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From Marginal to Emergent

Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), has a problem. Named for the great poet of American individualism and steeped in American cultural history, Wittman wants to be a latter-day Jack Kerouac, but to his chagrin, he comes to realize that the real Kerouac would never have seen him as a protégé. To Kerouac, Wittman could only have been another Victor Wong, preserved for posterity in Kerouac’s novel Big Sur (1962) as “little Chinese buddy Arthur Ma.”¹ Wittman wants to be an American Artist—he wants to carve a place for himself in American cultural history—but finds that first he must disengage himself from the subordinate place that American culture has made for him on the basis of his ethnicity.

Wittman’s manic narrative registers the pain of being caught between two cultures, of being increasingly drawn away from the Chinese culture of his ancestors, which he admires, by the dominant, mainstream culture of Whitman, Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, and UC Berkeley, which he also admires. Wittman wants to define an identity for himself that can truly be called “Chinese American,” but to do so he must prevent his Chinese inheritance from being transformed into a safely exotic form of cultural residue: he must prevent the “Chinese” from being marginalized by the “American.” Wittman’s goal is to create a form of public art that can redefine what it means to be “Chinese American”—redefine it for himself, his community, and the larger culture of which both he and his community are a part. In the course of the novel, Wittman discovers that his cultural identity is necessarily hybrid, and he suspects that every American identity is, in fact, necessarily hybrid, though mainstream U.S. culture has worked hard to deny that fact. Tripmaster Monkey thus dramatizes the predicament faced by all U.S. late-twentieth-century minority cultures, whether oriented around ethnicity or around sexuality: how to transform themselves from marginal cultures into emergent cultures capable of challenging and reforming the mainstream.

This transformation depends in large on a shift in perspective. Part of what it means to be emergent is to associate yourself with the idea of the new. Remember that Raymond Williams, in his original theorization of the idea of the emergent, identifies it as the site or set of sites where “new meanings and values new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created.”² This newness, however, is a matter of perspective: what is new is what looks new from the vantage point of the dominant. So it should not surprise us to discover that some cultural forms that we might designate as emergent are, in fact, hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years old. For example, elements of homosexual experience played an important role in the cultures of classical Greece and Rome and of medieval Islam,³ but gay and lesbian culture remains in an emergent and oppositional position in the United States today, as the continuing resistance in many parts of the country to the idea of “gay marriage” demonstrates.⁴ “The project of our enemies is to keep us from falling in love,” writes Paul Monette in his memoir, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992): “It has always been thus, the history written by straight boys who render us invisible, as if we were never there…. If you isolate us long enough and keep us ignorant of each other, the solitary confinement will extinguish any hope we have of finding our other half.”⁵ We find a similar assault upon a minority’s sense of community in a moment from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) when the narrator describes the character Auntie’s world-view: “An old sensitivity had descended in her, surviving thousands of years from the oldest times, when the people shared a single clan name and they told each other who they were; they recounted actions and words each of their clan had taken, and would take; from before they were born and long after they died, the people shared the same consciousness.” But Auntie feels that Christianity has “separated the people from themselves; it tried to crush the single clan name, encouraging each person to stand alone, because Jesus Christ would save only the individual soul.”⁶ The holistic communitarianism that Auntie longs for is ancient, but in Silko’s novel it becomes an alternative that can be transformed into a site of new resistance.

The potential for resistance is a crucial component of the emergent: according to Williams, a truly emergent culture must be “substantially alternative or oppositional” to the dominant, and it is an article of faith among minority discourse theorists that opposition to the dominant culture is an experience that all U.S minority cultures share. As Abdul JanMohammed and David Lloyd put it in the introduction to The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1990), “Cultures designated as minorities have certain shared experiences by virtue of their similar antagonistic relationship to the dominant culture.”⁷ Drawing on the work of the postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, JanMohammed and Lloyd argue “that minority discourse is, in the first instance, the product of damage—damage more or less systematically inflicted on cultures produced as minorities by the dominant culture. The destruction involved is manifold, bearing down on variant modes of social formation, dismantling previously functional economic systems, and deracinating whole populations at best or decimating them at worst.” ⁸ Minority discourse theory in the United States has been greatly influenced not only by the work of Williams but also by postcolonial theory, which has offered insights into the ways in which dominant cultures colonize the subjectivities of those whose cultures they marginalize, whether those subjectivities belong to subjugated native peoples, to immigrant populations, or to ethnic, racial, religious, sexual, or other minorities. What emergent writers in the United States share with native intellectuals in colonial and postcolonial contexts is the common project of decolonizing themselves.

When Silko’s character Auntie thinks about the cultural damage suffered by Native American cultures in the aftermath of European colonization, she thinks first of the linguistic damage that has occurred: “the fifth world had become entangled with European names: the names of the rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants—all of creation suddenly had two names: an Indian name and a white name”. The influential Kenyan dramatist, novelist, and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o offers a similar insight in Decolonising the Mind (1986) when he writes, “The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of spiritual subjugation.” The imposition of English on the peoples of Kenya was a powerful way for the British to take cultural control, which, Ngugi argues, was a crucial part of the process of colonization:

Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.

Ngugi dropped his given name—“James”—in 1972 as a way of resisting Christianity’s linguistic colonization of his people, and he would eventually renounce English as a language for African literary production, turning instead to his native Gikuyu. “We as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro America,” Ngugi writes and then asks: “But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?”⁹

In the United States, the process that Ngugi describes occurs not simply through imposition of English as the national language, but also through the powerful mythologies generated by U.S. popular culture. Recalling the powerful force exerted by Hollywood during her childhood in the Philippines, the Filipino American writer Jessica Hagedorn reflects:

Even though we also studied Tagalog, one of our native languages … and read some of the native literature … it was pretty clear to most of us growing up in the fifties and early sixties that what was really important, what was inevitably preferred, was the aping of our mythologized Hollywood universe. The colonization of our imagination was relentless and hard to shake off. Everywhere we turned, the images held up did not match our own. In order to be acknowledged, we had to strive to be as American as possible.¹⁰

