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Introduction

Theorizing the Emergent

When I was growing up, strangers would ask me, “Where are you from?” and I’d say, “New York” or “the Upper West Side.” They’d look vaguely disappointed: “No, I meant what’s your background.” I wasn’t really being disingenuous, though I was well aware what the first question really meant. It’s just that I never particularly identified with either of my parents’ cultural traditions. My father is a Parsee, born in Karachi, when Karachi was a part of India, and my late mother was a Filipino. They had met at the International House at Columbia University, my father coming from Pakistan to study mathematical statistics, my mother from the Philippines to study literature and drama. We spoke English at home, and my parents had gradually lost their fluency in their mother tongues (Gujarati and Tagalog, respectively). What I identified with was being mixed and being able to slip from one cultural context to another. To my Parsee relatives, I looked Filipino; to my Filipino relatives, I looked “bumbai”; and to my classmates—well, on the rare occasions when someone wanted to launch a racial slur, the result was usually a lame attempt to insult me as if I were Puerto Rican.

We weren’t particularly religious at home, though we did celebrate Christmas and made it a point to attend the Christmas Eve services at Riverside Church in New York, a few blocks up the street from where we lived. My mother sometimes liked to attend Easter services there as well. It was always assumed that I would become a Zoroastrian like my father. As my mother explained it, that way I could keep my options open. I could convert to Christianity but not to Zoroastrianism later, because Zoroastrianism didn’t accept converts. But, when the time came during third grade for my navjote ceremony to be performed, we couldn’t find a priest. We kept hearing excuses along the lines of, “I would do it, but my mother-in-law is very old-fashioned.” The problem was that my mother was a Christian—oddly enough a Protestant, unlike most Filipinos, because my grandmother had converted to a Pentecostal sect before my mother’s birth. Eventually, we managed to secure the services of a priest from Mumbai who was traveling in the United States and spending some time in New York. Four years later, we had to go to London to have my sister’s ceremony done.

It was an early lesson in the dynamics of culture, though it would take me years to recognize it: my parents’ marriage was an emblem of cosmopolitan cultural mixing, while the priests’ belief in the importance of cultural purity served as an emblem of all the forces that are arrayed against cosmopolitanism. I suppose, therefore, that it’s somewhat predictable that in recent years I have chosen to work on what I call “emergent literatures”—literatures that express marginalized cultural identities—and found myself increasingly interested in theories of cosmopolitanism.

* * *

This book was almost called U. S. Multicultural Literatures, a title that one of the press reviewers suggested in lieu of the one I had proposed. The people in charge of marketing at NYU Press apparently concurred, because they wanted the book to be a candidate for classroom adoption, and they did not believe that enough teachers and students around the country would recognize the term emergent. “Multiculturalism,” however, is a term that would be familiar to our target audience. The problem with the title U. S. Multicultural Literatures, however, is twofold. For one thing, the book does not include accounts of African American literature or women’s literature, two mainstays of current multicultural curricula. Instead, the book presents a comparative overview of the histories of the literatures produced by Asian Americans, gay and lesbian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.¹ These are literatures that were generally included in late-twentieth-century conceptions of multiculturalism, but had less standing than either African American or U.S. women’s literatures. They were, if you will, the minority literatures within “U.S. minority literature.”² Suggestive rather than exhaustive, this book presents ways of mapping the overlapping concerns of the foundational texts and authors of these literatures during the late twentieth century, by which I mean the period that spans roughly 1968 to 2001.³ My goal is to give readers a sense of how these foundational texts work as aesthetic objects (rather than merely as sociological documents) crafted in dialogue with the canonical tradition of so-called “American Literature,” as it existed in the late twentieth century, as well as in dialogue with each other. Occasionally, I will dwell on particular texts that strike me as signal achievements, in order to convey a sense of their distinctive flavor. The book will, I hope, serve as a resource for readers and teachers who wish to put together reading lists that explore traditions of U.S. literature with which they are not yet familiar.

A second way in which the title U. S. Multicultural Literatures would have been misleading is that it would have suggested that I support the idea of “multicultural literatures” as a conceptual category. In fact, what I will present is a critique of “multicultural literatures” as they are commonly understood today. What I will argue is that the literatures I discuss are more powerfully and completely understood if they are seen as “emergent literatures” rather than “multicultural literatures.”

