Introduction
Theorizing the Emergent
When I was growing up, strangers would ask me, “Where are you from?” and I’d say, “New York” or “the Upper West Side.” They’d look vaguely disappointed: “No, I meant what’s your background.” I wasn’t really being disingenuous, though I was well aware what the first question really meant. It’s just that I never particularly identified with either of my parents’ cultural traditions. My father is a Parsee, born in Karachi, when Karachi was a part of India, and my late mother was a Filipino. They had met at the International House at Columbia University, my father coming from Pakistan to study mathematical statistics, my mother from the Philippines to study literature and drama. We spoke English at home, and my parents had gradually lost their fluency in their mother tongues (Gujarati and Tagalog, respectively). What I identified with was being mixed and being able to slip from one cultural context to another. To my Parsee relatives, I looked Filipino; to my Filipino relatives, I looked “bumbai”; and to my classmates—well, on the rare occasions when someone wanted to launch a racial slur, the result was usually a lame attempt to insult me as if I were Puerto Rican.
We weren’t particularly religious at home, though we did celebrate Christmas and made it a point to attend the Christmas Eve services at Riverside Church in New York, a few blocks up the street from where we lived. My mother sometimes liked to attend Easter services there as well. It was always assumed that I would become a Zoroastrian like my father. As my mother explained it, that way I could keep my options open. I could convert to Christianity but not to Zoroastrianism later, because Zoroastrianism didn’t accept converts. But, when the time came during third grade for my navjote ceremony to be performed, we couldn’t find a priest. We kept hearing excuses along the lines of, “I would do it, but my mother-in-law is very old-fashioned.” The problem was that my mother was a Christian—oddly enough a Protestant, unlike most Filipinos, because my grandmother had converted to a Pentecostal sect before my mother’s birth. Eventually, we managed to secure the services of a priest from Mumbai who was traveling in the United States and spending some time in New York. Four years later, we had to go to London to have my sister’s ceremony done.
It was an early lesson in the dynamics of culture, though it would take me years to recognize it: my parents’ marriage was an emblem of cosmopolitan cultural mixing, while the priests’ belief in the importance of cultural purity served as an emblem of all the forces that are arrayed against cosmopolitanism. I suppose, therefore, that it’s somewhat predictable that in recent years I have chosen to work on what I call “emergent literatures”—literatures that express marginalized cultural identities—and found myself increasingly interested in theories of cosmopolitanism.
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This book was almost called U. S. Multicultural Literatures, a title that one of the press reviewers suggested in lieu of the one I had proposed. The people in charge of marketing at NYU Press apparently concurred, because they wanted the book to be a candidate for classroom adoption, and they did not believe that enough teachers and students around the country would recognize the term emergent. “Multiculturalism,” however, is a term that would be familiar to our target audience. The problem with the title U. S. Multicultural Literatures, however, is twofold. For one thing, the book does not include accounts of African American literature or women’s literature, two mainstays of current multicultural curricula. Instead, the book presents a comparative overview of the histories of the literatures produced by Asian Americans, gay and lesbian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.1 These are literatures that were generally included in late-twentieth-century conceptions of multiculturalism, but had less standing than either African American or U.S. women’s literatures. They were, if you will, the minority literatures within “U.S. minority literature.”2 Suggestive rather than exhaustive, this book presents ways of mapping the overlapping concerns of the foundational texts and authors of these literatures during the late twentieth century, by which I mean the period that spans roughly 1968 to 2001.3 My goal is to give readers a sense of how these foundational texts work as aesthetic objects (rather than merely as sociological documents) crafted in dialogue with the canonical tradition of so-called “American Literature,” as it existed in the late twentieth century, as well as in dialogue with each other. Occasionally, I will dwell on particular texts that strike me as signal achievements, in order to convey a sense of their distinctive flavor. The book will, I hope, serve as a resource for readers and teachers who wish to put together reading lists that explore traditions of U.S. literature with which they are not yet familiar.
A second way in which the title U. S. Multicultural Literatures would have been misleading is that it would have suggested that I support the idea of “multicultural literatures” as a conceptual category. In fact, what I will present is a critique of “multicultural literatures” as they are commonly understood today. What I will argue is that the literatures I discuss are more powerfully and completely understood if they are seen as “emergent literatures” rather than “multicultural literatures.”
A literature, in the sense that I am using it here, is an institution of culture. It is a form of expression produced by some group that has cohered (or that can be seen to cohere) around a cultural identity based on nation, race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender, sexuality, or any of a number of other categories.. A group of writings becomes a literature when those who produce it (the writers) or those who consume it (a group that includes readers, critics, teachers, and publishers) regard it as such. Thus, for example, Asian American writers in the early twentieth century were considered exotic anomalies and “Asian American Literature” as a category did not exist until the early 1970s.
An emergent literature is a literature that exists within a certain relation to established literary forms. My conception of the emergent is founded on Raymond Williams’s analysis of the dynamics of modern culture—an analysis that served, I believe, as the implicit foundation for minority discourse theory in the 1990s.4 Williams characterizes culture as a constant struggle for dominance in which a hegemonic mainstream seeks to defuse the challenges posed to it by both residual and emergent cultural forms. According to Williams, residual culture consists of those practices that are based on the “residue of … some previous social and cultural institution or formation,” but continue to play a role in the present, while emergent culture serves as the site or set of sites where “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created.” Both residual and emergent cultural forms can only be recognized and indeed conceived in relation to the dominant: each represents a form of negotiation between the margin and the center over the right to control meanings, values, and practices.5
When I discuss Williams’s model of culture with students, I always stress that this description does not mean that residual cultures should be considered “unimportant” or “minor.” On the contrary, they are major parts of any cultural formation. One example that I frequently offer to students comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journal of 1840:
In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. This, the people accept readily enough, & even with loud commendation, as long as I call the lecture, Art; or Politics; or Literature; or the Household; but the moment I call it Religion—they are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which they receive everywhere else, to a new class of facts.6
Emerson is living in post-Enlightenment, post-Jacksonian market society, when the influence of the old republican biblical culture presumably has fallen away. Promulgating his doctrine of “the infinitude of the private man” in his lectures on various subjects, he finds resistance only when he begins to talk about religion. It may no longer be at the center of the dominant ideological consensus, but the old-time religion is still powerful: Emerson has to take it into account,