Named for a derogatory stereotype of Filipinos, Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters (1990) depicts the culture of the Philippines as the quintessential damaged culture, transformed by its encounter with America into an empty simulacrum that eschews its native forms in order to model itself on the sham culture depicted in Hollywood movies. The novel begins in “the air-conditioned darkness of the Avenue Theater, … Manila’s ‘Foremost! First-Run! English Movies Only!’ theater,” where one of the novel’s central characters, a young girl named Rio Gonzaga, sits with her “blond” “mestiza” cousin, Pucha, the two of them “enthralled” as they watch Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, and Gloria Talbott in All That Heaven Allows: “we gasp at Gloria’s cool indifference, the offhand way she treats her grieving mother. Her casual arrogance seems inherently American, modern, and enviable.”¹¹ Written in a present-tense pastiche of first-person narrative, third-person narrative, fictional newspaper accounts, to which are added quotations from the Associated Press, a poem by José Rizal, a speech by William McKinley, and Jean Mallat’s ethnographic study The Philippines (1856), Dogeaters depicts a thinly veiled version of the corrupt regime presided over by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos from 1965 to 1986. Casual arrogance marks the novel’s depiction of the repressive social apparatus: the military regime led by General Nicasio Ledesma is ruthless, brutal, and efficient in its use of torture, rape, and murder to eliminate the enemies of the President and the First Lady. But even more powerful in ensuring the regime’s dominance is the culture’s ideological apparatus, which operates through religion, education, and (perhaps most powerfully) popular culture.

Dogeaters permits us to enter the thoughts of characters from the full spectrum of social classes: from Madame First Lady to the theater cashier, Trinidad Gamboa, from Severo Alacran, the richest man in the Philippines, to the junkie mulatto deejay, Joey Sands. Linked together through a series of violent events that culminate in an assassination, these characters are even more tightly bound together by their common fascination with the movies. “What would life be without movies?” the First Lady asks an American journalist off the record: “Unendurable, di ba? We Filipinos, we know how to endure, and we embrace the movies. With movies, everything is okay lang. It is one of our few earthly rewards.”¹² Linking its characters together through violence and pop culture, the novel suggests that violence and pop culture are themselves inextricably linked. The entire country is addicted to the radio soap opera Love Letters, and Rio tells us in the novel’s first chapter that “without fail, someone dies on Love Letters. There’s always a lesson to be learned, and it’s always a painful one. Just like our Tagalog movies.”¹³ The connection is vividly dramatized in the novel’s most chilling scene, a gang rape carried out by military officers and a presidential aide while Love Letters plays in the background.

Dogeaters vividly explores the effects of American cultural colonization abroad, but emergent writers frequently dramatize the fact that American culture colonizes at home as well. Within its own boundaries a dominant culture seeks to colonize the imaginations of those whom it has marginalized. Mainstream U.S. culture teaches gays and lesbians that they are perverts and deviants; it constructs “Americanness” and “homosexuality” as opposites; it encourages gays and lesbians to remain closeted, to assimilate quietly—“don’t ask, don’t tell.” In Becoming a Man, Monette describes the experience of being made to feel like an enemy of the culture, a spy in one’s native land:

I speak for no one else here, if only because I don’t want to saddle the women and men of my tribe with the lead weight of my self-hatred, the particular doorless room of my internal exile. Yet I’ve come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment. The self-delusion of uniqueness. The festering pretense that we are the same as they are. The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eunuchs, our zones of pleasure in enemy hands. Most of all, the ventriloquism, the learning how to pass for straight. Such obedient slaves we make, with such very tidy rooms.

Mainstream U.S. culture fosters an oppositional relationship with gay culture by luring gay men and women into mimicking its thinking by “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.¹⁴

The experience of being in the closet is akin to the experience of cultural hybridity—the feeling of being caught between cultures—that ethnic Americans undergo when they are taught to deny the parts of themselves that lie outside of mainstream U.S. culture. Tayo, the protagonist of Silko’s Ceremony, remembers what he was told at the V. A. hospital: “the white doctors had yelled at him—that he had to think only of himself, and not about the others, that he would never get well as long as he used words like ‘we’ and ‘us.’” Like many late-twentieth-century Native American writers, Silko conceives of Native American culture and history as primarily communitarian in nature and therefore set against the grain of the American national culture’s celebration of individualism. So Tayo thinks to himself that he has “known the answer all along, even while the white doctors were telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine didn’t work that way, because the world didn’t work that way.” Kingston’s Wittman Ah Sing finds himself in an analogous position in Tripmaster Monkey, sitting in the unemployment office watching “a cartoon about going for a job interview” that gives him hints about “good grooming,” which turn out to include the following pieces of advice: “COME ALONE to the interview. DO NOT take friends or relatives with you.” Wittman immediately realizes the nature of the message implicit in these dicta: “An X through my people. Adios, mis amigos…. An American stands alone. Alienated, tribeless, individual. To be a successful American, leave your tribe, your caravan, your gang, your partner, your village cousins, your refugee family that you’re making the money for, leave them behind. Do not bring back-up.”¹⁵

What Monette, Silko, and Kingston are confronting here is the logic of ontological individualism that has been so dominant within U.S. culture. As I argued in the first chapter, American theorists of individualism from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Rawls have typically sought to shift the ground of inquiry from culture and society to the individual, thereby translating moments of social choice into moments of individual choice. And one of the most powerful claims that U.S. culture makes about individuals is that sexuality, ethnicity, and cultural hybridity are contingent, incidental, and ultimately irrelevant aspects of individual identity.

Richard Rodriguez’s controversial autobiography, Hunger of Memory (1982), makes a powerful case for the applicability of this model of identity-formation to individuals designated as minorities by mainstream U.S. culture. Arguing that class is the true dividing line in U.S. culture, Rodriguez argues that middle-class Americans of all races and ethnicities who are in a position to think like individualists should do so. His opposition to both bilingual education and affirmative action (which have made him unpopular among Chicano activists) is based on the belief that such remedies are unnecessary for middle-class individuals who have the opportunity to participate in America’s culture of individualism.

