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negotiating the american century

american literature since 1945

Towards a Transnational Nation

Americans ended the decade of the 1930s in an inward-looking mood, concerned with economic issues, unemployment and the need to heal internal ideological divisions. By the close of the Second World War, however, that mood had changed. The United States had become a global superpower, committed to the international arena. In the new era of postwar, postcolonial politics, it had come to stand for the ‘American’ way of capitalism, individualism and the open market: opposed in every respect to the ‘Russian’ or ‘Communist’ way of collectivism and the organized economy. A war machine that had managed to treble munitions production in 1941 continued, if in a slightly lower gear. The cessation of conflict did not mean an end to arms production, now that the United States discovered a new threat in international socialism, and the next decade or so saw the rapid expansion of what one president was to term ‘the military-industrial complex’: a compact between military interests, eager to acquire ever newer and more powerful armaments, and industrial interests, just as eager to produce them, that was to prove satisfactory and very profitable to both. At the same time, the manufacturing industries catering to more peaceful demands began to expand rapidly. Construction boomed; the demand for the consumer durables of modern mass society – cars, television sets, refrigerators – grew among people suddenly released from the constraints of war; and unemployment only rose a little above the all-time low of 1.2 per cent created by a war economy. The only nation to emerge from the Second World War with its manufacturing plant intact and its economy strengthened, America presented itself to the rest of the world – and, in particular, to Europe – as an economic miracle. In 1949, the per capita income of the United States was twice that of Britain, three times that of France, five times that of Germany and seven times that of Russia. It had only 6 per cent of the world’s population: yet it consumed 40 per cent of the world’s energy, 60 per cent of its automobiles, 80 per cent of its refrigerators and nearly 100 per cent of its televisions. This, evidently, was the

society of abundance, appearing to prove the claim of an earlier president, Calvin Coolidge, that the business of America was business.

The business of America was also, perhaps, to dictate the terms of modern culture, at least to its Western allies, and to other parts of the globe where it claimed a right of intervention and control. As the 1940s passed into the 1950s, America seemed to set the style in everything, from high art to advanced technology to popular culture. In Eisenhower, the president from 1952 to 1960, Americans also had someone at the head of state whose main aim seemed to be to preserve this economic abundance and cultural hegemony through a strategy of masterly inactivity. Gone were the frenetic commitments of the New Deal; and in their place was an administration that appeared intent on stopping things happening – on maintaining equilibrium by vetoing any legislation that seemed likely to promote radical change. To some commentators, it looked like a case of the bland leading the bland. Like Ronald Reagan thirty years later, Eisenhower made a dramatic exhibition of not working too hard; as he apparently saw it, his job as president was to leave Americans alone to go about their business, and to discourage the state from any interference in the day-to-day life of the individual. If self-help was to be encouraged, then citizens had to be left to themselves: to work hard and then to enjoy the material comforts thereby earned. ‘These are the tranquillized Fifties,’ observed the poet Robert Lowell; and for many Americans they were – a period when, after several decades of crisis, it was evidently possible to enjoy the fruits of their labour and exploitation of the earth’s natural resources without any fear that, some day, those resources might run out. Many intellectuals and artists – although by no means all of them – participated in this era of consensus. This was the period of so-called ‘value-free’ sociology; much of the liberal intelligentsia acted on the assumption that it was possible to exercise the critical function untouched by social or political problems; and many writers withdrew from active involvement in issues of public concern or ideology into formalism, abstraction or mythmaking. One notable dissenter, Irving Howe (1920–93), complained about this in an essay appropriately entitled ‘This Age of Conformity’ (1952). ‘Far from creating and subsidising unrest,’ Howe observed, ‘capitalism in its most recent stage has found an honoured place for the intellectuals; and the intellectuals, far from thinking of themselves as a desperate “opposition”, have been enjoying a return to the bosom of the nation.’ He concluded: ‘We have all, even the handful who still try to retain a glower of criticism, become responsible and moderate. And tame.’

