How Sexy Is It?

In the spring of 1986 Madonna cut off her hair, reduced her make up and put on a simple black t-shirt with the application telling everyone who was and who wasn't willing to know that in her opinion "Italians do it better." It being sex. Italians being a widely acknowledged ethnic category, a recognizable description for a given group of people that forms itself in reaction to the constant dynamic between consent and descent. [1] In this way Madonna Louisa Ciccone also paid tribute to her so-called ethnic heritage. Considering her public image, this very unusual, trimmed-down glamour stressed the focus on ethnicity as an aesthetic device. Always following the pulse of the time, Madonna was again on the beat. At that time - the rise of multicultural celebration and ethnic pornography - propagating ethnic characteristics became a desirable way of interacting with society. Earlier calls for unification and the abolition of "differences" were in large part replaced by an exoticization and often eroticization of the same. Strategic formulas that use ethnicity: 'ethnic is beautiful'; race: 'black is beautiful'; and, according to Ludwig Ammann more recently religion: 'Muslim is beautiful,' became familiar slogans, whose omnipresence was established at an astonishingly fast pace. [2] (Un)Desirability of ethnic characteristics, just like in the case of race and religion, proved to be a fertile ground for ideology.

Corresponding topics can be found in contemporary literature. Literary theory, however, responds only tentatively. Even though the understanding of both ethnicity and sexuality in contemporary cultural and literary theory as social constructions led to critical fieldwork since the rise of post-structuralism, it remains a work in progress. Frederik Barth's late 1960s conceptualization of ethnicity as a process of drawing borders and David Hollinger's follow-up in a recent declaration of a "postethnic America" based on voluntary affiliation rather than forced identification found many followers for their deconstructionist positions. [3] Sexuality has been viewed through the lens of deconstructionism only in specific circles. Since the rise of the Second Feminist Movement in the 1970s, sexuality has been analyzed as a construction mainly in the context of gender roles. Similar to ethnicity, dependent on disguised or aggressive inclusion and exclusion acts, it calls for more work. Questioning of categories - as developed in Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's work - paved the way for a variety of interpretations in literary studies willing to open up for discourse analysis. Publications that favor social constructionist positions exist next to essentialist theories. However, it is necessary to add new components to discussions on categorizations. Both concepts, sexuality and ethnicity, in spite of their apparent influence on each other, remain separated in theoretical debates. A perspective that combines the two in many ways similar concepts could be a helpful tool. Recent feminist theory reacts with a neologism: ethnosexuality. Even though quite new the term ethnosexuality is being used with increasing frequency. Joane Nagel gave the following representative definition: By ethnosexual, I refer to the intersection and interaction between ethnicity and sexuality and the way in which each defines and depends on the other for its meaning and power."  [4] The term, as defined by Nagel, can be in literary analysis in order to point out topics that for a great part have been missing from academic debates.

As opposed to the critics, more and more contemporary American fiction writers have implemented ethnosexuality as a topic in their texts. Especially in an Eastern European American context, in which the Cold War vocabulary provided an environment bursting with images of love and hate, writers have chosen this subject for their narratives. Three recent novels set at the intersection between an Eastern European and an American milieu depict the narrow corset into which the extreme uncritical affirmation of a "different" heritage squeezes the "ethnic" body. The protagonists: Jozef and Victor in Aleksandar Hemon's Nowhere Man, Eva and her nameless American husband in Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, as well as Gin and Talibe in Iva Pekarkova's Gimme the Money illustrate libidinal economic structures in which the deconstruction of ethnicity takes place by highlighting the construction of sexuality. [5] In these three cases sexuality is ethnicized, as seen in the relationship between the main characters, all immigrants from Eastern Europe, and their "American" partners. They are thus building an ethnosexual frontier.

In her semi-autobiographical novel Lost in Translation Eva Hoffman, a Polish American writer currently living in Boston and London, connects ethnicity with sexuality, and nostalgia with eroticism by describing her own marriage with a "native."By so doing she is following a familiar pattern in immigrant women's writing, since marriage to a native-born was for many immigrant women the only entrance into what was believed to be the higher strata of American society. A pattern that lead Mary Dearborn to coin the phrase "Pocahontas's Daughters" in order to describe the process of entering national/ethnic social spaces through sexual encounters. [6] However, instead of coming to an end where her predecessors Mary Antin and Elisabeth Stern (Polish American writers of the Great Migration at the turn of the century) did, namely at describing the process of falling in love with a so-called real American man and becoming part of "society" by spending time in his company, Hoffman goes on to explain the quality of this love to herself and to her readers. By breaking the relationship down to its constituent elements, searching for particular motivations and tracking it through to the end, thus moving away from classic tales of romance, her analysis culminates in an exploration of the nexus of language and sexuality.