The benefits—and the potential losses—that result from this stance can be seen most poignantly in Rodriguez’s rendering of what is the classic situation for the ethnic minority subject: being forced to choose between the culture of his parents and the dominant culture that surrounds him. Having summoned the courage to raise his hand and speak up in class, Rodriguez tells us that “at last, at seven years old, I came to believe what had been technically true since my birth: I was an American citizen.” This gain, however, entails a loss: “the special feeling of closeness at home was diminished” by “the dramatic Americanization” that he and his siblings underwent: “gone was the desperate, urgent, intense feeling of being at home; rare was the experience of feeling individualized by family intimates. We remained a loving family but we were greatly changed. No longer so close; no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of our public separateness.”¹⁶ For Rodriguez, the loss is completely offset by the gain. It is never, for him, really a question of choosing between two equally viable cultural groups. There is only one group—the dominant group—and it is one to which he does not belong. In other words, Rodriguez presents himself from the outset as “tribeless,” and he conceives of emergence not as a struggle between cultures, but as a process of personal metamorphosis. It is in this shifting of the ground of analysis from the group to the individual that Hunger of Memory proves itself to be a classic account of American self-making, a contribution to the Emersonian and Rawlsian traditions of American liberalism.

The last pieces of advice that the cartoon offers to Wittman Ah Sing deal with the question of language: “SPEAK clearly and answer questions honestly. BE business-like and brief.” The cartoon exhorts its audience to present a public self that is likely to succeed in mainstream culture, and it is the development of this public self that Rodriguez charts in his autobiography. In arguing against bilingual education, Rodriguez writes: “Today I hear bilingual educators say that children lose a degree of ‘individuality’ by becoming assimilated into public society…. But the bilingualists simplistically scorn the value and necessity of assimilation. They do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized. So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality.” The achievement of this public individuality has a price: “it would never again be easy,” Rodriguez tells us, “for me to hear intimate family voices.” But it is a price that Rodriguez is willing to pay, though he nonetheless tries to minimize its cost, naturalizing this split between private and public individuality by ascribing it to the “inevitable pain” of growing up: “The day I raised my hand in class and spoke loudly to an entire roomful of faces, my childhood started to end.” Childhood is indeed full of pain, and children often find themselves at odds with their families, but what is different about the particular pain that Rodriguez describes is that it is the product of the dominant culture’s attempt (in Wittman Ah Sing’s phrase) to put an X through his people. Almost in passing, Rodriguez tells us that “the bilingualists insist that a student should be reminded of his difference from others in mass society, his heritage.” But “heritage” is a subject upon which Rodriguez chooses not to dwell, setting it aside without further comment. The price for the achievement of his public individuality, then, is alienation from family, ancestors, and heritage. What Rodriguez fails to points out is that it is only members of minority cultures who must pay this particular price.¹⁷

In seeking to portray class as the primary determinant factor in American life, Rodriguez must deny his identity as an ethnic hybrid (and, though this is not made explicit in the text, his identity as a gay man). He is thus forced to inflict damage not only upon himself—by sacrificing his “private individuality”—but also upon his family. In a later essay he describes the beginning of his Americanization as his “emergence as a brat” and admits that he “determined to learn English, initially, as a way of hurting [his parents].”¹⁸ Rodriguez’s autobiographical writings provide a case study in the ways that America’s minority cultures internalize the damage inflicted upon them by mainstream culture. There is a tension in Rodriguez’s text between the argument he is making—about the primacy of class over ethnicity as a determinant of identity—and the ethnically inflected episodes that he uses to illustrate that argument.

Hunger of Memory is indeed an emergent text: it transforms American liberalism because it asserts the right of a person of color to participate in the American liberal tradition, a right recognized in theory but not yet fully realized in practice. Paradoxically, however, the text can assert this right only by denying the relevance of its author’s racial, ethnic, and sexual identity. In other words, the text is forced to abjure the very qualities that make it emergent. Because Rodriguez’s aim is not to transform mainstream U.S. culture but rather to detail a strategy for becoming part of it, he seeks to naturalize what other authors might represent as a process of cultural damage. Rodriguez chose to describe the hardships he has undergone as fundamentally similar to the hardships that any American faces when trying to achieve a public voice. But his text leaves us with the uncomfortable feeling that what it is recording—almost despite itself—is the damage specifically inflicted upon minorities by mainstream U.S. culture.

To put Rodriguez’s rhetorical strategies in perspective, we might compare Hunger of Memory to another text that portrays the inevitability of Americanization, John Okada’s novel No-No Boy (1957). The novel’s protagonist, Ichiro, has suffered the humiliation of being interned in a camp with other Japanese Americans and decides, when he is later drafted, not to serve in the American army.¹⁹ Ichiro has chosen to side with his non-assimilationist mother, and he goes to prison for it. Returning home to Seattle after the war, Ichiro thinks to himself what he is unable to say to his mother, that there was a time when “we were Japanese with Japanese feelings and Japanese pride and Japanese thoughts because it was all right then to be Japanese and feel and think all the things that Japanese do even if we lived in America.” But then

there came a time when I was only half Japanese because one is not born in America and raised in America and taught in America and one does not speak and swear and drink and smoke and play and fight and see and hear in America among Americans in American streets and houses without becoming American and loving it. But I did not love enough, for you were still half my mother and I was thereby still half Japanese and when the war came and they told me to fight for America, I was not strong enough to fight you and I was not strong enough to fight the bitterness which made the half of me which was you bigger than the half of me which was America and really the whole of me that I could not see or feel.²⁰

This passage, taken from a long interior monologue in the middle of the novel’s first chapter, embodies the novel’s recognition of the extent to which Japanese Americans suffer from the idea of the “dual personality,” the idea that the “Asian” and the “American” are incompatible selves at war with one another within the Asian American individual. Trapped within a logic of either/or, Okada’s protagonist believes that he must choose either to be Japanese or to be American. What No-No Boy explores is the deep regret that Ichiro feels after his release, the sense that he has made a mistake, that he has chosen wrongly. And he comes to believe that he has chosen foolishly because what appeared to be a choice was, in fact, never really a choice. No-No Boy portrays resistance to assimilation as futile, but it differs from Hunger of Memory because it openly explores the pain of cultural hybridity, which it can only understand as a state of violence. No-No Boy anticipates a narrative strategy that has proven to be central to the project of producing emergent literature in late-twentieth-century America.

This strategy is to understand hybridity as a crucial fact about identity and to depict the ontology of hybridity as an ontology of violence. Writers as disparate as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Jessica Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Paul Monette depict characters who have internalized the dominant culture’s understanding of hybridity as a state of violence and self-division. For example, the mixed-blood war veteran, Abel, in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) experiences his mixed blood as a clash between contradictory frames of reference, a clash that fractures his consciousness, leading him to treat wartime combat as if it were ritual, and ritual as if it were actual combat. The vicious schoolyard beating of a “meek, nervous kid” by a group of “Irish toughs” is an unforgettable incident that occurs early in Monette’s memoir Becoming a Man; later, when threatened by a “football jock” two years older than he, Monette describes himself as “a prisoner who spills all the secrets as soon as he sees the torture room, before the first whip is cracked.” Being in the closet is for Monette an experience of pain: “When you finally come out, there’s a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.” Worst of all, he finds that being in the closet has made him internalize the hatred directed toward him: “it makes me sick to hate the way my enemies hate.”²¹

“Decolonization,” wrote the seminal postcolonial critic Frantz Fanon, “is always a violent phenomenon.” Gay and lesbian texts share with texts of ethnic emergence a preoccupation with the violence of living on the margins of U.S. culture. In fact, many gay and lesbian activists believe that gay studies, queer theory, and the gay rights movement should pattern themselves on “the ethnic model” in order to gain political power. The problem with this strategy, as Dana Takagi points out in her contribution to the anthology Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay & Lesbian Experience (1996), is “the relative invisibility of sexual identity compared with racial identity. While both can be said to be socially constructed, the former are performed, acted out, and produced often in individual routines, whereas the latter tends to be more obviously ‘written’ on the body and negotiated by political groups.” This caveat—about the extent to which identities like “Asian American” or “gay and lesbian” can be considered performative—is an important one. But it applies to bodies and not texts, to authors rather than their work. For all texts are “performed, acted out, and produced … in individual routines”: all of them represent a decision either to “pass” as mainstream or to present themselves as “emergent.” In this sense, both ethnic and gay writers share the dilemma that addles Kingston’s poet-protagonist at the end of the first chapter of Tripmaster Monkey: “Does he announce now that the author is—Chinese? Or, rather, Chinese-American? And be forced into autobiographical confession. Stop the music—I have to butt in and introduce myself and my race.” Whether the question is race, ethnicity, or sexuality—and we could perhaps argue for the inclusion of gender and class as well—the dilemma is that of the marginalized author who would be emergent.²²

Kingston’s novel suggests that the dilemma of whether or not to introduce one’s race was not something that Herman Melville faced: “‘Call me Ishmael.’ See? You pictured a white guy, didn’t you?” Some queer theorists might beg to differ, however, arguing that texts like “Benito Cereno” (1855) and “Billy Budd” (1924) bear the signs of struggle evident when a gay writer chooses to pass for straight: one of the major subjects in Melville studies during the 1990s has been the question of whether the author was, in fact, either gay or bisexual. Melville, it seems, may have been closer to the margins of U.S. culture than the canonical tradition would have us believe.²³

For gay and lesbian writers, being emergent entails both establishing the literary right to explore the dynamics of gay life—in particular the dynamics of gay eroticism—and “outing” those gay authors who have been assimilated into the mainstream literary canon with no acknowledgment of the impact that their sexualities may have had upon their literary art. Part of the project of American queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s has been to locate the closets within the texts of writers like Melville, Henry James, and Willa Cather, to understand what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called “the epistemology of the closet.”²⁴ Judith Fetterley, for example, argues that the power of Cather’s My Ántonia is “connected with its contradictions” and that “these contradictions are intimately connected to Cather’s lesbianism.” Unable to write freely about lesbian desire, Cather finds a “solution to the inherent contradiction between American and lesbian” by conflating the two and portraying the land both as female and as an object of desire: according to Fetterley, “in the land, Cather successfully imagined herself; in the land, she imagined a woman who could be safely eroticized and safely loved.”²⁵ Such rereadings of canonical authors have a double effect: first, they demonstrate the existence of a longstanding tradition of gay and lesbian writing upon which openly gay writers can now draw; second, they demonstrate the extent to which mainstream U.S. culture has been shaped by gay sensibility. It is no accident, such critics argue, that America’s bard, Walt Whitman, was a homosexual: who better to embody the ideology of individualism than a gay man cut off from the rest of his “tribe” (to use Paul Monette’s word)?²⁶

Whether Whitman looms as a force of liberation or constraint depends, however, upon an author’s subject position. To Paul Monette, who uses one of Whitman’s Calamus poems (“I Hear It Was Charged against Me”) as the epigraph for Becoming a Man, he is a forefather to be cherished and emulated. For Maxine Hong Kingston, however, Whitman represents the canonical American tradition—so full of the writings of white men—that places the emergent ethnic writer into an oppositional position. Whitman is a figure with whom to struggle and contend and, if possible, one to appropriate, too.

For many emergent ethnic writers in the United States, another strategy for resistance has been to draw on non-Anglo-American and non-European mythological beliefs and stories. Native American authors draw upon what remains of their tribal cultures, in part because tribal ways represent an integral part of their personal identities, but also because their depictions of tribal cultures help to preserve those cultures, not simply in memory but as living cultures. The novelist N. Scott Momaday’s Kiowa name is “Tsoai-talee,” which means “Rock-tree Boy,” a reference to Momaday’s being taken as an infant to Tsoai, a place sacred to the Kiowas that appears on U.S. maps as “Devil’s Tower, Wyoming.” The name connects Momaday to a Kiowa legend that his great-grandmother told him and that he tells this way in his memoir, The Names (1976):

Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body was covered with fur. There was a bear where the boy had been. The sisters were terrified; they ran, and the bear after them. They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It bade them climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were just beyond its reach. It reared against the tree and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper.²⁷

Momaday tells interviewers that he imagines himself to be the reincarnation of that boy and uses storytelling to enable himself to explore what it means to live under the sway of a legend: “All things can be accepted, if not understood, if you put them into a story. It is exactly what the Kiowas did when they encountered that mysterious rock formation. They incorporated it into their experience by telling a story about it. And that is what I feel that I must do about the boy bear.”²⁸ Momaday’s writing re-enacts the story-making that loomed so large in the lives of his ancestors; its very existence represents a way of resisting both the cultural eradication pursued by the U.S. government in the nineteenth century and the cultural mummification wrought by those whose images of the Native American remain rooted in nineteenth-century stereotypes.