No consensus, however, is quite as complete as it seems, just as no society – not even the most totalitarian one – is without its areas of dissent. Abundance breeds its own anxieties, not least the fear of losing the comforts one enjoys; in many ways, the calm society is the one most susceptible to sudden, radical fits of panic. This uneasiness that hovered beneath the bland surfaces of the times found its outlet in many forms. In popular culture, for instance, it was expressed in a series of ‘invaders from space’ movies that uncovered a dark vein of public paranoia about the possible arrival of hostile forces, aliens who would rob Americans of their comforts and complacency. In literature, related insecurities issued in a

preoccupation with evil, the possible eruption of weariness, guilt and remorse, into the rhythms of routine experience. In this respect, there was an almost willed dimension to the formalism of so many writers of the 1950s: it was as if, like their fellow Americans (although, obviously, in a far more self-conscious and articulate way), they were trying to contain their anxiety by channelling it into socially established and accepted structures. And in the political life of the period, in turn, perhaps the most significant expression of this fear of invasion, subversion or even destruction by covert agencies was the phenomenon known as McCarthyism. Joseph McCarthy was a young senator from Wisconsin who had a self-appointed mission to wage war on anything he saw as Communist subversion. Exploiting his position on the Un-American Activities Committee, playing on popular anxieties about the growing power of Russia and the possible presence of an ‘enemy within’, he embarked on a modern-day witch-hunt, the result of which was that many people were sacked from their jobs and blacklisted on the mere suspicion of belonging to the Communist Party. Guilt was established by smear; loss of job followed on false witness; and a cast of characters that included Hollywood scriptwriters, intellectuals and academics suddenly found themselves the subject of vicious public abuse. McCarthy declared that he was engaged in a battle that could not be ended ‘except in victory or death for this civilization’; and, during the period when he flourished, he managed to convince many Americans that the preservation of their material wealth and social health depended upon his rooting out enemies of the people wherever he could find or invent them.

One crucial fear that McCarthy exploited was the fear of the betrayal of atomic secrets. America had unleashed strange and terrible forces when it dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb cast its shadow over the immediate postwar decades, just as it has done ever since; and the discovery that certain people in the United States, Canada and Britain had passed atomic secrets to the Russians, who could now explode nuclear weapons of their own, clearly exacerbated public anxieties about hidden enemies and conspiracies, and made it that much easier for McCarthy and his committee to flourish. Fear of the potential nuclear capability of the enemy, allied to this suspicion of a powerful enemy within, also increased the tensions of what Winston Churchill christened ‘the Cold War’: that policy of brinkmanship between the United States and Russia, their respective satellite states and allies, that was based on the premise that the two superpowers were engaged in a life-or-death struggle for global supremacy. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, talked of ‘the liberation of captive peoples’ and the possibility of turning back the Communist tide. His vice-president, Richard Nixon, who had first come to public attention while serving on the Un-American Activities Committee, announced that there would be no relaxation in the drive to root suspected subversives out of public service. And even Eisenhower himself, despite his evident mildness of manner, promised the American electorate, ‘We will find out the pinks, we will find the Communists, we will find the disloyal’. The Red scare of the Eisenhower years was more than just a useful weapon in the hands of certain ambitious politicians, helping to generate policies of confrontation and

containment. It was a clear symptom of the uneasiness, the nightmarish fears that haunted Americans at the time, despite their apparent satisfaction with themselves. There was abundance and some complacency, certainly, but there was also a scarcely repressed imagination of disaster fuelled by the threat of nuclear war.

By the late 1950s, this threat – and, more specifically, the bomb that embodied it