A literature, in the sense that I am using it here, is an institution of culture. It is a form of expression produced by some group that has cohered (or that can be seen to cohere) around a cultural identity based on nation, race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender, sexuality, or any of a number of other categories.. A group of writings becomes a literature when those who produce it (the writers) or those who consume it (a group that includes readers, critics, teachers, and publishers) regard it as such. Thus, for example, Asian American writers in the early twentieth century were considered exotic anomalies and “Asian American Literature” as a category did not exist until the early 1970s.

An emergent literature is a literature that exists within a certain relation to established literary forms. My conception of the emergent is founded on Raymond Williams’s analysis of the dynamics of modern culture—an analysis that served, I believe, as the implicit foundation for minority discourse theory in the 1990s.⁴ Williams characterizes culture as a constant struggle for dominance in which a hegemonic mainstream seeks to defuse the challenges posed to it by both residual and emergent cultural forms. According to Williams, residual culture consists of those practices that are based on the “residue of … some previous social and cultural institution or formation,” but continue to play a role in the present, while emergent culture serves as the site or set of sites where “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created.” Both residual and emergent cultural forms can only be recognized and indeed conceived in relation to the dominant: each represents a form of negotiation between the margin and the center over the right to control meanings, values, and practices.⁵

When I discuss Williams’s model of culture with students, I always stress that this description does not mean that residual cultures should be considered “unimportant” or “minor.” On the contrary, they are major parts of any cultural formation. One example that I frequently offer to students comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journal of 1840:

In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. This, the people accept readily enough, & even with loud commendation, as long as I call the lecture, Art; or Politics; or Literature; or the Household; but the moment I call it Religion—they are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which they receive everywhere else, to a new class of facts.⁶

Emerson is living in post-Enlightenment, post-Jacksonian market society, when the influence of the old republican biblical culture presumably has fallen away. Promulgating his doctrine of “the infinitude of the private man” in his lectures on various subjects, he finds resistance only when he begins to talk about religion. It may no longer be at the center of the dominant ideological consensus, but the old-time religion is still powerful: Emerson has to take it into account, as he tries to push the envelope of cultural forms. Residual culture is still powerful culture.

Emergent cultures are powerful, too, but on the other end of the spectrum. Either way, as Williams observes, “since we are always considering relations within a cultural process, definitions of the emergent, as of the residual, can be made only in relation to a full sense of the dominant.”⁷ In other words, it makes no sense to think of the emergent apart from the dominant: the very definition, or self-definition, of the emergent depends on the existence of a dominant culture. The idea of the emergent thus offers a way of conceptualizing the projects of the literatures produced by Asian Americans, gay and lesbian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans after 1968. Inspired by a dominant “American” literary tradition that seems to exclude them and their writings, these writers find themselves with one foot inside and one foot outside of the U.S. literary mainstream.

An emergent literature is therefore the literary expression of a cultural group that defines itself either as an alternative to or in direct opposition to a dominant mainstream. What makes the literature emergent is the fact that it portrays beliefs and practices that are taken to be “new” by the dominant culture, though in some cases they may in fact be thousands of years old. At the same time, it is crucial to emphasize that an emergent literature is the expression of a cultural identity: avant-garde literatures are also literatures that identify themselves with the “new,” but an avant-garde literature that is not the expression of a cultural identity, that orients itself, for example, around a set of formal practices or a philosophical stance, is not what I am describing as an “emergent literature.” Indeed, as we will see, at various moments in their histories, many U.S. emergent literatures have adopted formally conservative modes of expression.

The strategies that emergent writers adopt depend on the kind of relationship that they wish their writing to have with regard to what the reader-response theorist Hans Robert Jauss calls the “horizon of expectations.” This horizon is created both by social practice—what Jauss describes as “the milieu, views and ideology of [the] audience”—and by literary tradition. Jauss argues that

A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions. It awakens memories of that which was already read, brings the reader to a specific emotional attitude, and with its beginning arouses expectations for the “middle and end,” which can then be maintained intact or altered, reoriented, or even fulfilled ironically in the course of the reading according to specific rules of the genre or type of text…. The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced.⁸

This model suggests that the meaning of a literary text is a function not only of its author’s intention in writing it but also of the milieu into which it is received, which includes its reader’s social, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and personal contexts. Meaning, in other words, is a negotiation between writer and reader through the medium of the text.

When Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick was published in 1851, readers couldn’t really make heads or tails of it. It wasn’t what they expected a novel to be. In fact, at the turn of the century, it was classified in many prominent libraries as a treatise on cetology.⁹ Moby-Dick challenged the familiar rules, but American readers were not yet equipped to understand or appreciate that challenge. Simplifying greatly, we might say that despite the radicalism of Moby-Dick, the horizon of expectations of its potential audience remained unchanged.

On the other hand, the disparity between the horizon of expectations and the new work that questions it can result in a “change of horizons,” according to Jauss, by “[negating] familiar experiences or by raising newly articulated experiences to the level of consciousness.”¹⁰ In the case of Moby-Dick, this change of horizons came about in the mid-twentieth century, when a group of scholars led by F. O. Mathiessen proclaimed the existence of a mid-nineteenth century tradition called the American Renaissance and set Moby-Dick at its center.¹¹ Critics and readers were ready to appreciate the white whale: it was literary real estate just waiting to be developed. Now many people think of Moby-Dick as the Great American Novel. It has become a “classic,” which Mark Twain once described as “a book which people praise and don’t read.”¹² The changing status of Moby-Dick over time is an example of “a second kind of horizonal change” that can occur when a literary text is deemed to be a classic and thus becomes incorporated into a new horizon of expectations that conceals what was once regarded as its subversiveness. What was once a challenge to a literary tradition becomes the exemplar of that literary tradition. In other words, we tend to think of a classic as a text that is embedded in traditions and conventions, and we forget that many texts now considered classics were written in order to question and challenge the traditions and conventions of their times.

Another example of these shifting horizons can be found in the history of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel about American slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published at roughly the same time as Moby-Dick. Stowe’s novel was once thought to be radical, even to be a text that may actually have started a war. Unlike Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not challenge the prevailing horizon of expectations for a novel in formal terms. Knowing that she was dramatizing a subject—anti-slavery—that was often considered unpalatable by the audience she wished to reach, Stowe sugar-coated her subject through the use of sentimental and Christian doctrine. As one Stowe scholar puts it, “Sometimes critics have assumed that it was the subject of antislavery which made Uncle Tom’s Cabin a powerful novel. It is perhaps more exactly true to say the opposite—that because Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a powerful novel, antislavery became a powerful cause.”¹³ By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was generally regarded, at best, as just another piece of sentimental fiction, at worst as an example of American racist logic. By the 1970s, it had become something else: a touchstone of American feminist criticism.¹⁴ It becomes the job of the student of literature to regain the original horizon of questioning and subversiveness once again.

Sometimes, however, the second round of questioning occurs as the result of the emergence of a new text that refers back to the classic and recasts it in a different light. For example, the works of certain postmodern writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, or Milan Kundera have enabled us to see works like Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–1615), Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), or Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste (1796) with fresh eyes. In the early part of the twentieth century, emergent ethnic writers frequently adopted strategies akin to Stowe’s, choosing familiar literary styles such as a realism that could enable readers to concentrate on what they were writing rather than how they were writing it. Readers came to assume that ethnic writing was about realistic representation rather than formal experimentation. By the late twentieth century, however, emergent writers like N. Scott Momaday or Maxine Hong Kingston could make use of more adventurous narrative strategies because, in the aftermath of modernism, mainstream audiences had become accustomed to formal experimentation in literary novels. Emergent writers weren’t the only ones to benefit from the canonization of modernist practice: Moby-Dick finally found an audience in the mid-twentieth century because it was seen to be a modernist novel avant la lettre.

