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;