–had become a potent symbol for the destructive potential of the new society: the dark side of those forces that had created apparently limitless wealth. Everywhere in the culture there were signs of revolt, as the fears and phobias that had been lurking just below the ‘tranquillized’ surfaces of middle America began to bubble to the top. There was a renewed spirit of rebelliousness, opposition to a social and economic order that had produced abundance, admittedly, but had also produced the possibility of global death. In music, the emergence of rock and roll, derived mainly from black musical forms, signalled a reluctance to accept the consensual mores, and the blandness, of white middle-class America: which is why, until they were absorbed into the mainstream, performers like Elvis Presley were perceived by political and religious leaders as such a potent threat, offering a gesture of defiance to ‘civilized standards’. In the movies, similarly, new heroes appeared dramatizing an oppositional stance to the dominant culture: James Dean, in films like Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Marlon Brando in, say, The Wild One (1953), seemed living monuments to the new spirit of alienation. And in literature, too, there were analogous developments. Two key fictional texts of the period were The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Radically dissimilar as these two books were, they had in common heroes at odds with modern urban-technological life: outsiders who moved between fragile mysticism and outright disaffiliation in their search for an alternative to the orthodox culture. They were willing, in effect, to say no, in thunder, just as earlier American heroes had been. This was also true of many writers of the period, who bore witness to a gradual slipping away from the formalism and abstraction – and, to some extent, the conformism – of the postwar years and towards renewed feelings of freedom, individualism and commitment. Recovering the impulse towards the personal, sometimes to the point of the confessional, and the urge towards an individual, perhaps even idiosyncratic beat, they gave voice to a growing sense of resistance to the social norms. Reinventing the old American allegiance to the rebellious self, and weaving together personal and historical traumas, they sought in their line and language for a road to liberation, a way of realizing their fundamental estrangement. No cultural development is seamless, of course, and it would be wrong to suggest that the story of the first two decades after the Second World War is one simply of abundance and anxiety merging into revolt and repudiation of fixed forms. But, in terms of a general bias of direction or tendency, this was the way that many American writers moved, along with their fellow Americans, as they saw one president, Eisenhower, who seemed ‘pretty much for mother, home, and heaven’, succeeded by another, Kennedy, who preferred to talk in terms of ‘a new generation of Americans’ ‘tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace’

–‘unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which

this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world’.

President John F. Kennedy spoke in these terms at his Inauguration in January 1961. He had won the election by only the narrowest of margins. But, once elected, he brought with him to office the expectation of great change, an optimism and confidence about the character of the United States and its role in the world that many Americans were eager to share. His words were ambiguous, to say the least. Did they anticipate the elimination of poverty and inequality or a renewed aggressiveness in foreign policy – or perhaps both? Despite this, or maybe even because of it, they struck a responsive chord in the heart of the nation. ‘We stand today on the edge of a new frontier,’ Kennedy declared, ‘a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils. . . . I am asking each of you to be pioneers on that New Frontier.’ The appeal to the apparently timeless myth of the West, pioneering and conquest, was echoed in the words of Robert Frost at the Inaugural. Frost had been invited to the ceremony as America’s unofficial poet laureate, and as an emblem of Kennedy’s belief that he could, among many other things, preside over a revitalization of the nation’s cultural life. Eighty-six years old now, he recited from memory his poem ‘The Gift Outright’: ‘This land was ours before we were the land’s, /’ the poem begins. ‘She was our land more than a hundred years / Before we were her people.’ Going on to ‘the land vaguely realising westward, / But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced’, the poem, just like the speech, captures a dominant feeling of the time. It captures the confidence, the ambition, the sense of potential and the arrogance of a ‘new generation of Americans’, and weds all this to the ideology of a long-vanished frontier.

The America to and of which both poet and president spoke was a constellation of many new attitudes and forces: a nation of 180 million people, a growing number of whom were white suburbanites living in quiet comfort on the edge of the older, urban areas, buying their goods in out-of-town shopping malls and working in white-collar service-sector industries. Nine out of ten families, by this time, owned a television, and six out of ten of them a car. The gross national product seemed to move inexorably upward, from $285 billion in 1950 to $503 billion in 1960, and so too did the population index: during the 1950s, the population had risen by 18.5 per cent. Most of this increase was due to the rapid rise in the birth rate and a prolonged life expectancy rather than to immigration; and the result was that nearly half of the population was either under eighteen or over sixty-five, too young or too old to participate in the economic life of the nation. To those excluded by youth or age from full participation in the nation’s growing wealth could be added those excluded by race or situation: fruitpickers in California, say, black sharecroppers in the South, and the different ethnic groups comprising the urban poor. While the income of middle-class Americans of working age continued to improve, that of the bottom 20 per cent showed hardly any advance at all. There was conspicuous abundance, certainly, but there was equally conspicuous poverty: the rhetoric of the president possibly acknowledged this but it tended to be forgotten amidst the general euphoria, the sense of irresistible expansion and movement

forwards towards a ‘New Frontier’. And it was only in the later 1960s that the seeds of discontent and dissension sowed by this conspicuous contrast between haves and have-nots began to be harvested.

