Emergent U.S. Literatures

Toward the end of Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), the protagonist muses: I love these streets lined with big American sedans and livery cars and vans... . I love how the Spanish disco thumps out from windows... . I follow the strolling Saturday families of brightly wrapped Hindus and then the black-clad Hasidim, and step into all the old churches that were once German and then Korean and are now Vietnamese. And I love the brief Queens sunlight at the end of the day, the warm lamp always reaching through the westward tops of the magnificent city. (346) Lee’s novel is haunted by the death of the protagonist’s young multi-ethnic child but also by the hope of a US nation-space that is not continually plagued by loss, violence, absence, and destruction; at times it offers the prospect of numerous cultural identities in dialogue with each other, or of what Cyrus R. K. Patell terms “the dynamics of multiple, overlapping hybridities” (239), in fructifying, if not always peaceful, negotiation. For some time now, literary critics have struggled to formulate a term for contemporary US multi-ethnic literature that takes account of the way that it may have evolved, post-Civil Rights Movement and after the emergence of many ethnic activist movements, in a world in which borders and boundaries between cultures and ethnic identities are themselves increasingly porous and permeable. Shall we call contemporary literature written by multi-ethnic individuals “post-ethnic” (as David Hollinger does), “interethnic” (as Caroline Rody phrases it), “interstitial” (to borrow a term from Leslie Bow), or “cosmopolitan” (as many other critics have proposed)? What are the limits and values of each of these terms—and why do we need a new label in the first place?

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