Eva Hoffman sees herself as an heir to Mary Antin and Elisabeth Stern and deliberately continued her narrative where they chose to finish theirs. This linearity is due to her understanding that her protagonist's sexuality is determined by her migrant background, often called her ethnicity, and vice versa. The character's awareness of the connection between sexuality and ethnicity first emerges at school parties at which she realizes that instead of being ashamed and feeling isolated she could employ her "otherness," paradoxically, for the purpose of developing a feeling of social acceptance. "They are curious about what I have to say, and fascinated by the fact that I'm a 'European,' which in their minds guarantees some mysterious and profounder knowledge." (179) She does nothing to dispel this impression and agrees to perform the role of the spiritual leader until she feels trapped by this social function. "After a while, this will become a treacherous condition, for it will be difficult to break out of my difference and reclaim a state of ordinariness in which, after all, we want to live." (179) The mysterious knowledge that her migrant background is supposed to supply her with is a constant element of her ethnosexual encounters.

The first love relationship thus built on exotic grounds will soon break apart for the very same reason. The romanticization of Eva's otherness does not appear to be a conflict, as long as she settles for guest-status in her new country. The severe limitations of this imagined identity, a form of 'strategic authenticity,' become obvious with her perceiving herself transcending the guest role. Hoffman's text proceeds through the twisted passageway that identities in supposedly separated cultural spheres, and thus in a supposed transition from one place to the other, have to travel. Since overlapping is marked to be taboo, even though cultural intersections in her case obviously are much more the norm than a side effect, Eva will remain in the limbo of transition from one culture to another until she realizes that there is no bridge between cultures except for her own body. Neatly spread between the "American way of life" and the "Polish way of life," her body became the stomping ground for her "unicultural" environment. Consequently, changes she goes through while adapting the "American" norm are in most cases described in body shaping: waist-size, hairdo etc. Her body is the site of cultural inscription, "a point of overlapping between the physical, the symbolic and the sociological." [7]

After establishing a relationship to the fact that she is perceived as 'different,' she will discover the limitations of her own perspective on "others."

Even though her husband's eloquence will confuse Eva eventually, this relationship will also lead her to a break with her utopian expectations of a linear development and a stable identity. Like Roland Barthes' proposal to accept the strange creature inside of a reader, she will accept the voice inside of herself that calls for irregularities, silences and aphasic vocabulary, if only in order to come to terms with her own expressiveness and meet her "husband's discourse". [8] She will try the impossible by searching for "a room of her own" outside of ethnosexuality, which will lead to a constant process of negotiation. Surprisingly, precisely this continual movement will give her the feeling of having found her own space; a feeling that she longed for before entering the realm of contradictions and illogicality. The movement becomes her identity.

Reading American women's writing throughout the 20th century, it becomes obvious that sexual contact with "real" Americans was for many women the fastest way of "assimilating" first into the so-called "Melting Pot" (in the case of women perceived as white), and later into the celebration of ethnicity. Hoffman's text picks up a long-established topic and searches for conclusions. There is no inherent essence of ethnicity, since the ethnicity itself changes with the perspective taken. Sexuality changes accordingly. Another failure in love will be followed by a personal analysis.

An awareness of the continual negotiation of one's own ethnicity will lead to an unending series of conflicts in the context of social conntact and of sexuality. These emerge from the pressure to "feel" ethnicity. The realization of the artificiality of ethnic characteristics will actually help shift or even remove undesirable boundaries, since the character realizes that her sexuality is linked to her ethnicity, or much more to her foreigness. Sexuality, in this case, is being unveiled as a means to strengthen ethnic boundaries, and ethnic boundaries are the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The sexual attention she receives is built partially on her being Polish and partially on her not being American. It symbolizes access to "forbidden" spheres and otherwise inaccessible authority, especially in the case of sexuality, being subject to strict social control and moral regulations. Paradoxically, the power reached through ethnosexual encounters will have a paralyzing effect, since they suggest participation through subordination. The protagonist of Lost in Translation, a Polish woman who feels honored and acknowledged because of her "American" husband, proves that an ethnically marked woman is likely to engage in ethnic stereotyping. In spite of the power mechanism being more subtle and less noticeable, the awareness of this process in Eva Hoffman's example helped at least partially escaping it. The character proves that this is a process that needs to be re-learned continually.