In the meantime, in the early 1960s, optimism and the promise of adventure were in the air. Responding to the sense of new frontiers to be conquered, many artists of the period, of every kind, were notable for their willingness to experiment, to confront and even challenge cultural and social norms. A decade is, of course, an artificial measure and, in this respect as in most others, ‘the Sixties’ had really begun in the middle to late 1950s: when the popular arts were revivified by a new sense of energy and power, and a lively avant-garde embarked on challenging conventional norms and forms. Happenings, festivals, multimedia performances became commonplace events. Readings of poetry and prose, often to jazz accompaniment, attracted dedicated audiences. There was a sense of risk, of venturing beyond the formalism, the preoccupation with craftsmanship of earlier decades. Writing became more open, rawer, alert to the possibility of change and the inclusion of random factors. There was a renewed emphasis on chance, difference, impermanency, a new willingness to see the new artistic object as a shifting, discontinuous, part of the flux and variety of things. Modernism was, in effect, shading into postmodernism, with its resistance to finality or closure, to distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, to grand explanations and master narratives – and to the belief that there is one, major or monolithic truth to be apprehended in art. With its preference for suspended judgements, its disbelief in hierarchies, mistrust of solutions, denouements and completions, the postmodernist impulse was a characteristic product of these times. It encouraged forms of writing that thrived on the edge, that denied the authoritative in favour of the arbitrary and posited a random, unstructured world as well as an equally random, unstructured art. This was a different kind of new frontier, perhaps, from the one Kennedy anticipated. But it tapped a similar excitement: ‘this country might have / been a pio / neer land, once,’ declared the black poet Sonia Sanchez, ‘and it still is.’

If one growing tendency of American writing of the 1960s and later was towards postmodernism, another was towards the political. Nowhere was this more notable than among African American writers, like Sanchez. The Black Arts movement, in particular, reacted to calls for ‘black power’ and a new feeling of racial pride captured in the slogan ‘black is beautiful’. Its attempt to define a ‘black aesthetic’, what it meant to be a specifically black writer, encouraged analogous developments among other ethnic minorities and among women of all races. In conferences and workshops, like the Second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in 1967, critics and writers worked with the issues of how literature might properly express and promote political causes. ‘The Black Arts and the Black Power concept’, Larry Neal (1937–81) wrote at the beginning of his essay ‘The Black Arts Movement’ (1968), ‘both relate broadly to the African American’s desire for selfdetermination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic.’ And, just as African American writers became intent on explaining and expressing their solidarity with their black brothers and sisters – the urban poor and dispossessed, the people of

the newly independent African nations – so women writers, many of them, expressed a commitment to new forms of feminism. ‘We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says, “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home”,’ wrote Betty Friedan (1921– ) in The Feminine Mystique (1963). Following on from her, there was an exponential increase in writing about experiences and issues that vitally affected women – women’s sexuality, the ‘feminine’ role, childbirth, domestic politics, lesbianism – and a steady development of feminist criticism and theory, social history and aesthetics. Not long after The Feminine Mystique was published, in 1965, Luis Valdez (1940– ) combined Mexican American literature with political purpose when he joined with the farmworkers’ union, led by César Chavez, to form El Theatre Campesino. This theatre company mixed traditional Spanish and Mexican dramatic forms with agit-prop techniques to create dramatic sketches in support of union issues. The publication of House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday in 1968, heralding the emergence of a major movement in Native American writing, coincided with an upsurge in Indian protest: the symbolic seizing of Alcatraz and later armed conflict on reservations that helped generate revisionist histories like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971) by Dee Brown (1908– ). Asian Americans, too, gradually asserted their presence, first male writers such as Louis Chu (Eat a Bowl of Tea) and then later female writers like Chuang Hua (Crossings). In these works, a similar confluence of the personal and political was perceptible: the lives of Chinese men, who have left their wives to search for a better existence in America (Eat a Bowl of Tea), the lives of women struggling with the racial and cultural constraints imposed on them by an ancient culture (Crossings).

