American Literature and Post-colonial Theory

273 Pages·2008·0.89 MB·English

by  Madsen, Deborah L.

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Beyond the Borders
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Beyond the Borders
American Literature and
Post-colonial Theory
Edited by
Deborah L. Madsen
P
Pluto Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
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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
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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
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Contents
Introduction: American Literature and Post-colonial Theory 1
Part 1 Ethnic Literature and Post-colonialism
1. Indigenous Literatures and Postcolonial Theories:
Reading from Comparative Frames 15
Chadwick Allen
Part 2 Post-colonialism at Home
2. “Going Into a Whole Different Country”:
Postcolonial “Nation”-hood in Native American Literature 31
Lee Schweninger and Cara Cilano
3. Origin Story: On Being a White Native American(ist) 51
John Hunt Peacock, Jr.
4. Counter-Discursive Strategies in Contemporary
Chicana Writing 65
Deborah L. Madsen
5. “At Least One Negro Everywhere”: African American
Travel Writing 77
Alasdair Pettinger
6. Unsettling Asian American Literature: When More
than America is in the Heart 92
Rajini Srikanth
7. Forging a Postcolonial Identity: Women of Chinese
Ancestry Writing in English 111
Mary Condé
8. Border Crossings: Filipino American Literature in
the United States 122
Angela Noelle Williams
9. Reading the Literatures of Hawai’i Under an
“Americanist” Rubric 135
Paul Lyons
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vi Beyond the Borders
Part 3 Post-colonialism in the Border Regions
10. Writing Migrations: The Place(s) of U.S. Puerto Rican
Literature 151
Frances R. Aparicio
11. Diasporic Disconnections: Insurrection and Forgetfulness
in Contemporary Haitian and Latin-Caribbean Women’s
Literature 167
Myriam J. A. Chancy
12. Reclaiming Maps and Metaphors: Canadian First
Nations and Narratives of Place 184
Richard J. Lane
13. Thomas King and Contemporary Indigenous Identities 195
Laura Peters
Part 4 American Post-colonialism at Home and Abroad
14. Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Literature in a
Postcolonial Context 209
Renny Christopher
15. Politics, Pleasure, and Intertextuality in
Contemporary Southeast Asian Women’s Writing 222
Julie Shackford-Bradley
16. U.S. and US: American Literatures of Immigration
and Assimilation 238
Geraldine Stoneham
List of Contributors 249
Index 253
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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
1
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2 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.
Thiscollectionofessaysworksfromthepremisethattheethnicvariety
ofthecontemporaryUnitedStatescallsforaredefinitionofinherited
notions of “American identity”. Post-colonial theory is the tool that
enablestheculturalstudyofareformulatedidentity.Thequestioning
ofAmericanculturalidentitytakestwoforms:ontheonehand,essays
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Introduction 3
explorehowthemultiethnicnatureoftheUnitedStatesimpingesupon
writingbymemberswhoself-identifywithAmericanethnicminorities
(Native American, Chicano/a, Latino/a, Black, Asian American,
Hawaiian),whileotheressaysexplorehowtheliteraturesofwhatmight
be broadly conceived as “border” regions (the Caribbean, Central
America,Canada)orliteraturesofregionsinwhichAmericahashada
colonialimpact(particularlycountriesofSoutheastAsia)areinfluenced
bydefinitionsof“America”thatcarryaheavycolonialinflection.
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