Just like sexuality, ethnicity is simply supposed to 'feel right.' The a-historicality of the concept is striking; the appearance of naturalness and timelessness is a constituent element of ethnicity. It comes as no surprise that the term, according to Werner Sollors, has no proper definition. [9] The division between "ours" and "theirs" is always a question of "feeling it." Wrong feelings are punished or romanticized. The parameters for the "right view" are based on stereotypes - there are 'good' and 'bad' ethnic systems, clean and dirty ethnicities, lazy and hardworking ethnicities, rational and emotional ethnicities, punctual and always late ethnicities, etc. Obviously, the pattern is one of binary opposition, consequently the categorization depends upon the position of the viewer. A remarkable portrayal of the duality of ethnic systems and the implementation of sexuality in order to draw the borderlines of ethnicity in a broader context of race originates in Iva Pekarkova's novel Gimme the Money. The romanticization of cross-racial sexual exchange and the fractious base of ethnic identity are two main topics of the novel about Gin, a Czech female cab driver in New York of the 1990s. The writer draws from ethnosexual mythologies, which include visions of Others with large or exotic genitals who are possessed of unusual sexual powers or who are exceptionally attractive or beautiful. Race-based sexual standards tend to define African American and Latino men as excessively masculine and oversexed or "hypersexual" and Asian men as insufficiently masculine and undersexed or "hyposexual". [10] The novel Gimme the Money circles around the seldom discussed topic of another "Other" in this setting, the Eastern European woman.

Like in the case of ethnicity racial boundaries are also sexual boundaries, and crossing them might be a form of either invasion or adventure, as suggested by Joan Nagel. The protagonist in Gimme the Money, an immigrant woman from the Czech Repbulic working as a cab-driver in New York, is constantly crossing racial boundaries, oscillating between invasion and adventure without falling into either one of these two categories. Both her African born American husband Talibe and she romanticize the Other in the other. Gin by choosing her lovers according to their skin color, feeling driven by the "chessboard of their interlaced fingers," and Talibe by using his 'otherness' for sexual seduction. (14) In both cases sexuality is racialized. Race and sex support and amplify each other, yet they go beyond invasion or adventure.

Similar to Hoffman's example, the exoticization is introduced by connecting sexuality with the expressiveness of the men in language. But the language is not English anymore. The "purity" of the English language is replaced by the "exoticism" of Mandinge, highlighting the double-bind effect of multiculturalism, (which is one of its main deficiencies) while opening a forum for minority voices it marks them as minority voices, exoticizing and othering them. The only situations in which Gin sees a chance to confront her husband with domestic financial issues are their sexual encounters, since all of their meetings are sexual. In a prototypical scene, in which Gin is trying to have a serious conversation with Talibe about their former mutual household, she is interrupted by Talibe's language seduction. He starts talking Mandinge while making love to her.

The author is twisting the trope of the "American man" functioning as the entrée to American society by using a male figure who does not speak proper English, does not "feel" American but serves the same purpose by being a holder of a green card. Thus, there is a continuation of "Pocahontas's myth" simply under different conditions, those of multiculturalism. Gin married Talibe in order to receive a permanent visa; he, indeed, is her entrance into the American society. On a couple of occasions she states that she does not love him, yet his use of language has a seductive effect on her. Language in Gimme the Money is used primarily in a sexual context. Talibe has been living in Harlem for eight years, however he speaks only broken English. This is a conscious decision he made, in order to preserve his "French" mannerisms. Using French as a lingua franca does not appear to cause him any trouble communicating - he uses it for sexual seduction and in his social environment, entirely consisting out of immigrants from Mali. After moving out of their apartment as soon as Gin has the financial means to rent her own room, their encounters are strictly sexual, and the sexual connection in each case is determined by racial "characteristics" like skin color (sexual arousal connected to the sight of light and dark skin next to each other), foreignness (the foreign language, all of his friends and co-workers are immigrants from Mali), mysticism (his life is protected by an African charm Gin is not allowed to touch, smells in his apartment), exoticism (his apartment is arranged like an apartment in Mali) etc. Gin is entering Talibe's space trough the outside, and the outside happens to be "American." Thus, she for him is an American woman. Gin's husband is subordinated to the black and white dynamics himself. He will eventually die in a Harlem hospital feeling choked by the color white.

