528 The American Century: Literature since 1945Along with them the great narratives, the metanarratives used once to explain
historical movement, have lost plausibility. The myth of Plymouth Rock, for exam-
ple, of America as the exclusive domain for Europeans seeking religious and political
freedom, has far less resonance in a world characterized by transnational drift and
an American nation that is more than ever multicultural. So does the classic iconog-
raphy of the United States as a melting pot, in which all cultures, all nationalities are
resolving into one. Which brings in the most significant series of markers that have
now disappeared. American popular culture has become internationally dominant.
In the global marketplace it is America that is the biggest item on sale. In a postco-
lonial world, our imaginations have been colonized by the United States. At the same
time, and crucially, the United States itself has been internationalized. It has become,
not a melting pot, but a mosaic of different cultures – what one American writer,
Ishmael Reed, has called “the first universal nation.”
“The world is here,” Reed declared in an essay called, appropriately enough,
“America: The Multinational Society” (1988). And the world is here, in the United
States, for three seminal reasons. In the first place, particular ethnic groups that have
been there for centuries have gained in presence and prominence. The National
Census of 1990, for instance, reported 1,959,234 Native Americans living in a total
population of over 248 million Americans. This figure was an almost fourfold
increase on the number of 523,591 Native Americans reported in the 1960 census,
which in turn built upon the population nadir of around 250,000 in 1900. The huge
rise in the Native American population was down to a consistently high birth rate
and improved medical care, but also due to the increased number of people who
claimed Native American ancestry. Whether or not, as some cultural commentators
have claimed, ethnicity is a matter of consciousness rather than cultural difference,
it is clear that the consciousness of ethnicity has secured the status and significance
of certain ethnic groups in the United States. Many more Americans are proud,
eager to define themselves as Native American. Many Mexican-Americans, in turn,
have lived in a cultural borderlands for two centuries, what they call la frontera,
thanks to Spanish conquest and then American annexation. In his novel Becky and
Her Friends (1990), for example, the Mexican-American novelist Rolando Hinojosa
records of one his characters that she “was born a Spanish subject in 1814; at age ten
she was a Mexican citizen; by the summer of 1836, she was a Texan. Later, in 1845,
an American when Texas was annexed that December 21st.” And their numbers have
steadily grown, thanks not only to natural increase but to waves of immigration,
especially during and after World War II. Along with certain other ethnic groups,
notably those from Cuba, Dominica, and Puerto Rico, Mexican-Americans have
effected a sea change in American culture and transformed the demographic
destiny of the nation. So much so that in 1997 the Census Bureau calculated that by
2050 Hispanics would account for nearly one in four of the American population:
96 million in a total of 393 million.
“American literature, especially in the twentieth century, and notably in the last
twenty years,” Toni Morrison wrote in 1992, “has been shaped by its encounter with
the immigrant.” Which leads to the second, seminal reason why the United StatesGGray_c05.indd 528ray_c 05 .indd 528 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM