ABSTRACT
In Chapter 7, I will show how viewing American diversity as a quilt of languages is also a way to unify the otherwise different projects of W.E.B. DuBois, William Faulkner, and Amy Tan. All three dispel the myth of race by resituating it as a system of signs and a brutal politics of historical form. In three separate sections, I will show, first, how DuBois’s terms in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), particularly the terms “soul” and “folk,” derive from the vocabulary of the German Romantic philosophy that he studied under Max Weber in Berlin while on a visiting fellowship there as a graduate student from Harvard. The paradox of a Eurocentric origin for postcolonial vocabulary will go on to draw the attention of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha. For Faulkner, race is little more than a desperate semio(p)tics. In Amy Tan, this same paradox reappears in the mythology of a lost language of “China” that the Chinese American daughters in The Joy Luck Club puzzle over in their vexed relation to their nostalgic mothers, prompting a reflection on Tan’s deconstructive feminism that concludes the chapter.