His "American" wife is the Czech immigrant Gin. All of the characters around Gin follow a strict and rigid ethnic/racial separation in their lives according to their own rules; often these rules collide with each other. Gin is the only character, who remains not definable in this sense. Thus, she receives a tag supplied by her environment. As opposed to the other extremely static characters Gin is extremely dynamic. She can be defined by constant movement. However, entering various static spheres she is subjected to their rhythm, being an object of constant ethnic, gendered or racial interpretation. Not even death will break this pattern. Talibe's decease will not free her of binary oppositions; he arranged a marriage between Gin and his cousin for the purpose of obtaining a green card for the cousin before passing away. Thus he closed the vicious circle around Gin. The relationship with the cousin will reconstitute in many ways her relationship with Talibe: no connection other than sexual encounters and no sexual encounters outside of racialized fantasies. Gin, the Czech cab driver, will again be Gin, the American wife.

Intersections of ethnicity and sexuality that are central to the characters in Gimme the Money develop in an already solid ethnosexual social surrounding. Because of her marriage to an African American man, Gin is sexualized by other black men.

Seductive or threatening sexual descriptions based on the construction of race are the norm in this novel. The eruption of violence seems not to be a question of choices of the behavior on the part of the characters but a question of time. Both positive and negative stereotypes about the sexuality of ethnic or racial Others support the notion of ethnic/racial differences and continue the process of isolation. Gin does not speak, she moves. In the course of the novel she will change apartments four times, lovers five times and ethnicity twice. In order to escape her fellow cab drivers, for whom she is an Eastern European woman, whom they can mock for her heritage, she will engage with the city and its architecture driving along at nights. In order to escape her husband and his African-American friends and relatives, for whom she is an American woman, who cannot understand Talibe, and can be mocked for being "American," which they obviously associate with being white, she will escape into sexual phantasies. All characters remain trapped in fears, desires, prejudices and preferences connected to ethnic or racial characteristics expressed in sexuality. Her Czech heritage is simply being ignored and replaced by a known figure, except when it can be used for purposes of exoticization: Gin's flatmate Gloria, a Cuban American artist, will spend a lot of time practicing Gin's Eastern European accent in order to appear interesting in her own social circles. This scene, and fellow cab-drivers mocking Gin, are the only scenes in the novel, which reveal Gin's heritage. The novel suggests that there is no place outside of ideology, which strongly depends on the construction of race and ethnicty.

The third example is framed by another source of exoticization: the Western mystification of the Balkans. In Aleksandar Hemon's novel Nowhere Man (2003) the writer introduces Jozef Pronek, a Bosnian refugee living in Chicago, by depicting him from six different perspectives. In the third chapter of the novel, which bears the symbolic title "Fatherland, Kiev, August 1991," the American Victor Plavchuk's ethnic romanticization takes the form of his love and libidinal longing for the Bosnian Jozef Pronek. Victor met Jozef in Ukraine, while supposedly connecting with his roots, but really looking for: something to do until I figured out what to do." (78) Soon he finds out that Jozef's roots" are also in Ukraine, since Jozef, just like Victor, has a Ukrainian father. Jozef himself grew up in Bosnia. The mutual, literal fatherland and Jozef's "dangerous and exotic" home country prompts Victor to declare Jozef to be "the other me." The knowledge that Jozef lived in Sarajevo while the city was besieged by the Serbian army leads to ecstatic feelings in Victor, who consequently falls in love with Jozef's musty smell of a lived life." (78) The mysterious knowledge of a foreigner, just like in Hoffman's case, is his motivation. This exotic destination will also be Victor's erotic location - a place where he will place all his sexual images, fears and desires, thus shaping ethnic stereotypes and differences.

