The idea of the emergent also focuses attention on a change in attitude that occurred in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. No longer is “assimilation” the abiding goal of those who write from the cultural margins. “America was multiethnic from the start,” writes Schlesinger in The Disuniting of America, and he argues that
the United States had a brilliant solution for the inherent fragility, the inherent combustibility, of a multiethnic society: the creation of a brand-new national identity by individuals who, in forsaking old loyalties and joining to make new lives, melted away ethnic differences—a national identity that absorbs and transcends the diverse ethnicities that come to our shore, ethnicities that enrich and reshape the common culture in the very act of entering into it.
Schlesinger cites Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s remark in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) that “the American is a new man, who acts upon new principles.… Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men”—an early formulation of the idea of the melting pot. Schlesinger laments the loss of the melting pot ideal, even as he recognizes that “the United States [never] fulfilled Crèvecoeur’s standard…. For a long time the Anglo-Americans dominated American culture and politics and excluded those who arrived after them…. We must face the shameful fact: historically America has been a racist nation.”26 Glazer notes that “assimilation today is not a popular term…. The ‘melting pot’ is no longer a uniformly praised metaphor for American society, as it once was. It suggests too much a forced conformity and reminds people today not of the welcome in American society to so many groups and races but rather of American society’s demands on those it allows to enter.”27 Rather than a cultural stew whose flavor is constantly changing as immigrants add new ingredients to the mix, the melting pot became a metaphor for homogenization.
In 1915, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in which he debunked the idea of the “hyphenated American”:
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.28
Roosevelt was speaking after the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, and his concern was with those American citizens who might “vote as a German-American, an Irish-American, or an English-American”—who might vote, in other words, in a way that puts the interests of some other nation ahead of those of the United States.29 Many Americans neglected or refused to make Roosevelt’s distinction between the “naturalized American” and the “hyphenated American,” assuming that it was impossible for any immigrants to become truly naturalized.
Ethnic writers of the early part of the twentieth century often sought to understand and represent the ways in which they and those like them were portrayed as different, incomprehensible, inscrutable, and uncivilized—in short, portrayed as “others” who could not be assimilated. They sought a solution to what I call the impasse of hyphenation, the idea that the American who belongs to a minority group is caught between two incompatible identities, the minority (Jewish, Italian, Irish, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native, etc.) and the majority (“American”). The writer Frank Chin called this, in the Asian American context, the “dual personality,” as if somehow all Asian Americans were split down the middle and made schizophrenic by U.S. culture.30 Identity thus becomes a matter of either/or: either “American” or whatever it is that precedes the hyphen.
Emergent writers think of themselves differently. They realize that they are writing from the margins of U.S. culture, but feel themselves to be sufficiently empowered to offer a challenge to the center. Their goal is not to enter the mainstream but to divert and transform it: they seek to add their own distinctiveness to the stew of U.S. culture in such a way that the flavor of the stew is altered. For example, like earlier Asian American writing, such as Sui Sin Far’s story “The Wisdom of the New” (1912) or John Okada’s novel No-No Boy (1957), Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey registers the pain of being caught between two cultures. But Wittman Ah Sing is not interested in kowtowing to mainstream attitudes about either identity or art. Instead, he wants to define an identity for himself that can truly be called “Chinese American,” an identity in which the “Chinese” is no longer marginalized by the “American.” No longer would the phrase “Chinese American” be some kind of oxymoron: it would simply be another way of talking about the “American.” The idea of the emergent highlights the fact that U.S. ethnic writing has become less interested in strategies of assimilation than in strategies of negotiation, which offer a solution to the impasse of hyphenation: they embrace the idea of hybridity, dramatizing the idea that all American identities are hybrid—and always have been.
With its emphasis on practices that are produced by cultural groups, the idea of the emergent helps us to gain insight into one subject of these negotiations between margin and center, namely the relationship between the universal and the particular in U.S. writing. Emergent ethnic writers no longer accept without question the universalizing logic of individualism that lies at the heart of U.S. liberal culture. This logic is based upon what political theorists call ontological individualism, the belief that the individual has an a priori and primary reality and that society is a derived, second-order construct. From Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth century to John Rawls in the twentieth, U.S. theorists of individualism have typically sought to shift the ground of inquiry from culture and society to the individual, translating moments of social choice into moments of individual choice. This strategy is a literal application of the motto e pluribus unum—“from many, one”—which expresses the idea that the United States is nation formed through the union of many individuals. In the hands of thinkers like Emerson and Rawls, the customary sense of this motto is reversed: they move from the many to the one, to the single individual, paring away differences in order to reach a common denominator that will allow them to make claims about all individuals.31
Thus Emerson writes about “the soul” in essays like “The American Scholar” (1837) or “Self-Reliance” (1841), and once he has established that every person has a fundamental equality in the soul, he begins to make universalist generalizations about all human beings. Emerson, in other words, doesn’t ignore social questions, but rather he recasts them as questions of individual choice, using the soul as his point of entry. Likewise Rawls reinvents contract theory to create what he calls “the original position of equality,” a thought experiment in which each participant knows that he or she will live in a society in which there are going to be inequalities—of class, race, gender, talent, intelligence, hair color, wealth—but is unaware of how he or she will be marked by those inequalities. From behind what Rawls refers to as “the veil of ignorance,” the Rawlsian individual thus argues with others about how to construct the best society, without knowing what attributes he or she will have once that society comes into being. The original position, however, is in fact a rigged game, because Rawls believes that in the end an individual would choose only one kind of society: namely, a society in which the lot of the least well-off is maximized. Confronted with the possibility that he or she might end up at the very bottom of society, each individual would choose to create a society in which that bottom is not as bad as it would be in other societies. One might choose, for example, a non-slave state instead of a slave state, because the person who is worst-off in a non-slave state would still not be a slave. For Rawls, the original position is ultimately reducible to one set of arguments: he believes that every single individual, if he or she were rational, would choose in the same way. That is his way of shifting the ground to the individual.32
Aware that mainstream U.S. culture has a large stake in preserving