Other emergent ethnic writers give prominence within their fictions to figures or places that embody the ideas of subversion and resistance. One such figure is the trickster, who appears throughout Native American tribal mythologies in such manifestations as Coyote, Crow, Jay, Hare, Loon, Raven, Spider, Wolverine, and Old Man. Sometimes a heroic, even god-like figure, the trickster can also be a liar and a cheater, a fool and a bungler, but he is almost always connected to the telling of stories. In Love Medicine (1984; expanded edition, 1993) and The Bingo Palace (1994), Louise Erdrich draws on Chippewa tales of the trickster Nanabozho to create figures of both comedy and subversion in Gerry Nanapush, a member of the radical American Indian Movement, who has a knack for escaping from prison by squeezing into unimaginably small spaces, and his son, Lipsha Morissey, who embarks on a vision-quest for three days and ends up having visions of American fast food. Maxine Hong Kingston sets a trickster figure at the heart of Tripmaster Monkey: alluding to Wu-Cheng-en’s sixteenth-century Chinese folk novel Hsi Yu Chi (translated into English as The Journey to the West), Wittman Ah Sing calls himself “the present-day U.S.A. incarnation of the King of the Monkeys.” Wu-Cheng-en’s Monkey King, Sun Wu Kong, is a master of transformation, undergoing seventy-two of them in the course of his story, and Wittman seeks to revolutionize American literature by tapping into Sun Wu Kong’s transformative powers, particularly those that arise from his ability to tell tales. The Native American writer Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa) draws attention to the parallels between the Native American and Chinese trickster traditions in his novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987), whose protagonist, Griever de Hocus, a visiting professor at Zhou Enlai University in Tianjin, is described as a “mixedblood tribal trickster, a close relative to the oldmind monkeys.”²⁹ Elsewhere, Vizenor has argued that the trickster is a natural resource for both Native American tribal narratives and for postmodernism because he is the embodiment of deconstructive strategies—“chance and freedom in a comic sign”—and thus disrupts and resists institutionally sanctioned ways of reading.³⁰

For Chicano writers, the most potent deployment of mythical belief has been the collective re-imagining of Aztlán, the Chicano homeland. In the Nahuatl language of ancient Mexico, “Aztlán” means “the lands to the north,” and Chicanos use it today to refer to what is now the Southwestern United States. “The ancestors of the Aztecs named their homeland Aztlán,” writes the novelist Rudolfo Anaya, “and legend placed it north of Mexico. Aztlán was the place of origin, the sipapu, the Eden of those tribes. There they came to a new relationship with their god of war, Huitzilopochtli, and he promised to lead them in their migration out of Aztlán.”³¹ That migration southward led to the establishment of the new Aztec nation of Tenochtitlán, which would eventually be conquered by Cortés in 1521. For all of its bloodthirstiness, the Spanish conquest of Mexico ironically resulted in a true melting pot, a nation less obsessed than its northern neighbor with ideas of blood purity, and thus most Mexicans and Chicanos are products of the fusion of both Native American and Spanish bloodlines and cultures.

It is no accident that the rebirth of interest in Aztlán occurred in tandem with the rise of the Chicano Movement during the 1960s, a time when, according to Anaya, the “absorption of the Chicano into the mainstream American culture was occurring so quickly that unless we re-established the covenants of our ancestors our culture was threatened with extinction.”³² Seeking Chicano origins in Aztlán was a way of emphasizing the Native American roots of Chicano identity and thus of de-emphasizing its roots in the Spanish conquistadors, the first invaders and occupiers of America and forerunners in that sense of the U.S. government. “The naming of Aztlán,” writes Anaya, “was a spontaneous act which took place throughout the Southwest” and was codified at the Chicano Youth Conference held in Denver, Colorado, in March 1969. The document adopted at the conference—“El Plan Espiritual de Aztlána”—concluded with this declaration:

Brotherhood unites us and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggle against the foreigner “Gabacho,” who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our hurt in our hands and our hands in the soil, We Declare the Independence of our Mestizo Nation. We are a Bronze People with a Bronze Culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the Bronze Continent, We are a Nation, We are a Union of free pueblos, We are Aztlán.³³

The modern invocation of the myth of Aztlán represents the conscious deployment of an ancient myth of origin for the purpose of political and cultural resistance. In 1972, the radical dramatist Luis Valdez co-edited an activist anthology of Mexican American literature entitled Aztlán; Anaya entitled his second novel Heart of Aztlán (1976) and pushed the mythopoetic techniques used in his prize-winning debut, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), even further: in Heart of Aztlán, myth becomes not just a way of interpreting the world but a way of revolutionizing it.