The chapter is written from Victor's perspective, and suggests the fictitious character of categorization, since the other perspectives result in different conclusions. For Victor Jozef is the embodiment of primitivism. Following Jozef's urge to tell him about his dissertation on Queer Leer" Victor chooses to stay silent because of a supposed inability of understanding on the part of Jozef Pronek, even though Jozef studied comparative literature himself. On the other hand, approaching a pair of does in a field, Victor imagines that Jozef shares some strange kind of understanding with them - that "they communicate". Thus, Jozef's heritage marks him as primitive and animalistic. In the - for stereotypes necessary - oppositional manner, "the mirth of Jozef's body" (87) has been built up by Victor in order to stand against his intellect. His imagination will reach absurd levels; then, after being established as the primitive Other, Jozef will alternately take on the role of a fouwe from the middle ages - the unreachable lady for whom the knight will suffer and pine, preferably all his life long - and the role of a dominatrix, who always bravely punishes the master according to his wishes, never too hard, never too soft. In both cases Jozef's function as an "ethnic" character will be to take Victor by the hand and lead him to greater heights of ecstasy and joy. His ethnicity, just like that in the two other novels, is inscribed in his body; he "slumped his body next to me", (87) and Victor's mind soaked up the body. His mind will inform Jozef of his appalling childhood, his parents' unhappy marriage, and his lonely teenage years. He will trust the Bosnian Jozef because of his mysterious knowledge of life. His "life experience" will be the perfect ear for Victor's problems. The projection of his own fears and desires onto Jozef's body will reach bizarre proportions, when in a quite comical scene Victor realizes that Jozef leaned closer and concentrated simply in order to understand his English, a language he did not have a good command of. This "still does not diminish my belief that he understood me better than anybody, precisely because he could go beyond my vapid words." In Hoffman's example the proficency in language was the source of sexual attraction, in Gin's example it was the sound of a foreign language, in Jozef's case it is the absence of language that makes him the perfect target for Victor's sexual phantasies. Victor's story, on the other hand, will sound to Jozef "like an American novel": the narrativization of a life trapped by history. By calling Victor's life an American novel Jozef Pronek turned himself into a fictitious character in this story. There is only Victor's story. In opposition to all other aspects of Jozef Pronek's character, as depicted in other chapters and out of other perspectives, in this chapter written from Victor's perspective we read about Jozef constantly eating (once a whole pig, daring everyone to try the brain), drinking, loving and playing the court-jester. At the same time Victor will be thinking, suffering and dreaming. Then: "I loved Jozef Pronek because I thought that he was the simple me, the person I would have been had I known how to live a life, how to be accommodated in this world." (124) The novel Nowhere Man playfully deconstructs the Western perception of Balkan identities as being located somewhere between tragedy and myth. After another quasi-therapeutic moment in Jozef and Victor's encounter, in which Victor talks about his father, he suddenly asks Jozef about his family. Jozef answers by telling how his father used to punish him with twenty-five belt lashes for a transgression. Victor envies him for "having had those moments". (93) This masochism is set in a frame of a classic domination game. Like the other two writers Hemon is playing with the limits of classic sexual domination here connected to ethnicity. Like in Lost in Translation again, everything seems to be allowed exept the state of ordinariness.

The extraordinary moment in Jozef's life is his war experience, thus, even though it remains uncommented upon, it qualifies as part of the motivation for the envious feelings he provokes in Victor. During the war in Bosnia and most of all during the NATO bombing of Serbia certain stereotypes about the Balkans became more explicit, since this region received more attention in daily news. Information media all over the world were spreading the news about the "civilized" West, including Western Europe and the USA, rescuing the "barbaric" Balkans from themselves. Victor's identification of himself in opposition to Jozef can thus be read as a self-definition of the West in opposition to the fractious Balkans. The relationship is one of love and hate, envy and admiration. The Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic gave a long list of stereotypes bound to this region: "brainless regents and arrogant kings, spies, vagabonds, military idiots, stupid and servile inhabitants of dictatorships, informers, murderers, bloodthirsty dictators, wild people, Draculas and Draculaesque mutants." [11] All of these fairy tale-like characters lead in one direction: to exoticization. The unfamiliarity with the region allows Victor to project his wildest phantasies.

But the question is, what leads Victor, a thirty year old university teacher of literature from Chicago, to exoticize Jozef in such a raw manner? Any post-Freudian theorist would feel compelled to take a better look at the family structure - and the title of the chapter, "Fatherland," provides the unmistakeable direction. Most of all: Victor's father is an "unaccommodated man." His father, "a fucking foreigner, always cheap and always angry," will remain the main motivation for Victor's exoticization of Jozef. The passage on King Lear, Victor's dissertation on the performativity of masculinity in the play, and the title "Fatherland" lead the character's motivation not to his ancestral "roots" but rather to his American family. Shakespeare's play which is being constantly quoted opens with Lear wanting to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. In order to fix the size of their corresponding parts the daughters need to articulate the "size" of their love for the father. After the first two daughters receive their adequate parts, the youngest daughter Cordelia refuses to take part in this love competition. Even though the whole kingdom knows about the strong bond between Cordelia and Lear, her love, not put into words, does not exist. Her father will not only banish her, but 'give her' to the French prince, the enemy. (Sexuality intertwined with nationhood is obviously not a new subject in English literature.) Cordelia's refusal to speak to Lear parallels Victor's refusal to speak to his father, which again finds an expression in his refusing to speak with Jozef. Language, in this case, kept outside of sexuality, cannot be used in a functional manner. Only in sexual fantasies will Victor be able to talk.

