Beyond the Borders

Description

This book challenges the boundaries of postcolonial theory. Focusing on American literature, it examines how America's own imperial history has shaped the literature that has emerged from America, from Native American, Latino, Black and Asian-American writers. They contrast this with postcolonial literature from countries whose history has been shaped by American colonialism, from Canada, Central America and the Caribbean to Hawaii, Indonesia and Vietnam.



It explores questions about national identity and multiculturalism: why, for instance, is a Native writer categorised within 'American literature' if writing on one side of the border, but as 'Canadian' and 'postcolonial' if writing on the other?



This is a challenging collection that raises questions not only about the boundaries of postcolonial theory, but also about ethnicity and multiculturalism, and the impact of immigration and assimilation.
Introduction

ETHNIC LITERATURE AND POST-COLONIALISM

1. Indigenous Literatures and Postcolonial Theories: Reading from Comparative Frames

Chadwick Allen, Ohio State University

POST-COLONIALISM AT HOME

2. ‘Going Into a Whole Different Country’: Postcolonial ‘Nation’-hood in Native American Literature

Lee Schweninger and Cara Cilano, University of North Carolina, Wilmington

3. Origin Story: On Being a White Native American(ist)

John Peacock, Maryland Institute College of Art

4. Counter-Discursive Strategies in Contemporary Chicana Writing

Deborah L. Madsen, University of Geneva

5. ‘At Least One Negro Everywhere’: African American Travel Writing

Alasdair Pettinger

6. Unsettling Asian-American Literature: When More than America is in the Heart

Rajini Srikanth, University of Massachusetts, Boston

7. Forging a Postcolonial Identity: Women of Chinese Ancestry Writing in English

Mary Condé, Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London

8. Border Crossings: Filipino American Literature in the United States

Angela Noelle Williams, San Jose State University

9. Reading the Literatures of Hawai’i under an Americanist Rubric

Paul Lyons, University of Hawai’i—Manoa

POST-COLONIALISM IN THE BORDER REGIONS

10. Writing Migrations: The Place(s) of U.S. Puerto Rican Literature

Frances R. Aparicio, University of Illinois

11. Diasporic Disconnections: Insurrection and Forgetfulness in Contemporary Haitian and Latin-Caribbean Women’s Literature

Myriam J. A. Chancy, Arizona State University

12. Reclaiming Maps and Metaphors: Canadian First Nations and Narratives of Place

Richard J. Lane, University of Debrecen

13. Thomas King and Contemporary Indigenous Identities

Laura Peters, University of Surrey, Roehampton

AMERICAN POST-COLONIALISM AT HOME AND ABROAD

14. Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Literature in a Postcolonial Context

Renny Christopher, California State University, Channel Islands

15. Politics, Pleasure and Intertextuality in Contemporary Southeast Asian Women’s Writing

Julie Shackford-Bradley, California State University, Monterey Bay

16. U.S. and US: American Literatures of Immigration and Assimilation

Geraldine Stoneham, London South Bank University

Notes on Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Democracy

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 août 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849644860
• Langue: English

Extrait

Beyond the Borders

Beyond the Borders

American Literature and Postcolonial Theory

Edited by Deborah L. Madsen

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2003 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166-2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Deborah L. Madsen 2003

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 2046 5 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2045 7 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

Contents

Introduction: American Literature and Post-colonial Theory

Part 1 Ethnic Literature and Postcolonialism 1. Indigenous Literatures and Postcolonial Theories: Reading from Comparative Frames Chadwick Allen

Part 2 Postcolonialism at Home 2. “Going Into a Whole Different Country”: Postcolonial “Nation”-hood in Native American Literature Lee Schweninger and Cara Cilano 3. Origin Story: On Being a White Native American(ist) John Hunt Peacock, Jr. 4. Counter-Discursive Strategies in Contemporary Chicana Writing Deborah L. Madsen 5. “At Least One Negro Everywhere”: African American Travel Writing Alasdair Pettinger 6. Unsettling Asian American Literature: When More than America is in the Heart Rajini Srikanth 7. Forging a Postcolonial Identity: Women of Chinese Ancestry Writing in English Mary Condé 8. Border Crossings: Filipino American Literature in the United States Angela Noelle Williams 9. Reading the Literatures of Hawai’i Under an “Americanist” Rubric Paul Lyons

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Beyond the Borders

Part 3 Postcolonialism in the Border Regions 10. Writing Migrations: The Place(s) of U.S. Puerto Rican Literature Frances R. Aparicio 11. Diasporic Disconnections: Insurrection and Forgetfulness in Contemporary Haitian and Latin-Caribbean Women’s Literature Myriam J. A. Chancy 12. Reclaiming Maps and Metaphors: Canadian First Nations and Narratives of Place Richard J. Lane 13. Thomas King and Contemporary Indigenous Identities Laura Peters

Part 4 American Postcolonialism at Home and Abroad 14. Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Literature in a Postcolonial Context Renny Christopher 15. Politics, Pleasure, and Intertextuality in Contemporary Southeast Asian Women’s Writing Julie Shackford-Bradley 16. U.S. and US: American Literatures of Immigration and Assimilation Geraldine Stoneham