As a category, the emergent is useful to the literary historian because it offers a dynamic model of the interactions of literary cultures, a model that focuses our attention on the fact that literatures are not simply sets of texts but rather institutions of culture with normative practices that evolve over time. Thus, the negotiations that take place between marginalized U.S. literatures and whatever canon of literature occupies the center always involve not only questions of literary influence among writers, but also other factors that previous literary historians might have considered to be extrinsic to literary studies. Such factors include the design of school curricula, the creation of departments and programs in colleges and universities, the practices of publishers, the editing of anthologies, and the awarding of literary prizes.¹⁵ These factors help to shape the horizon of expectations to which writers look as they produce texts, and when writers think of themselves as participating in something called a “literature,” they are often thinking about the ways in which their writing fits into institutional structures that are governed by such factors as sales expectations, syllabi, anthologies, and prizes. The genre of the Native American novel, for example, was brought into being by N. Scott Momaday’s winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. The novelist James Welch describes Momaday’s award as a crucial turning point for Native authors: “suddenly people started to notice Indian literature, [and] the way kind of opened for Indians; … younger people who didn’t think they had much of a chance as a writer, suddenly realized, well, an Indian can write.”¹⁶ Early Chicano novelists essentially looked around and thought to themselves, “Nobody’s giving us any prizes, so we’ll make up one of our own, and we’ll make up an anthology of our own too.” The writer Tomás Rivera once remarked to the critic Juan Bruce-Novoa that the Chicanos were the first people to have an anthology before they had a literature.¹⁷ Moreover, as the critic Héctor Calderón has noted, the history of twentieth-century Chicano literature is marked by the fact that “almost all Chicana and Chicano writers of fiction have earned advanced degrees in the United States.” Although Chicano literature “may inform the dominant culture with an alternative view of the world filtered through myth and oral storytelling or offer an oppositional political perspective,” Calderón argues that “this is done … from within educational institutions. We must realize,” he writes, “how institutionally Western” Chicano literature is.¹⁸

As a result of both their training and their teaching, these authors find themselves deeply influenced by canonical traditions of U.S., English, and European literature, and the literature that they produce is necessarily hybrid in the sense that Mikhail Bakhtin used the term. Bakhtin describes hybridization as “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.”¹⁹ Thus, for example, the protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1987) is named Wittman Ah Sing, a reference to the great poet of individualism. The reference is not only being made by “Kingston”: it is also being made by the character’s parents, who know exactly what they’re doing in naming him. Momaday cites as influences not only the different Native American traditions to which he belongs, but also Dickinson, Melville, and Faulkner.²⁰ Without these writers, his novel—and thus the tradition of the Native American novel that it engendered—would not have been possible.

The idea that a literature is an institution of culture is a crucial part of the conception of the emergent in which this book is grounded. When I use the terms emergent writer or emergent text, they should be understood as shorthand for the more cumbersome “writer or text belonging to a literature identified as emergent.” In other words, I mean for emergent to be understood as a description of literatures—bodies of texts—rather than as a description of individual writers or individual texts. Each of these literatures in turn will replicate the dynamics of dominant, residual, and emergent. The power of Williams’s model of culture as the dynamic interplay of the forms is that it works at every level of culture. So, for example, if both Asian American literature and Hispanic American literature are “emergent” in their negotiations with the canonical tradition of U.S. literature that emerges after World War II, there are within these two literatures, as we will see, dominant discourses associated with masculinity against which emergent discourses associated with feminism or queerness position themselves. My argument that Jewish American literature and African American literature should not be regarded as emergent literatures in the period from 1968 to the beginning of the twenty-first century is an argument about the institutional standing of these literatures. It does not mean that a reader will not detect aspects that seem emergent within the writing, say, of Toni Morrison or Colson Whitehead. Indeed an awareness of the dynamics of dominant, residual, and emergent might enhance a reading of novels such as Morrison’s Paradise (1997) or Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999), and it might even serve as a productive way of understanding Whitehead’s writing as a response to Morrison’s dominance within the field of African American literature. My point, however, is that the literature with which both Morrison and Whitehead are primarily associated—African American literature—is no longer emergent during the period that is the subject of this book.

The emergent model thus helps us to gain a more subtle understanding of the ways in which texts and authors interact with one another and the ways in which bodies of literature are produced. The model encourages us to investigate the ways in which U.S. culture’s reception of previous texts by emergent authors influences the production and reception of future texts from emergent literary cultures. So, for example, it enables us to understand a moment, early in Tripmaster Monkey, when we find Wittman beginning his literary career by imitating the poetry of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Wittman writes poetry that sounds very “black.” For Wittman, blackness is a cultural template that signifies radicalism: revolutionary poetry, he believes, should sound like Jones’s poetry. Tripmaster Monkey is in part about how Wittman learns to leave the template behind and create something new.²¹

