Reviewed by:

• The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and Los Angeles by Dean J. Franco
• Richard T. Rodríguez

We have witnessed in recent years the trend to place “critical” in front of historically marginalized areas of scholarly inquiry such as ethnic and gender studies. The ambition behind this move seeks to challenge traditional approaches to these studies’ respective subjects by foregrounding nascent theoretical approaches to move beyond presumably essentialist and outmoded intellectual formations. Yet one of the most lamentable casualties of this trend is an abandoned engagement with the comparative. Indeed, many scholars have— understandably, in some instances— veered away from comparative ethnic and gender studies because of the way “just like” approaches literally compare one group to another rather than acknowledge their historical, political, and spatial linkages. Dean J. Franco’s The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and Los Angeles, however, is both analytically astute and attentive to the interlocking lived realities of the communities on whom his book focuses, thus elegantly breathing new life into the practice of comparative ethnic studies.

Kicking off the book’s first chapter on Helena María Viramontes’s 2008 novel Their Dogs Came with Them and the Boyle Heights organization La Union de Vecinos, Franco asks: “How can we compare— literatures, cultures, places, people— without collapsing difference into sameness? How do we maintain specificity and the contingency of experience, even while seeking some understanding across experiences?” (33). For the duration of the book Franco masterfully evades a flattening out of Chicana/o, African American, and Jewish American experiences and the literary expressions representing them in favor of illustrating the commonalities [End Page 289] circumscribing their interconnected everyday lives. With a focus on the figure of “the neighbor” and “the neighborhood” as sites from which metaphorical and metonymic possibility manifest, the book’s introduction, three chapters, and conclusion maintain “that precisely because different racial and ethnic groups occupy the same space at the same time, or come into contact through economic and imaginative borderzones, we miss the vital co-constitution of racial identities when we do not compare” (31).

Along with the focus on Viramontes’s Chicana/o-populated Boyle Heights neighborhood in chapter 1, chapters 2 and 3, respectively, focus on African American and Jewish American LA neighborhoods. Yet cordoning these topographies based on ethnic population hardly structures Franco’s adopted interpretive strategy. Rather, as with his examination of the Watts Writers Workshop, Franco illustrates how Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg— a Jewish American man who resided in Beverly Hills—financed the Workshop in predominantly African American Watts as a way to signal the ability to traverse neighborhood divides categorized by race and class. Yet while Schulberg’s desire to bridge these two communities does materialize metaphorically, concretely conjoining these disparate spaces is marred by inevitable racial conflicts foreseen by an interlocutor and correspondent by the name of James Baldwin. Turning to Paul Beatty’s 2015 novel The Sellout, Franco compellingly concludes that the perpetual spatial subordination of disenfranchised groups cannot lead to freedom when the imperatives for such, modeled by Schulberg, are cast in monocultural liberal terms. In contrast, chapter 3, with attention paid to Jewish neighborhoods, understands the eruv as an exemplary “counter-public.” Here, Franco assesses a range of Jewish neighborhoods— public and private, sacred and secular— which live up to the eruv’s translation from the Hebrew as “mixture.” These include the LA Eruv, Boyle Heights (the subject of the first chapter), and the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi’s 2010 film, My Neighborhood. Drawing on his own rich family history in Southern California (at times anchored in the very locations he appraises), Franco substantiates his argument that we must consider literature [End Page 290] as akin to the neighborhoods in which we attain experiential knowledge of race and space.

Indiscriminately following the advice of recent “critical ethnic studies” scholars to move “beyond compare” would result in a missed opportunity to learn from Franco’s comparative and...