The impulse towards more openly political forms of writing, and the postmodern inclination towards the absurd, both received a push from events that took place not long after President Kennedy took office. Indeed, if his Inauguration acted as a catalyst for the optimism of the early 1960s, then his assassination in Dallas in November 1963 served as a focus for energies of another kind. The belief in the possibility of radical change persisted but it was now continued within a harsher, more abrasive and confrontational sense of the social realities. The divisions and discontent that had always been there – in a society still painfully split between rich and poor, white and black, suburbanite and ghetto-dweller – now came to the surface; the violence that brought the president’s life to an end was echoed in the national life, at home and abroad. Of course, there was and is an honoured tradition of protest in American life, ever since the Puritan settlement, and a spirit of unease had been particularly notable in the culture since the late 1950s, symbolized by popular heroes like James Dean and poetic heroes like Allen Ginsberg. But now the protest became more widespread and exacerbated, and the uneasiness burgeoned into open revolt. The civil rights movement, for example, grew more militant. Instead of merely boycotting segregated businesses and services, black and white activists began to use them, challenging the authorities to enforce iniquitous segregationist laws. Confrontations occurred in several Southern townships, between civil rights workers and white authorities: in Little Rock, Arkansas, for instance, in

Selma, Alabama, and Oxford, Mississippi. In August 1963, there was a massive demonstration in Washington, DC, involving over a quarter of a million people, who heard Martin Luther King, the movement’s inspired leader, talk of his dream of a multiracial society. The demonstration was notably and triumphantly peaceful: but, in this respect, it marked the end of an era. Within a few years, King himself had been assassinated, and the ghettos of Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, Washington and many other cities were aflame. During the late 1960s, it seemed as if rioting in the streets of the cities had become an annual event, as black people expressed their anger with a social and economic order that tended to deprive them of their basic rights. At the same time, the nation’s universities were the scene of almost equally violent confrontations, as students expressed their resistance to local university authorities and the power of the state.

For university students, as for many other protest groups of the time, the central issue was the Vietnam War. In the summer of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson persuaded Congress to give him almost unlimited powers to wage war against what was perceived as the Communist threat from North Vietnam. American troops were committed to a massive land war against an indigenous guerrilla movement; the American military was involved in saturation bombing and what was euphemistically known as ‘defoliation’ – that is, destruction of the forests, the vegetation and plant life of a country situated about 12,000 miles from Washington; and American policy was, effectively, to bleed the nation’s human and economic resources in support of what was little more than a puppet government in South Vietnam. By 1967, millions of Americans were beginning to feel that the war was not only useless but obscene, and took to the streets in protest: these included novelists like Norman Mailer and poets like Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. Simultaneously with this, in response to what looked like the obscenity of the official culture, a vigorous alternative culture developed. Much of this alternative culture was specifically political in its direction. Young men burned their draft cards; and, when the Democratic Party met in Chicago in 1968 to nominate their candidate for president, young people upstaged the proceedings by engaging in pitched battles with the police in the streets. But much of it, too, had to do with styles of life and styles of art. Hair was worn unconventionally long, skirts unconventionally short; hallucinogenic drugs, psychedelic art, hugely amplified rock concerts all became part of an instinctive strategy for challenging standard versions of social reality, accepted notions of behaviour and gender. The analytical mode was supplanted by the expressive, the intellectual by the imaginative; artists as a whole went even further towards embracing a sense of the provisional, a fluid, unstructured reality; and artistic eclecticism became the norm, as writers in general hit upon unexpected aesthetic mixtures – mingling fantasy and commitment, myth and social protest, high and popular art.

