Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Chicano vs. Mexican, for example) were important to writers in the 1960s and
1970s, those lines are increasingly being blurred as writers adopt transnational
perspectives, exploring pan-Pacific, transatlantic, and other cross-cultural connec-
tions and identities. Writers in all genres continue to address issues of identity,
assimilation, and cultural heritage, but they do so with increased attention to craft
and experimentation with form. Although more-recent writers are less inclined
to focus on the social inequities that earlier generations wrote about, they are not
blind to them. Their inclination, however, is to focus on the creative possibilities
of hybridity in culture as well as form. The dynamic process of identity formation
is reflected in the fragmentation of Cha’s Dictee (1982), which combines prose
and poetry interspersed with photographs, diagrams, and documents. Linguistic
play, a mixture of Spanish, English, and Spanglish, in the poetry of Alberto Ríos
and the fiction of Díaz and Ana Castillo transforms literary English to suggest
the multiple textures of different cultural perspectives. Kiana Davenport includes
legends and rituals as markers of a Hawaiian identity rooted in place rather than
in the images on tourist postcards. Within the narrative of Dogeaters (1990),
Hagedorn interweaves poetry, excerpts from letters and other works, news items,
and a gossip column to get at different perspectives of postcolonial Filipinos.
These works and others continually remind readers of the changing nature of
America’s cultural negotiations and the continuities between the United States
and other nations.
The emphasis on considering race and ethnicity as a central subject of inter-
est has also led to a reexamination of the social, political, and economic conditions
which historically shaped (and continue to shape) identity in literary works by
Americans with Jewish, Italian, and Irish backgrounds. More recently, “white-
ness” has become a focus for studying racial formation. Toni Morrison’s Playing
in the Dark (1992), for example, suggests how the social and political category of
“white” has been constructed and protected in relation to those defined as racial
“others.”
The richness of works by writers of different cultural backgrounds makes it
impossible to speak of American literature as a monolithic or unified entity. Any
interpretation needs to situate ethnic American literature within the historical
and cultural contexts of its cultural tradition while also working through parallels
and connections to other ethnic American discourses. The emphasis must always
be on plurality. Although this makes the categorization and analysis of American
literature a more complicated task, it is ultimately more rewarding than accepting
the illusion of homogeneity.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) the narrator protests
stereotypical and racist labels, “‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words” because, as she
says, “they do not fit my skin.” Other ethnic American writers have sought
to dismantle shallow stereotypes through their works by presenting complex
characters in particular social and historical situations. Students interested in
exploring how writers resist racist images might begin with an investigation of