Emergent ethnic writers, however, often find themselves forced to do violence not only to the tradition of canonical American texts but also to the literary, mythological, and cultural traditions that have given them the opportunity to be “emergent” in the first place. Thus, for example, Frank Chin accuses Kingston of attacking Chinese civilization by rewriting some of its fairy tales and myths.³⁴ The novelist and critic Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna) accuses Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna) of violating Native American religious and ethical traditions by transcribing and interpolating into her written texts stories that are meant to be spoken—and spoken only within a clan for specific purposes.³⁵

Writers like Kingston and Silko, however, take a dynamic view of traditional myth, believing it to be not a static relic of the past but an ongoing process in the present. So Kingston declares, in a personal statement included in a volume of essays about her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976): “Sinologists have criticized me for not knowing myths and for distorting them; pirates correct my myths, revising them to make them conform to some traditional Chinese version. They don’t understand that myths have to change, be useful or be forgotten. Like the people who carry them across oceans, the myths become American. The myths I write are new, American.”³⁶ Silko provides a similar answer to critics like Allen, an answer embodied in the character of Betonie, the medicine man in Ceremony, who includes newspapers and telephone books among his implements of magic. Betonie says: “The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done…. They think that if a singer tampers with any part of the ritual, great harm can be done, great power unleashed.” Yet, he continues, “At one time the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough for the way the world was then. But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong.”³⁷

Drawing from both the center and the margins of American literary culture, however, does not guarantee that these writers will be able to appeal to either constituency. Mid-twentieth-century ethnic writers like Jade Snow Wong, Monica Sone, and José Antonio Villarreal solved the problem of audience by writing in a realist style addressed primarily toward a white readership—a solution that comes to seem less appealing as emergent literatures gain the self-confidence that comes with literary recognition. “I am really a megalomaniac,” says Maxine Hong Kingston, “because I write for everybody living today and people in the future; that’s my audience, for generations.” Her audience, she claims, includes “everyone”—not only Chinese Americans, but also her “old English professors of the new criticism school in Berkeley,” as well as “those who are not English majors and don’t play literary games.” Aware that her writing “deals with a culture that has not adequately been portrayed before,” Kingston reveals that she consciously “work[s] on intelligibility and accessibility” when revising her manuscripts. Yet in an essay entitled “Cultural Mis-Readings by American Reviewers,” written after the publication of The Woman Warrior, Kingston registers the artistic problems involved in bringing these different audiences together. Many of her reviewers, she laments, “praise[d] the wrong things”: unfamiliar with many of the historical, cultural, and social contexts that inform The Woman Warrior, many reviewers “measur[ed] the book … against the stereotype of the exotic, inscrutable, mysterious oriental.” To Kingston, such responses demonstrate the failure of her text: “the critics who said how the book was good because it was, or was not, like the oriental fantasy in their heads might as well have said how weak it was, since it in fact did not break through that fantasy.”³⁸

What must the emergent ethnic writer do to break through the stereotypical assumptions of Eurocentric readers? Kingston claims that the process of heightening “intelligibility and accessibility” does not include “slow[ing] down to give boring exposition, which is information that is available in encyclopedias, history books, sociology, anthropology, mythology.” After all, she claims, “I am not writing history or sociology but a ‘memoir’ like Proust…. Some readers will have to do some background reading.” Yet her second volume, China Men (1980), makes a greater attempt to educate her non-Chinese and non-Chinese American readers, because, as she told an interviewer, the reviews of The Woman Warrior “made it clear that people didn’t know the history—or that they thought I didn’t. While I was writing China Men, I just couldn’t take that tension any more.” In her second book, Kingston shifts the balance between myth and history: the mythical imagination of The Woman Warrior is tempered in China Men by the desire to heighten the historical texture of the narrative. Most telling of all is the decision to include a brief interchapter entitled “The Laws,” in which she lists and comments wryly upon pieces of legislation that have affected Chinese Americans, beginning with the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. “The Laws” is not sociology, and it is not boring, but its inclusion does register Kingston’s frustration with readers who have not done their background reading and who are content to read her texts from the vantage point of Orientalism. What “The Laws” is designed to demonstrate is that Kingston’s characters cannot be safely exiled to the exotic realms of myth; they exist in history—in U.S. history—and they have been the victims of nationally sanctioned injustice.³⁹

Kingston’s dilemma is familiar to writers and critics of emergent writing, who often claim that their work has a special relation to history. One prominent Chicano critic contends, for example, that history is “the decisive determinant of the form and content of [Chicano] literature” and therefore “cannot be conceived as … mere ‘background’ or ‘context’”; it is, instead, “the subtext that we must recover” if we wish to understand Chicano writing.⁴⁰ For many literary scholars, in the aftermath of Marxist criticism and the New Historicism, this description of the interconnection between history and literature applies not only to Chicano writing or even to emergent writing more generally, but rather to all writing: for the historicist critic, history is the subtext that we must recover if we wish to understand any literary text fully. Rather than possessing a special relationship to history, the emergent text simply reminds us forcefully of what is true of every text: that that texts are marked by the historical context—or, rather, by the multiple, intersecting historical contexts—from within which they arise.

It should come as no surprise that the claims made by minority discourse theorists about emergent fiction came to seem banal to historicists in the late 1990s, because emergent ethnic writing (and the criticism that it fostered) played a crucial role in the much-discussed “turn to history” that took place in American literary and cultural studies in the early 1980s. Scholars of ethnic writing have long recognized that the formalism that characterized New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction implicitly depends upon the existence of a particular Eurocentric interpretive community. The close reading skills taught at most American high schools and universities prove inadequate to the challenges posed by emergent literature; they do not, for example, help a reader to do more than scratch the surface of a text like N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), which the Native American novelist and essayist Michael Dorris describes as “a classic of traditional Kiowa literature.” Although the text is written in English, Dorris contends that “it cannot be understood without major reference to its tribal symbol system. It may misleadingly appear, like much oral literature when written down, simple and straightforward and the non-Kiowa reader who approaches the work in isolation will likely miss much of its depth and hence most of its beauty and significance.”⁴¹ In short, emergent ethnic writing teaches us about the inseparability of text and cultural context, and the contribution of minority discourse theory to late twentieth-century historicism is one of the ways in which Wittman Ah Sing has forced us to reread Walt Whitman, to recall that as a gay man writing about sexuality Whitman was—and, in this respect, still is—an emergent writer.⁴²