One of the paradoxes of the year 1968 was that it witnessed alternative culture at its zenith and the election of Richard Nixon, self-proclaimed spokesman for the ‘silent majority’ of white middle-class Americans, to the office of president. To the extent that ‘the Sixties’ have become a convenient label for a particular frame of

mind – radical, experimental, subversive and even confrontational – they did not end in 1970 any more than they began in 1960. Many aspects of the alternative culture survived well into the next decade; and some, like the feminist and ecological movements, effectively became part of the cultural mainstream. Nevertheless, the election of such an un-alternative, un-radical president as Nixon, and his reelection in 1972, did signal a shift in the national mood that was gradually confirmed in the 1970s and beyond. The Vietnam War was brought to an ignominious end, removing one of the major sources of confrontation and revolt. Black Americans remained economically dispossessed, but the civil rights movement did increase their electoral power, and so gave them the opportunity of expressing their dissatisfaction through the ballot-box rather than by taking to the streets. The children of the postwar ‘baby boom’, who had fuelled the fires of apparent revolution, began to enter the workforce and take on the responsibilities of jobs, homes and families. And, while the United States continued to prosper – the gross national product had risen to $974 billion in 1970 – there were worrying signs of possible economic crisis. Inflation was worse than in most Western European countries; the balance of payments deficit began to grow to frightening proportions; while the dollar steadily lost its purchasing power. As the economic situation grew harsher, especially after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, more and more Americans narrowed their horizons, devoting their attention and energies to the accumulation and preservation of personal wealth. One commentator christened the 1970s ‘the me decade’; another referred to the culture of narcissism. And these significant tendencies did not alter with the resignation of Nixon. First Gerald Ford, and then later Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, offered distinct alternatives to the radicalism of the 1960s. With Carter, for instance, there was a new emphasis on the limits to growth and power and a new, introspective moralism: ‘Your strength’, he told the American public at his Inauguration in 1977, ‘can compensate for my weakness, and your wisdom can minimize my mistakes.’ The rhetoric of Reagan might have sounded similar, at times, to that of Kennedy: when, for instance, he talked about building a shining city upon a hill or declared that the best years of America were yet to come. But this rhetoric occurred within structures of belief and assumptions that were quite different from those of the assassinated president. For Reagan, the crucial appeal was to the past, the mythical American past of stable, familial and to an extent pastoral values that, as he saw it, it was the duty of Americans to recover; and to this predominantly backward-looking impulse was added a strong sense of personal responsibility, a feeling that each American should look after himself or herself, which found little room for accommodating the communal vision of an earlier decade.

Reagan might have appealed to the past. Later, in the 1990s, Bill Clinton might have tried to claim some of the spirit of the 1960s for himself, with his talk of being part of a raw, new postwar generation, his declaration of belief in a place called Hope, and, not least, his use of an old movie showing him, as a boy, shaking hands with John Kennedy. The two President George Bushes, father and son, might suggest in turn a warier, more combative and conservative America. What all these

presidents have in common, however, is what they have presided over: a dissolution of the old social and cultural markers. Many of the great nation-states have disintegrated, notably, that sinister other of Cold War America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Along with them the great narratives, the metanarratives used once to explain historical movement, have lost plausibility. The myth of Plymouth Rock, for example, of America as the exclusive domain for Europeans seeking religious and political freedom has far less resonance in a world characterized by transnational drift and an American nation that is more than ever multicultural. So does the classic iconography of the United States as a melting pot, in which all cultures, all nationalities, are resolving into one. Which brings in the most significant series of markers that have now disappeared. American popular culture has become internationally dominant. In the global marketplace, it is America that is the biggest item on sale. In a postcolonial world, our imaginations have been colonized by the United States. At the same time, and crucially, the United States itself has been internationalized. It has become not a melting pot but a mosaic of different cultures, what one American writer, Ishmael Reed, has called ‘the first universal nation’.