In addition to helping us to conceptualize the strategies used by these literatures to gain audiences during the mid-twentieth century, the emergent model also gives us a way of understanding developmental inequalities among the literatures that are produced by different cultural traditions. It helps to explain, for example, why in the mid-1980s a progressive approach to American prose fiction after 1940 would immediately identify the contributions of African American writers and women writers, but neglect Native American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and gay and lesbian writers.²² In The Disuniting of America, a critique of multiculturalism first published in 1991, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., argues that “twelve percent of Americans are black” and the “pressure to correct injustices of past scholarship comes mostly on their behalf.” This assertion became the foundation for Nathan Glazer’s argument in We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1997) that African Americans played a decisive role in the victory of multiculturalism during the so-called “culture wars” of the 1980s: “blacks are the storm troops in the battles over multiculturalism…. [T]heir claim that they must play a larger role in the teaching of American literature and history, indeed should serve to reshape these subjects, has a far greater authority and weight than that of any other group.” As a result, Glazer suggests, “we all now accept a greater degree of attention to minorities and women and their role in American history and social studies and literature classes in schools.” And, although Glazer regards the presence of women’s studies within multiculturalism as counterintuitive, he makes the historical argument that at the moment that women’s studies came to prominence as a field of scholarly inquiry, “both women’s studies and the new ethnic and racial studies could trace a common history, arising in the same decades, drawing on similar resentments, and a common new awareness of inequality.” Indeed, Glazer argues, the field of women’s studies has become “so large a part” of multiculturalism “that it often outweighs the rest.”²³

The concept of the emergent, however, draws our attention to those groups that have played a less prominent role in the rise of multiculturalism. If multiculturalism often boils down, as Glazer suggests, to the “universalistic demand” that “all groups should be recognized,” he notes that some groups “have fallen below the horizon of attention.”²⁴ The concept of the emergent refocuses our attention on precisely those groups that struggled for notice even as African American studies and women’s studies established themselves as legitimate academic fields. It enables us to identify a set of literatures that are fighting for canonical notice even as they are engaged in critique of the prevailing conceptions of what constitutes “American Literature.”

The emergent thus gives us a model with which to discuss the relationship between mainstream U.S. culture and those practices that it deems “deviant.” It points us to the structural similarities between U.S. ethnic writing and the writing of gay and lesbian Americans. The experience of being in the closet—an abiding subject for gay and lesbian writing—is akin to the feeling of being caught between cultures that ethnic Americans undergo when they are encouraged to dehyphenate themselves. Mainstream U.S. culture fosters an oppositional relationship with gay culture by luring gay men and women into mimicking its thinking by what Paul Monette calls “halving the world into us and them,” even as it attempts to keep gay culture divided by making it difficult for gay men and women to acknowledge one another openly.²⁵

The idea of the emergent also focuses attention on a change in attitude that occurred in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. No longer is “assimilation” the abiding goal of those who write from the cultural margins. “America was multiethnic from the start,” writes Schlesinger in The Disuniting of America, and he argues that

the United States had a brilliant solution for the inherent fragility, the inherent combustibility, of a multiethnic society: the creation of a brand-new national identity by individuals who, in forsaking old loyalties and joining to make new lives, melted away ethnic differences—a national identity that absorbs and transcends the diverse ethnicities that come to our shore, ethnicities that enrich and reshape the common culture in the very act of entering into it.

Schlesinger cites Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s remark in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) that “the American is a new man, who acts upon new principles.… Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men”—an early formulation of the idea of the melting pot. Schlesinger laments the loss of the melting pot ideal, even as he recognizes that “the United States [never] fulfilled Crèvecoeur’s standard…. For a long time the Anglo-Americans dominated American culture and politics and excluded those who arrived after them…. We must face the shameful fact: historically America has been a racist nation.”²⁶ Glazer notes that “assimilation today is not a popular term…. The ‘melting pot’ is no longer a uniformly praised metaphor for American society, as it once was. It suggests too much a forced conformity and reminds people today not of the welcome in American society to so many groups and races but rather of American society’s demands on those it allows to enter.”²⁷ Rather than a cultural stew whose flavor is constantly changing as immigrants add new ingredients to the mix, the melting pot became a metaphor for homogenization.