Part of the project of emergent writing in the United States is to create what Dorris calls “self-history”—history written from within particular communities whose stories are either excluded or distorted by the “standard history” of the nation. American history, as commonly construed, is the history of a nation; self-history is the history of a particular people, a history that typically stretches much further back in time than the founding of the United States and often originates in territories that lie outside of its boundaries. Gay history, a field that came into being only after 1969, started out from the vantage point of self-history: as Paul Monette suggests, mainstream history has always been “written by straight boys who render us invisible, as if we were never there.” One of the field’s founding texts was a collection of primary documents entitled Gay American History (1976), edited by Jonathan Katz, whose qualifications for the undertaking were the result not of a doctorate in history but rather of years spent as a gay activist. The current task of gay history is to lift into visibility the homosexual elements of all cultures—ancient and modern—that have hitherto been hidden from view by standard history.⁴³

Ethnic self-history, however, must distinguish itself not only from standard history, but also from the academic sub-discipline known as “ethnohistory,” which often provides a wealth of information about ethnic communities but cannot substitute for ethnic self-history because it tends to represent an outsider’s point of view. Ethnohistory is generally written from without: according to the anthropologist Harold Hickerson, ethnohistory “consists of the use of primary documents—library and archival materials—to gain knowledge of a given culture as it existed in the past, and how it has changed…. In its broadest sense, ethnohistory employs a number of research techniques to see in what way the present-day culture is similar or dissimilar to ancestral cultures; to what degree, in other words, the culture has changed, and what the distinctive historical factors were in determining such change.”⁴⁴ It is a telling fact about the practice of ethnohistory that the discipline arose in the early 1950s as a result of Congress’s passage of the Indian Claims Commission Act in 1946, which gave Native Americans the right to claim redress for losses of land incurred as the result of the U.S. government’s violation of laws, treaties, or “standards of fair and honorable dealings.” To carry out its mandate, the commission enlisted anthropologists to use historical sources in order to determine whether certain Native American tribes had occupied particular territories, whether they had received fair value for those lands upon removal, and whether those now claiming redress were their rightful descendants. The journal Ethnohistory was founded in 1954, primarily to serve scholars engaged in the study of relations between white and Native American cultures.⁴⁵

For many emergent ethnic writers, both “American history” and ethnohistory are things that they learn in school; ethnic self-history is what they learn at home or in the streets of their neighborhoods. Paula Gunn Allen contrasts the education that she received in school (where she was “treated to bloody tales” of “savage Indians” killing “hapless priests and missionaries” and taught “that Indians were people who had benefited mightily from the advanced knowledge and superior morality of the Anglo-Europeans”) with the understanding “derived” from her “daily experience of Indian life” and from the teachings of her “mother and the other Indian people who raised” her.⁴⁶ The narrator of Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993) reflects, “We know so little of the old country. We repeat the names of grandfathers and uncles, but they have always been strangers to us. Family exists only because somebody has a story, and knowing the story connects us to a history.”⁴⁷ Ethnic self-history, in other words, is intimately connected to personal narrative, and as a result, autobiography and autobiographical fiction have played a formative role in U.S. emergent literatures.⁴⁸

Some ethnic autobiographies, like Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945), or Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (1953), devote themselves to charting a process of assimilation into the mainstream of American life. They adopt the individualistic perspective traditionally associated with the Western tradition of autobiography that dates back at least to Rousseau’s Confessions (1782, and possibly to Augustine’s from the fourth century CE), charting individual development as a process of conversion that leads to a sense of self-autonomy. They belong in a history of American emergent literatures because, despite their assimilative stances, they dramatize and document the damage inflicted upon minority cultures in the United States by the mainstream. In contrast, autobiographies like The Woman Warrior, Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy (1971), or America Is in the Heart (1946) by the Filipino immigrant Carlos Bulosan describe development in collective rather than individualistic terms; they set themselves against the grain of Western autobiography. Although Bulosan concludes his text with what seems to be a ringing affirmation of the American dream, expressing his “desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment,” his conception of that “fulfillment” has little to do with the laissez-faire individualism typically associated with the American Dream. What Bulosan seeks is “the enlargement of the American Dream,”⁴⁹ and what his autobiography charts is the development of feelings of communal solidarity. Late in the autobiography, Bulosan recalls attending a meeting in Los Angeles with “several cannery workers: Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, and white Americans” and coming to the realization that “there was the same thing in each of them that possessed me: their common faith in the working man…. Then it came to me that we are all fighting against one enemy: Fascism. It was in every word and gesture, every thought.”⁵⁰ Indeed, the image that brings about Bulosan’s final reverie upon the promise of America is the sight of “Filipino pea pickers in the fields” stopping to wave as the bus that Bulosan is riding passes by.

The history of Native American autobiography sets these two forms in a developmental relation, while re-enacting the shift from ethnography to ethnic self-history. The first full-length autobiography published by a Native American, William Apess’s A Son of the Forest. The Experience of William Apes, a Native of the Forest (1829), is quite literally a conversion narrative that concludes with Apess’s receiving a license to preach.⁵¹ George Copway, a Canadian Ojibwa who moved to the United States in 1846 after becoming a Methodist minister, mixes ethnography with conversion narrative in The Life, History, and Travels of Ka-gega-gah-bowh (1847), which contains detailed, if slightly romanticized, accounts of Ojibwa tribal customs as well as the story of Copway’s conversion to Christianity. Charles Eastman’s two autobiographies, Indian Boyhood (1902) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), stress the formative influence not of the Santee Sioux customs according to which he was raised by his paternal grandmother and uncle, but rather the Christian humanism that he learned at U.S. universities.

Apess, Copway, and Eastman are exceptions rather than the rule for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Native American autobiography. They write rather than speak their autobiographies. The bulk of nineteenth-century Native American personal narratives were transcriptions of oral accounts, and they were presented to the white reading public as specimens of ethnography. Prominent examples include J. B. Patterson’s Life of Black Hawk (1833), S. M. Barrett’s Geronimo’s Story of His Life (1906), and perhaps the most famous of these accounts, Black Elk Speaks, Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, as told through John G. Neihardt (1932). Although scholars believe that Neihardt sought to capture the Lakota chief’s narrative as faithfully as he could, he nevertheless took liberties with the oral account, including the addition of the text’s famous opening and closing paragraphs. Instead of Neihardt serving as Black Elk’s amanuensis, we have Black Elk serving as the vehicle for Neihardt’s vision of Native America. In contrast to these personal narratives, in which both the individuality and the representativeness of the subject are effaced by the mediation of a white interpreter, late-twentieth-century autobiographical texts like N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and The Names (1976) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller (1981) begin with the individual voices of their authors, but quickly expand to incorporate the polyvocality of tribal traditions.