‘The world is here,’ Reed declared in an essay called, appropriately enough, ‘America: The Multinational Society’ (1988). And the world is there, in the United States, for these seminal reasons. In the first place, particular ethnic groups that have been there for centuries have gained in presence and prominence. The National Census of 1990, for instance, reported 1,959,234 Native Americans living in a total population of over 248 million Americans. This figure was an almost fourfold increase on the number of 523,591 Native Americans reported in the 1960 Census, which in turn built upon the population nadir of around 250,000 in 1900. The huge rise in the Native American population was attributable to a consistently high birth rate, and improved medical care, but also to the increased number of people who claimed Native American ancestry. Whether or not, as some cultural commentators have claimed, ethnicity is a matter of consciousness rather than cultural difference, it is clear that the consciousness of ethnicity has secured the status and significance of certain ethnic groups in the United States. Many more Americans are proud, eager, to define themselves as Native American. Many Mexican Americans, in turn, have lived in a cultural borderlands for two centuries, what they call la frontera, thanks to Spanish conquest and then American annexation. In his novel Becky and Her Friends (1990), for example, the Mexican American novelist Rolando Hinojosa records of one of his characters that she ‘was born a Spanish subject in 1814; at age ten she was a Mexican citizen; by the summer of 1836, she was a Texan. Later, in 1845, an American when Texas was annexed that December 21st.’ And their numbers have steadily grown, thanks not only to natural increase but to waves of immigration, especially during and after the Second World War. Along with certain other ethnic groups, notably those from Cuba, Dominica and Puerto Rico, Mexican Americans have effected a sea change in American culture and transformed the demographic destiny of the nation. So much so that, in 1997, the Census Bureau calculated that by 2050 Hispanics

would account for nearly one in four of the American population: 96 million in a total of 393 million.

‘American literature, especially in the twentieth century, and notably in the last twenty years,’ Toni Morrison wrote in 1992, ‘has been shaped by its encounter with the immigrant.’ Which leads to the second seminal reason why the United States has become ‘the first universal nation’. Along with immigrants from the Hispanic world, those from the third world generally have been changing the character and destiny of the United States, especially after legislation in the 1960s first abolished national-origin quotas (which tended to favour Northern Europeans) and then expanded immigration from countries such as China and India. Almost nine million legal immigrants came to America during the 1980s, along with two million undocumented immigrants. They accounted for 29 per cent of the population growth from 226.5 million to 248.7 million during the decade. From 1990 to 1997, another seven and a half million foreign-born individuals entered the United States legally, accounting for 29.2 per cent of the population. By the middle of the twenty-first century, it has been calculated, ‘non-white’ and third world ethnic groups will outnumber whites in the United States. And the ‘average’ American resident will trace his or her ancestry to Asia, Africa, some part of the Hispanic world, the Pacific Islands, Arabia – almost anywhere but white Europe. Revealing the central dynamic of Western, and in some sense global, life today, which is marked by the powerful shaping force of shifting, multicultural populations, America has witnessed the disappearance of the boundary between the ‘centre’ and the ‘margins’. And with white Americans moving, it seems, inexorably into a minority, it has lost any claim it may have had, or any pretence of one, to a Eurocentric character and an exclusive destiny.

The consequences of all this for literature in America are debatable. Given that writers are responding on some level to their own unique encounters with history, they are in any event not easy, perhaps impossible, to summarize. For some, there has been a notable shift away from public affairs and commitment and towards introspection, the cult of the personal. Writers, quite a few of them, have turned away from immediate history, the pressures of the times, and devoted their imaginations to the vagaries of consciousness, the deeper forms of myth, ritual and fantasy, the imagery figured and the language articulated by the isolated mind. For others, particularly many women writers and writers from ‘ethnic’ or ‘non-white’ cultures, the engagement with history remains pressing, even painful: although the terms in which that engagement is expressed may vary from the literal, the direct, as in the New Journalism and forms of social realism, to the resonantly abstract, the figurative or the archaic. Writers may devote themselves, say, to the interrogation and alteration of verbal structures, in the belief that what we see and think is shaped by such structures; our social life being grounded in language, in order to change society it is language that must be changed. Or they may respond to what Clifford Geertz has called ‘the international hodgepodge of postmodern culture’ by creating an art of palpable discontinuity, yoking together wildly incongruous elements, mixing voices and genres, pursuing the inconsistent, the divergent and