A Problematic Multiculturalism in My Year of Meats?

I finally got myself entered into this blog site, and then I proceeded to misplace both my username and password, and I've spent the last half hour attempting to retrieve one or the other. It was absolutely frustrating, but now that I'm signed on, here goes:

Professor Suh mentioned today in passing the use of multiculturalism in My Year of Meats and how Ruth Ozeki does not really give us the analytical tools to critique the view of multiculturalism presented in this text. I agree that Ozeki does not offer us the lenses and tools to problematize the idea of multiculturalism in her text, and that, unlike Lisa Lowe and other critical studies or cultural studies theorists, this book presents a fairly mainstream discourse of multiculturalism--that we live in a "global village" of sorts, that we reside in the "land of opportunity." I found that Jane's attempts to craft each American family for her episodes to be very similar to what standard American rainbow curriculum promotes in a very 90s view of American-ness: that we are all similar (read: American) despite our differences and that it is in valuing each other's differences that we find our American identity. Am I making sense here? I'm suggesting that despite Jane's attempts to seem like a progressive Asian American activist who will use her camera to expose the diversity of the American people, she is still very much working within mainstream standards of diversity--a diversity which isn't problematized and seen more as a harmonious blending of colors. That's what I took from Jane's crafting of the "American family."

That's not to say that I found everything in the text regarding multiculturalism to be problematic or wrong. I actually found many points which suggested that Ozeki does recognize the absurdity of a non-critical and mainstream multiculturalism. There were points which I found to be so absurd as to suggest that Ozeki must be hinting at the ridiculousness of it all. For example, when Akiko came to America and boards the train down South, she meets a train full of poor black people who sing and feed her fried chicken. When I read this part of the book, I cringed a little and had to read it over again to see if Ozeki had really included this ridiculous caricatured account, and when I realized that Ozeki intentionally inserted this over-the-top characterization of the black community, I took it to mean that the absurdity was meant to provoke us to be deeper readers and to recognize that absurdity, and that it would be through that recognition of absurdity that we would come to realize the problems of a mainstream multiculturalism--precisely because mainstream multiculturalism often essentializes and stereotypes groups of people into different categories like the example above. Perhaps I am reading this in a too-twisted and convoluted manner, but that is my interpretation of this scene based on my assumption of Ozeki as a progressive Asian American.

When we talk about what an author intends or whether there is distance between the narrator and the character (that is, if the narrative isn't in first-person point of view), I always want to resort to the author's background. I often feel that a writer must, as a human being, reveal an aspect of her background and beliefs in her writings, and it is probably due to my admittedly naive assumption that Ozeki is a progressive API woman that I've assumed that she expects her readers to read between the lines and see that there really are problems inherent in scenes such as the one described above. Either that, or perhaps I am just making things up to my own liking.

By the way, does anyone actually know anything about Ruth Ozeki, her education and background, whether she considers herself an activist in the API community? Sam and I were both surprised when we realized that she did not appear in a Wikipedia search. Perhaps someone can enlighten us?