Autobiography and autobiographical fiction have also played a formative role in the emergence of gay and lesbian American literature. With the advent of the gay liberation movement in the aftermath of the Stonewall Rebellion came a new literary genre: the “coming-out” narrative. Anthologies of personal accounts like The Lesbian Path (1980) and The Coming Out Stories (1980) found an immediate audience within the gay community, while Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man (1992) gained national critical attention. The early 1980s saw the rise of what might be called the gay male Bildungsroman, whose central act was often a boy’s coming out to his parents. Prominent examples of the genre include Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1980) and Robert Ferro’s The Family of Max Desir (1983), as well as David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), in which a son and father come out to one another. Like many ethnic autobiographies, coming-out narratives map the individual onto the collective: they tell individual and occasionally idiosyncratic stories that often turn on the realization that the narrator’s experience is shared by a broad community of other individuals. The act of coming out is often performative rather than constitutive; that is, the act of coming out to one’s family and friends is often the very act that signals and brings about the embracing of one’s homosexual identity. Likewise, the emergence of the coming-out narrative as a major genre of writing has helped to bring about the existence of an openly gay American literature and to provide crucial encouragement to gay Americans still locked in their closets. The fact that literary coming-out narratives may have practical effects is made evident at the end of the anthology Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian (1994), which includes one appendix listing “books, magazines, and videos that may be of special interest to young adults” and a second appendix listing such “resources” as hotlines and support groups for gay youth. The collective nature of gay personal narrative and autobiographical fiction has only been strengthened with the advent of a second major genre, the AIDS narrative, which includes both non-fictional accounts such as Monette’s Borrowed Time (1988), an account of the death of his lover, Roger Horwitz, and novels such as Ferro’s Second Son (1988) and Monette’s Afterlife (1990).

Perhaps because many Native American tribal cultures are matriarchal, matrilineal, and traditionally tolerant of homosexuality and transvestism, Native American feminist writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, or Paula Gunn Allen have not been subjected to the kind of withering attacks that Asian American and Mexican American feminists and gay writers have received from their straight male counterparts. In the work of writers like Maxine Hong Kingston or the gay Chicano novelist John Rechy, the claims of ethnicity occasionally come into conflict with the claims of gender or sexuality. These writers are doubly marginalized: by mainstream U.S. culture on the basis of ethnicity, and by both mainstream U.S. culture and their own ethnic subcultures on the basis of gender or sexuality. The playwright and novelist Frank Chin has bitterly attacked Kingston for choosing the claims of feminism over the claims of ethnicity in The Woman Warrior. He accuses her of betraying her culture and of playing to Western stereotypes that undermine Chinese masculinity. Similarly, in an autobiographical collection of poems, essays, and stories entitled Loving in the War Years (1983), the lesbian Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga takes aim at the misogyny that prevents a true sense of “Chicano community” from being achieved: “There is a deeper love between and amongst our people that lies buried between the lines of the roles we play with each other…. Family is not by definition the man in a dominant position over women and children…. The strength of our families never came from domination. It has only endured in spite of it—like our women.” ⁵²

Misogyny, however, is not the only problem for writers like Moraga who are multiply marginalized. Women of color encounter discrimination from men of color on the basis of gender, and from other women on the basis of color. The groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983), which Moraga edited together with Gloria Anzaldúa, began as “a reaction to the racism of white feminists.”⁵³ Dedicated to the task of demonstrating that “we are not alone in our struggles nor separate nor autonomous but that we—white black straight queer female male—are connected and interdependent,” the anthology brings together prose and poetry by straight and gay African American, Asian American, Chicana, Latina, and Native American women. Moraga and Anzaldúa describe This Bridge Called My Back “as a revolutionary tool falling into the hands of people of all colors.”⁵⁴ It is a text that demonstrates that the goal of setting emergent American literatures into a comparative framework—a framework that highlights similarity without losing sight of difference—is not just a scholarly imperative, but also a cultural necessity: it is the necessary precursor to the reconception of the idea of “America” that is the goal of emergent writers in the United States.

Anzaldúa has written what, in both formal and thematic terms, is arguably the most radical autobiography produced by a late-twentieth-century American emergent writer. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is a hybrid text written partly in prose and partly in poetry, partly in English and partly in Spanish, and it brings the issue of hybridity immediately to the fore. “I am a border woman,” writes Anzaldúa in the book’s preface: “I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a member of a colonized people in our own territory). I have been straddling that tejas-Mexican border, and others, all my life. It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape.” Motivated by her “preoccupations with the inner life of the Self, and with the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation,” Anzaldúa’s text demonstrates that for someone like her—the book’s jacket describes her as “a Chicano tejana lesbian-feminist poet and fiction writer”—personal narrative is political narrative: to understand her personal identity she must unearth the mythic and historical foundations upon which it is built, and explore a complex cultural inheritance drawn from the civilizations of the Aztec, the Spaniard, and the Anglo. Hers is an identity wracked by the contradictions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, but—like Walt Whitman before her—she embraces these contradictions. Anzaldúa imagines the borderlands as a space where mainstream systems of classification break down: “To live in the Borderlands means you are neither hispana india negra españa / ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed.” Borderlands/La Frontera depicts the borderlands as a place of unspeakable violence, but also a place of incredible promise, a place that cannot be tamed by hegemonic culture, a place where new selves and kinds of selves can be born: “To survive the Borderlands / you must live sin fronteras / be a crossroads.”⁵⁵

For writers and critics of late-twentieth-century emergent U.S. literatures, the borderlands would become a powerful trope. What these literatures have in common is the desire to negotiate the borderlands between traditional cultures, to live without frontiers, to become a crossroads where Wittman Ah Sing (Chinese American and American playwright) can meet Walt Whitman (American bard and gay American) in order to collaborate in the making of what Whitman called “the greatest poem”—America itself.