List of Contributors Index

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249 253

Introduction: American Literature and Post-colonial Theory

Deborah L. Madsen

Post-colonial theory provides a powerful approach to ethnic literatures of the United States and of those political regions significantly influenced by U.S. political or cultural imperialism, such as Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Southeast Asia, and areas of Central America such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The essays collected here use post-colonial theory as a powerful lens through which to read these diverse literatures and to question the constitution of national ethnic literatures. It is a diverse body of writing with which contributors engage; what draws these very different texts together is the way in which they owe much of their thematic shape to perceived tensions with the colonial power exerted by the U.S. In this introduction I attempt to explain these post- colonial commonalities, which bring together scholars of Vietnamese, Indonesian, Burmese-American, Filipino/a, Hawaiian, Asian American, African American, Puerto Rican, Haitian and Latin-Caribbean, Chicana, Native American and Canadian First Nations literatures. First, however, the uses of the term “post-colonial” in this book need clarification. The term has been employed in a range of diverse readings and interpreta- tions for the past two decades. Consequently, the term has accumulated meanings and associations. In this book, each contributor argues from their own perspective about what they call the “post-colonial”, calling upon those contexts that are most relevant to the body of literary work and the particular theoretical approaches they address. Some contrib- utors choose to hyphenate the term (post-colonial); others choose to elide the two parts of the term (postcolonial): each critic chooses to represent the term in the form that is most appropriate to the argument they are developing. A number of recurring post-colonial themes do emerge: displacement or diaspora, exile, migration, nationhood, and hybridity. While individual essays employ the concept of the post- colonial in quite specific ways, then, the collection as a whole uses the

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Beyond the Borders

term broadly, to encompass all the complex processes of colonization and decolonization. In the course of its varied history “post-colonialism” has acquired three primary meanings. First, post-colonialism refers historically to writings produced in a previously colonized nation after its independ- ence from colonial control. In this sense, all literature produced in the United States after the War of Independence could be called post- colonial. However, the colonial status of the Native American “nations” of the United States in the same period is much more difficult to con- ceptualize. Native American literatures of the United States and Canada could perhaps be better described as post-colonial in a second meaning of the term, where it is used to encompass the whole complex of historical and cultural processes, starting with the pre-colonial period and leading up through independence from colonial control to a state of decolonization. Post-colonialism in this second sense describes then four (often overlapping) phases: the pre-colonial, colonial, independ- ence, and de-colonized periods of a nation’s development. Contributors use this second meaning of post-colonialism to describe aspects of the Vietnamese, Indonesian, Burmese, Filipino/a, Hawaiian, Asian American, African American, Puerto Rican, Haitian and Latin-Caribbean, Chicana, Native American and Canadian experiences of colonialism. These experi- ences are very different and vary according to history and geography: many European powers held colonies in these places with a consequent diversity of cultural effects. For example, the island of Hispaniola, which is now divided into Haiti on the one side and the Dominican Republic on the other, has seen the impact of Spanish and French colonization, about which Latin-Caribbean Americans write from their perspective as migrants to the United States. Situations such as this open up a third meaning of “post-colonialism” that is used by contributors in this book. In this third sense, it is the critic, rather than the text or its author, who adopts a post-colonial perspective. This is most clearly the case in the essays written by John Peacock and Myriam Chancy, both of whom are concerned to analyze the ways in which their own post-colonial status, as members of colonized cultural groups (Native American and Haitian respectively), is inscribed in their practice as readers and writers, teachers and scholars of American literature. This collection of essays works from the premise that the ethnic variety of the contemporary United States calls for a redefinition of inherited notions of “American identity”. Post-colonial theory is the tool that enables the cultural study of a reformulated identity. The questioning of American cultural identity takes two forms: on the one hand, essays

Introduction

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explore how the multiethnic nature of the United States impinges upon writing by members who self-identify with American ethnic minorities (Native American, Chicano/a, Latino/a, Black, Asian American, Hawaiian), while other essays explore how the literatures of what might be broadly conceived as “border” regions (the Caribbean, Central America, Canada) or literatures of regions in which America has had a colonial impact (particularly countries of Southeast Asia) are influenced by definitions of “America” that carry a heavy colonial inflection. In the opening essay Chadwick Allen reviews strategies for reading contemporary indigenous literatures within the context of post- colonialism in order to conceptualize the United States as a site of ongoing colonialism vis-à-vis American Indian peoples. The larger com- parative frame he employs represents a movement from the colonial/post-colonial world safely “out there” toward the colonial/ post-colonial world unexpectedly “at home” in the U.S. He begins with representations of “classic” colonial and post-colonial situations in Africa, then moves to representations of settler colonization in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, and finally home to the complicated colonial/post- colonial situation of the U.S. A second comparative frame is created by juxtaposing texts produced by colonizers with texts produced by colonized or formerly colonized indigenous peoples. Third and fourth comparative frames arise as comparisons are made among different colonizers and among various indigenous peoples. An additional com- parative frame is engaged by comparing post-colonial theory’s abstractions of “the” colonial or post-colonial situation with specific rep- resentations by individual writers. From Allen’s discussion of the relationships among post-colonial African, indigenous Aotearoa/New Zealand and Native American liter- atures, we move to the post-colonial tensions that inform relations between Native America and the U.S. Issues of “nation” and nationhood, which are prominent in contemporary post-colonial literary studies, are taken up by Lee Schweninger and Cara Cilano, who address Native American literatures as “post-colonial”, in that a focus on “nation” emphasizes the consequences that resulted from Native American contact with the dominant U.S. In the context of post-colonial literary studies, there has been a preoccupation with nationhood in relation to globalization and its effects. This has given rise to debates over whether the “nation” is still a viable model of political and economic organiza- tion, and a foundation for unified cultural identities. Within Native American literary studies the concept of “nation” can be seen to signify a desire for autonomy, self-determination, and equality not unlike those