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The conclusion highlights the double movement of the book as it reveals the figure of the American dream and refracts this figure into all its complexity. Ethnic literature’s shared engagement with and inevitable difference from this figure brings out both ubiquity and unevenness. Constellating distinct literary traditions in this way develops new comparative methods and orientations to ethnic archives, along with a better understanding of how race and ethnicity are being realigned at present. The conclusion emphasizes what characterization as contestation accomplishes—how the interplay of the many facets of character across literary and social worlds breaks down persistent archetypes and foregrounds structural constraints. In closing, the book points to attentiveness, underscoring the agency of literature and of literary critique.

This chapter explores the ethnic character who severs art from biography through José Garcia Villa’s infamous disavowal of his racial and colonial identity. Focusing on Villa’s autobiographical short story cycle in Footnote to Youth (1933), this chapter rethinks Villa’s disavowal in terms of exposure. The grotesque characters of Villa’s fictive work draw attention to their own twisted forms and expose the social characterization of minorities and of Filipino colonial subjects, specifically their Orientalist and primitivist caricature. This chapter reveals Villa’s insistent disavowal of biography to be the result of social compulsion rather than eccentric choice.

This chapter focuses on Paule Marshall’s characterization of Black upward mobility in the semiautobiographical novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). While the main characters of mother and daughter are often opposed in terms of their orientation toward the American dream, this analysis draws them together in a chiasmus of character shaped by their shared experience of racism. The Brooklyn brownstone emblematizes the difficult succession of European and non-European immigrants, and Barbadian immigrants in particular, reorienting readers toward a structural critique. Shaped not just by individual will but by determinative social forces, the spectacular figure of self making is brought into focus as a constrained character to be integrated rather than disavowed.

This chapter focuses on racial betrayal across José Antonio Villarreal’s life and work. It analyzes the overdetermined character of Villarreal’s semiautobiographical novel, Pocho (1959), into which protagonist and author are collapsed. Readings excavate two dynamic and interrelated fields of characterization: the queer figure of El Malinche who emblematizes assimilative desire and the masculinist figure of El Macho who has a revolutionary consciousness of colonial subjection. Pocho reveals rather than reproducing the dominant heteropatriarchal order from which minority and Chicano masculinity take their bearings, exposing the discontinuous character of author and protagonist.

This chapter explores the character of the imperialist immigrant that Ameen Rihani represents in his early work. Beginning with an epistolary volume, Letters to Uncle Sam, written from 1917 to 1919, this chapter focuses on The Book of Khalid (1911), a picaresque novel whose titular protagonist seeks as the “Superman of America” to found an Arab empire on the American model. This chapter analyzes the hyperproduction of character in the manic figure of Khalid and its reframing by a wry Editor, essentially the character function of Rihani. It demonstrates how Rihani indicts the American dream and the impossible identifications to which diasporic subjects and Arab Americans in particular are subjected.

This chapter explores the character of model minority through the figure of the first Asian American member of Congress, Dalip Singh Saund, and his autobiography, Congressman from India (1960). Linking the autobiography to the emergence of the model minority myth, this chapter shows how Congressman from India uses the discourse of character building to shape the exemplary figure of Saund, obscuring structural inequality and occluding Saund’s racial presence. This a precarious posture that pivots between race and ethnicity, destabilizing the model that that Saund seeks to build and guiding readers to a critical perspective upon the American dream and Saund’s Cold War propaganda function.

The introduction presents the central figures of this study: visibly racialized immigrants who embrace aspects of the American dream, from imperialism to individualism, racial betrayal to upward mobility. Building on ethnic and postcolonial studies, as well as theories of socioformal character and racial form, the introduction develops a method for reading such figures, showing how characterization and racialization are linked. It presents a new hermeneutic—race character critique, which bridges literary persona and social personhood, showing how this method grapples with the burden of representation of ethnic literature by mapping out (rather than collapsing) the relationship between the author as character within the historical record and the character function of the author within the text. The introduction offers an overview of the period from 1900 to 1960 in which this study is based, showing how this method illuminates a vexed genealogy of non-European immigration at the pivot of race and ethnicity. The dynamics of characterization are also those of contestation, the introduction demonstrates. Readers can critically engage with the American dream precisely through characters that appear to exemplify its ideology and develop a structural reading of minority identity shaped by necessity and constraint.

A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial, for they promise to expiate racial violence and perpetuate an exceptionalist ideal of America. Swati Rana grapples with these figures, building on studies of literary character and racial form. Rana offers a new way to view characterization through racialization that creates a fuller social reading of race. Situated in a nascent period of ethnic identification from 1900 to 1960, this book focuses on immigrant writers who do not fit neatly into a resistance-based model of ethnic literature. Writings by Paule Marshall, Ameen Rihani, Dalip Singh Saund, José Garcia Villa, and José Antonio Villarreal symbolize different aspects of the American dream, from individualism to imperialism, assimilation to upward mobility. The dynamics of characterization are also those of contestation, Rana argues. Analyzing the interrelation of persona and personhood, Race Characters presents an original method of comparison, revealing how the protagonist of the American dream is socially constrained and structurally driven.