than racial differences. The boundary figured in The Brick People, between Latino and white neighborhoods in 1940s Los Angeles, serves as one example, as does the physical distance between “Hisaye,” Yamamoto’s narrator – safely ensconced in a predominantly white suburb – and the Watts rioters, whom she watches on TV. This latter example is particularly important for Lee, because Hisaye struggles to form for herself a connection between Black and Asian-American identity, but is encumbered by her own physical, as well as socio-economic distances.

In response to Yamamoto’s question, Does literature have any impact on what goes on day to day? Lee responds – Yes, though not always in the ways we would have hoped. Sometimes, even in pieces that seem poised for action, for a call to social justice, Lee reads new ways of reaffirming old structures: the return to the safety and control of the single-family home, rather than the forging of a space of collective action in The Brick People, or the use of satire in Bonfire of the Vanities (perhaps less surprisingly) to reaffirm the privilege of whiteness, this time based on force rather than the isolation afforded by property. His study emphasizes the difficulties of escaping constructions of race and of interrogating a period in which “audiences readily consumed multicultural works, and indeed emphatically celebrated cultural pluralism” while America was witnessing “a general decline in the political agency of working poor people of color” (74). And yet, he does not consider himself a pessimist. Lee’s work complicates our understanding of the texts that grapple with these conditions, without abandoning a hope that change can come through literature – through our attention to it. In his conclusion, he points to a short story by Andrea Lee, “The Days of the Thunderbirds” (1984). Set in the 1960s, the story chronicles an encounter between a group of campers in a self-consciously multi-cultural (and middle class) summer camp and a group of Black girls and boys from a nearby urban center: a struggle over some missing items of clothing turns physical; fists fly; and in the end the visitors are sent home. James Lee’s reading of the piece pays attention to the separation imposed on the children (what the counselors deem the “failure” of the experiment at integration), but also to a kind of friction that is potentially constructive – a moment of contact really – which in and of itself might not be damaging. (The children are described as “not crying” in spite of the fight.) It is the fearful and exaggerated response of those in charge, the camp counselors, that transforms the struggle between individuals into an unbridgeable communal divide. Seeking a recuperative violence seems risky; but the fight between the children is not the devastating fire, the violence, or loss in Watts or in Philadelphia. It is the imposed separation, Lee suggests, that moves these children closer to that dangerous conflagration.