What Victor longs for is peace and isolation in order to "let the uncomplicated sorrow settle in and stay with me, like a childhood friend". (124) In order to reach this state of mind he needs a clearly defined and neatly divided global picture. "I get a kick out of meeting someone who is a cliché embodied. It produces a pleasant feeling of a world completed, of everything arranging itself without any of my involvement, yet not veering out of control." (102) Jozef Pronek is a screen onto which Victor projects his fantasies in a very conscious manner. His bare dolphin-like back" (99) is supposed to carry Victor through a harsh, uncomprehending world. The unattainability of the whole undertaking will only prolong its duration. Victor's sexual longing for Jozef's body is like a dream dreamt by another dream." (91) The other dream is King Lear's. In one of the last scenes Lear daydreams about going to prison with Cordelia and about all the beautiful things they would be able to do there, shut out from the rest of the world, outside of the bounds of society. Cordelia will stay silent again. Instead of reconciling with her father, she is murdered as soon as she reaches her prison cell. This scene keeps reappearing in Aleksandar Hemon's work. In this novel it is Victor's favorite scene. It parallels again Victor's relationship with Jozef, since his sexual fantasies about the two of them are all placed outside of the frame of their social environment. Instead, in the last scene Jozef will be gone and Victor will be teaching King Lear in a college class in Chicago.

In all three literary examples a region in Easter Europe, a former communist country, is the motivation for exoticization, which manifests itself in sexual encounters. The unfamiliarity with the region due to the Cold War makes it a perfect forum for unanswered desires, hidden fears and well-kept prejudices. The three novels all published after the end of the Cold War show that sexuality can be and is used as a means of drawing boundaries of ethnicity. Joan Nagel suggests in her already mentioned study of ethnosexuality in North America a division between ethnosexual settlers and sojourners on the one hand and ethnosexual adventurers and invaders on the other. The former appear to be more sympathetic, the latter more aggressive. None of the chosen literary examples qualify for any of these categories. In the context of American literature it seems that to do justice to this development the intersection of sexuality and ethnicity in a broader frame of migrations should be at the center of the analysis. A discourse analysis of power structures at work in ethnosexual interactions without an implication of the particular migrant component seems to be problematic. The specificity of the Eastern European migration to the USA as an element of literary analyses helps highlight the actual conflicts. All of the characters in the chosen novels have migrant backgrounds that have been predefined before their arrival in the USA. However, they do recognize agency in their exoticism which mainly becomes visible in sexual encounters. This predefinition is marked by ethnic boundaries, and they are constituted by and constitutive of sexual boundaries. Contemporary American literature in a migrant context calls for more analyses of this chain of mutual influence.

Humboldt University Berlin

Bibliography

Barth, Frederik Hg. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture and Difference. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1969.

Dearborn, Mary. Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Hemon, Aleksandar. Nowhere Man. New York: Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, 2002.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. 1989. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Hollinger, David. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Nagel, Joane. Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

Pekarkova, Iva. Gimme the Money. London: Serpent's Tail, 2000.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: consent and descent in American culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

1. On the concept of ethnicity and its various definitions: Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, (New York: Oxford UP, 1986)

2. Ludwig Ammann, Cola und Coran: Das Wagnis einer islamischen Renaissance, (Freiburg: Herder, 2004)

3. Frederik Barth Ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture and Difference, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1969) David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, (New York: Oxford UP, 1995)

4. Joane Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers, (New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 10.

5. Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man, (New York: Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, 2002); Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, (New York: Penguin, 1990); Iva Pekarkova, Gimme the Money, (London: Serpent's Tail, 2000) All further references in the text.

6. Mary Dearborn, Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. (New York: Oxford UP, 1986)

7. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 5.

8. Roland Barth, The Pleasure of the Text, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975)

9. Sollors, 1986.

10. Ibid 10. Also: Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity, (Durham: Duke UP, 1998)

11. Dubravka Ugresic. Balkan, My Balkans." Context 12, www.cdsee.org/pdf/crossing_perspectives_balkans.pdf, accessed 8/15/2004