In 1915, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in which he debunked the idea of the “hyphenated American”:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.²⁸

Roosevelt was speaking after the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, and his concern was with those American citizens who might “vote as a German-American, an Irish-American, or an English-American”—who might vote, in other words, in a way that puts the interests of some other nation ahead of those of the United States.²⁹ Many Americans neglected or refused to make Roosevelt’s distinction between the “naturalized American” and the “hyphenated American,” assuming that it was impossible for any immigrants to become truly naturalized.

Ethnic writers of the early part of the twentieth century often sought to understand and represent the ways in which they and those like them were portrayed as different, incomprehensible, inscrutable, and uncivilized—in short, portrayed as “others” who could not be assimilated. They sought a solution to what I call the impasse of hyphenation, the idea that the American who belongs to a minority group is caught between two incompatible identities, the minority (Jewish, Italian, Irish, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native, etc.) and the majority (“American”). The writer Frank Chin called this, in the Asian American context, the “dual personality,” as if somehow all Asian Americans were split down the middle and made schizophrenic by U.S. culture.³⁰ Identity thus becomes a matter of either/or: either “American” or whatever it is that precedes the hyphen.

Emergent writers think of themselves differently. They realize that they are writing from the margins of U.S. culture, but feel themselves to be sufficiently empowered to offer a challenge to the center. Their goal is not to enter the mainstream but to divert and transform it: they seek to add their own distinctiveness to the stew of U.S. culture in such a way that the flavor of the stew is altered. For example, like earlier Asian American writing, such as Sui Sin Far’s story “The Wisdom of the New” (1912) or John Okada’s novel No-No Boy (1957), Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey registers the pain of being caught between two cultures. But Wittman Ah Sing is not interested in kowtowing to mainstream attitudes about either identity or art. Instead, he wants to define an identity for himself that can truly be called “Chinese American,” an identity in which the “Chinese” is no longer marginalized by the “American.” No longer would the phrase “Chinese American” be some kind of oxymoron: it would simply be another way of talking about the “American.” The idea of the emergent highlights the fact that U.S. ethnic writing has become less interested in strategies of assimilation than in strategies of negotiation, which offer a solution to the impasse of hyphenation: they embrace the idea of hybridity, dramatizing the idea that all American identities are hybrid—and always have been.

With its emphasis on practices that are produced by cultural groups, the idea of the emergent helps us to gain insight into one subject of these negotiations between margin and center, namely the relationship between the universal and the particular in U.S. writing. Emergent ethnic writers no longer accept without question the universalizing logic of individualism that lies at the heart of U.S. liberal culture. This logic is based upon what political theorists call ontological individualism, the belief that the individual has an a priori and primary reality and that society is a derived, second-order construct. From Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth century to John Rawls in the twentieth, U.S. theorists of individualism have typically sought to shift the ground of inquiry from culture and society to the individual, translating moments of social choice into moments of individual choice. This strategy is a literal application of the motto e pluribus unum—“from many, one”—which expresses the idea that the United States is nation formed through the union of many individuals. In the hands of thinkers like Emerson and Rawls, the customary sense of this motto is reversed: they move from the many to the one, to the single individual, paring away differences in order to reach a common denominator that will allow them to make claims about all individuals.³¹

Thus Emerson writes about “the soul” in essays like “The American Scholar” (1837) or “Self-Reliance” (1841), and once he has established that every person has a fundamental equality in the soul, he begins to make universalist generalizations about all human beings. Emerson, in other words, doesn’t ignore social questions, but rather he recasts them as questions of individual choice, using the soul as his point of entry. Likewise Rawls reinvents contract theory to create what he calls “the original position of equality,” a thought experiment in which each participant knows that he or she will live in a society in which there are going to be inequalities—of class, race, gender, talent, intelligence, hair color, wealth—but is unaware of how he or she will be marked by those inequalities. From behind what Rawls refers to as “the veil of ignorance,” the Rawlsian individual thus argues with others about how to construct the best society, without knowing what attributes he or she will have once that society comes into being. The original position, however, is in fact a rigged game, because Rawls believes that in the end an individual would choose only one kind of society: namely, a society in which the lot of the least well-off is maximized. Confronted with the possibility that he or she might end up at the very bottom of society, each individual would choose to create a society in which that bottom is not as bad as it would be in other societies. One might choose, for example, a non-slave state instead of a slave state, because the person who is worst-off in a non-slave state would still not be a slave. For Rawls, the original position is ultimately reducible to one set of arguments: he believes that every single individual, if he or she were rational, would choose in the same way. That is his way of shifting the ground to the individual.³²

