As a result of both their training and their teaching, these authors find themselves deeply influenced by canonical traditions of U.S., English, and European literature, and the literature that they produce is necessarily hybrid in the sense that Mikhail Bakhtin used the term. Bakhtin describes hybridization as “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.”19 Thus, for example, the protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1987) is named Wittman Ah Sing, a reference to the great poet of individualism. The reference is not only being made by “Kingston”: it is also being made by the character’s parents, who know exactly what they’re doing in naming him. Momaday cites as influences not only the different Native American traditions to which he belongs, but also Dickinson, Melville, and Faulkner.20 Without these writers, his novel—and thus the tradition of the Native American novel that it engendered—would not have been possible.
The idea that a literature is an institution of culture is a crucial part of the conception of the emergent in which this book is grounded. When I use the terms emergent writer or emergent text, they should be understood as shorthand for the more cumbersome “writer or text belonging to a literature identified as emergent.” In other words, I mean for emergent to be understood as a description of literatures—bodies of texts—rather than as a description of individual writers or individual texts. Each of these literatures in turn will replicate the dynamics of dominant, residual, and emergent. The power of Williams’s model of culture as the dynamic interplay of the forms is that it works at every level of culture. So, for example, if both Asian American literature and Hispanic American literature are “emergent” in their negotiations with the canonical tradition of U.S. literature that emerges after World War II, there are within these two literatures, as we will see, dominant discourses associated with masculinity against which emergent discourses associated with feminism or queerness position themselves. My argument that Jewish American literature and African American literature should not be regarded as emergent literatures in the period from 1968 to the beginning of the twenty-first century is an argument about the institutional standing of these literatures. It does not mean that a reader will not detect aspects that seem emergent within the writing, say, of Toni Morrison or Colson Whitehead. Indeed an awareness of the dynamics of dominant, residual, and emergent might enhance a reading of novels such as Morrison’s Paradise (1997) or Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999), and it might even serve as a productive way of understanding Whitehead’s writing as a response to Morrison’s dominance within the field of African American literature. My point, however, is that the literature with which both Morrison and Whitehead are primarily associated—African American literature—is no longer emergent during the period that is the subject of this book.
The emergent model thus helps us to gain a more subtle understanding of the ways in which texts and authors interact with one another and the ways in which bodies of literature are produced. The model encourages us to investigate the ways in which U.S. culture’s reception of previous texts by emergent authors influences the production and reception of future texts from emergent literary cultures. So, for example, it enables us to understand a moment, early in Tripmaster Monkey, when we find Wittman beginning his literary career by imitating the poetry of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Wittman writes poetry that sounds very “black.” For Wittman, blackness is a cultural template that signifies radicalism: revolutionary poetry, he believes, should sound like Jones’s poetry. Tripmaster Monkey is in part about how Wittman learns to leave the template behind and create something new.21
In addition to helping us to conceptualize the strategies used by these literatures to gain audiences during the mid-twentieth century, the emergent model also gives us a way of understanding developmental inequalities among the literatures that are produced by different cultural traditions. It helps to explain, for example, why in the mid-1980s a progressive approach to American prose fiction after 1940 would immediately identify the contributions of African American writers and women writers, but neglect Native American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and gay and lesbian writers.22 In The Disuniting of America, a critique of multiculturalism first published in 1991, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., argues that “twelve percent of Americans are black” and the “pressure to correct injustices of past scholarship comes mostly on their behalf.” This assertion became the foundation for Nathan Glazer’s argument in We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1997) that African Americans played a decisive role in the victory of multiculturalism during the so-called “culture wars” of the 1980s: “blacks are the storm troops in the battles over multiculturalism…. [T]heir claim that they must play a larger role in the teaching of American literature and history, indeed should serve to reshape these subjects, has a far greater authority and weight than that of any other group.” As a result, Glazer suggests, “we all now accept a greater degree of attention to minorities and women and their role in American history and social studies and literature classes in schools.” And, although Glazer regards the presence of women’s studies within multiculturalism as counterintuitive, he makes the historical argument that at the moment that women’s studies came to prominence as a field of scholarly inquiry, “both women’s studies and the new ethnic and racial studies could trace a common history, arising in the same decades, drawing on similar resentments, and a common new awareness of inequality.” Indeed, Glazer argues, the field of women’s studies has become “so large a part” of multiculturalism “that it often outweighs the rest.”23
The concept of the emergent, however, draws our attention to those groups that have played a less prominent role in the rise of multiculturalism. If multiculturalism often boils down, as Glazer suggests, to the “universalistic demand” that “all groups should be recognized,” he notes that some groups “have fallen below the horizon of attention.”24 The concept of the emergent refocuses our attention on precisely those groups that struggled for notice even as African American studies and women’s studies established themselves as legitimate academic fields. It enables us to identify a set of literatures that are fighting for canonical notice even as they are engaged in critique of the prevailing conceptions of what constitutes “American Literature.”
The emergent thus gives us a model with which to discuss the relationship between mainstream U.S. culture and those practices that it deems “deviant.” It points us to the structural similarities between U.S. ethnic writing and the writing of gay and lesbian Americans. The experience of being in the closet—an abiding subject for gay and lesbian writing—is akin to the feeling of being caught between cultures that ethnic Americans undergo when they are encouraged to dehyphenate themselves. Mainstream U.S. culture fosters an oppositional relationship with gay culture by luring