审核人：

• 《边界与界限：种族，文学与洛杉矶》，作者：迪恩·弗朗哥（Dean J. Franco）
• 理查德·罗德里格斯

近年来，我们见证了将“批判性”置于历史边缘化的学术研究领域（例如种族和性别研究）之前的趋势。此举背后的野心旨在通过提出新兴的理论方法，以超越可能是本质主义和过时的知识形态，从而挑战针对这些研究各自学科的传统方法。然而，这一趋势中最可悲的伤亡之一就是放弃了与比较者的交往。确实，在某些情况下，许多学者已经转向种族比较研究和性别研究，这是可以理解的，这是因为“就像”方法在字面上将一个群体与另一个群体进行了比较，而不是承认他们的历史，政治和空间联系。迪安·佛朗哥（Dean J.Franco）然而，《边界与界限：种族，文学与洛杉矶》在分析上既精明又专心于他的书所关注的社区相互交织的现实生活，从而为比较族裔研究的实践注入了新的活力。

关于海伦娜·玛丽亚·维拉蒙特斯（HelenaMaríaViramontes） 2008年的小说《他们的狗来了他们》和博伊尔高地组织La Union de Vecinos的书的第一章，佛朗哥问道：“我们如何在不使差异趋于相同的情况下比较文学，文化，地方，人？即使在寻求跨经验的理解时，我们如何保持经验的特异性和偶然性？” （33）。在本书写作期间，佛朗哥巧妙地规避了奇卡纳/ o，非裔美国人和犹太裔美国人的经历，以及代表他们的文学表现形式，企图说明共同点[End Page 289]限制他们相互联系的日常生活。本书的引言，三章和结论着眼于“邻居”和“邻里”的身影作为隐喻和转喻可能性的发源地，“正是因为不同的种族和族裔占据了相同的空间”。同时，或者通过经济和富有想象力的边界区进行接触，如果不进行比较，我们就会错过至关重要的种族认同共同构成”（31）。

在第1章，第2章和第3章中分别关注了Viramontes的奇卡纳/ O人口稠密的Boyle Heights社区，并着眼于非裔美国人和犹太裔美国人洛杉矶社区。然而，根据族裔人口对这些地形进行警戒很难构成佛朗哥采用的解释策略。相反，佛朗哥（Franco）就像对瓦茨作家工作室（Watts Writers Workshop）的考察一样，说明了奥斯卡奖获奖编剧和小说家巴德·舒尔伯格（Budd Schulberg）（居住在比佛利山庄的犹太裔美国人）如何资助该工作室主要由非裔美国人瓦茨提供资助，以此来表明自己的能力。遍历邻居分为种族和阶级。然而，尽管舒尔伯格（Schulberg）希望在这两个社区之间建立桥梁的愿望在隐喻中得以实现，对话者和通讯员詹姆斯·鲍德温（James Baldwin）所预见的不可避免的种族冲突会破坏这些分散的空间的具体联系。转向保罗·比蒂（Paul Beatty）的2015年小说佛朗哥的《售罄》得出了令人信服的结论，即当以舒尔伯格为榜样的当务之急用单一文化的自由主义术语来表达时，被剥夺权利的群体的永久性空间从属不能导致自由。相比之下，第3章在关注犹太社区的情况下将eruv理解为典型的“反公共”。在这里，佛朗哥（Franco）评估了一系列犹太居民区-公共和私人，神圣和世俗的地区-符合eruv从希伯来语翻译为“混合物”的情况。其中包括洛杉矶拉鲁夫（La Eruv），博伊尔高地（Boyle Heights）（第一章的主题）以及朱莉娅·巴恰（Julia Bacha）的谢赫·贾拉（Sheikh Jarrah）在东耶路撒冷的街区以及丽贝卡·温格特·贾比（Rebekah Wingert-Jabi）2010年的电影《我的街区》。佛朗哥（Franco）利用自己在南加州的丰富家庭历史（有时锚定在他所评估的地理位置），证实了他的论点，即我们必须将文学[End Page 290]视为与我们获得种族和种族经验的社区类似的观点空间。

不加选择地遵循最近的“批判种族研究”的建议，学者们转向“超越比较”，这将导致错失向佛朗哥的比较法和学习法学习的机会。