Aware that mainstream U.S. culture has a large stake in preserving both the logic of either/or and the logic of universalist individualism, emergent ethnic and gay writers promote something else: a cosmopolitan perspective that is conceived in contradistinction not primarily to nationalism, as in earlier theories of cosmopolitanism, but in contradistinction to the idea of universalism. In Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995), David Hollinger “distinguish[es] between a universalist will to find common ground from a cosmopolitan will to engage human diversity.” According to Hollinger,

Cosmopolitanism shares with all varieties of universalism a profound suspicion of enclosures, but cosmopolitanism is defined by an additional element not essential to universalism itself: recognition, acceptance, and eager exploration of diversity. Cosmopolitanism urges each individual and collective unit to absorb as much varied experience as it can, while retaining its capacity to advance its aims effectively. For cosmopolitans, the diversity of humankind is a fact; for universalists, it is a potential problem.³³

I’d go further: cosmopolitanism conceives of difference, not as a problem to be solved (as it is for Emerson or Rawls), but rather as an opportunity to be embraced.

Multiculturalism, of course, is a response to universalism that ostensibly privileges the claims of difference over those of universalism. If multiculturalism responds, as Glazer suggests, to the “universalistic demand” that “all groups should be recognized,” it does so by stressing toleration and pluralism. Hollinger argues that, as institutionalized in the United States, multiculturalism promotes the goal of cultural diversity by advocating a pluralism that “respects inherited boundaries and locates individuals within one or another of a series of ethno-racial groups to be protected and preserved.” According to Hollinger, this kind of pluralism “differs from cosmopolitanism in the degree to which it endows with privilege particular groups, especially the communities that are well established at whatever time the ideal of pluralism is invoked.”³⁴ In other words, the logic of contemporary multiculturalism goes something like this: I like my culture (because it’s mine), but I respect yours. I want you to respect mine. I prefer mine (because it’s mine), and I imagine that you prefer yours (because it’s yours). I really can’t comment on your culture, because I don’t belong to it. I cherish my long-standing practices and values, and out of respect I’ll refrain from commenting on your long-standing practices and values. If I happen to find some of your long-standing practices and values distasteful or even repugnant—well, we’ll just agree to disagree. Even if, for example, one of those practices is slavery.

You would be hard pressed to find a multiculturalist who would actually suggest that slavery might be tolerated in certain cultural contexts, but such a position is simply the logical endpoint of the idea that we cannot make moral judgments about other cultures’ practices without engaging in cultural imperialism and domination. As a result, multiculturalists are often skittish about making judgments across cultural boundaries. Hollinger describes contemporary multiculturalism as a “bargain” in which different cultural groups agree: “You keep the acids of your modernity out of my culture, and I’ll keep the acids of mine away from yours.”³⁵

Emergent writers realize that such a bargain is not only undesirable but also untenable. Contemporary emergent writing sets itself against the idea of cultural purity that lies behind contemporary U.S. multiculturalism and identity politics. Emergent writing demonstrates the power of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “cosmopolitan contamination.” Cultures, in Appiah’s account, never tend toward purity: they tend toward change, toward mixing and miscegenation, toward an “endless process of imitation and revision.”³⁶ To keep a culture “pure” requires the vigilant policing often associated with fundamentalist regimes or xenophobic political parties. Like Williams’s account of the interaction of dominant, residual, and emergent cultures, Appiah’s description of culture is about “conversation across boundaries.” Such conversations, Appiah writes, “can be delightful, or just vexing: what they mainly are, though, is inevitable.”³⁷

Studying emergent literatures inevitably leads one to study the dynamics of cosmopolitanism. Like cosmopolitan theorists, emergent writers are committed to difficult conversations in which fundamental values are subject to examination and questioning. In a variety of ways, sometimes through style or form, sometimes through subject, emergent literatures bring us face-to-face with difference and then even closer—perhaps we might say, mind-to-mind. They ask us to think, “What if?”—to engage in thought experiments in which we experience difference. In this way, emergent literatures promote a cosmopolitan perspective. And they suggest, perhaps, that in this respect the idea of the emergent is ultimately most useful as a heuristic tool through which to understand the cosmopolitan dynamics of the literary impulse itself.