New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Fiction: Tan, Kingsolver, Castillo, Morrison

Introduction: Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 1 Introduction Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century he sheer volume of human beings migrating, individually or in groups, voluntarily or not, across national borders around the globe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first century has resulted in an incredible mixing of diverse peoples and cultures, which in turn has created both serious problems and potential for the future. The most serious negative consequences of such massive, ongoing migrations have included ethnic strife (to the point of ethnic cleansing at times), political and economic processes of class stratification and exclusion, diverse forms of racism, and intolerance with respect to religious and cultural practices that differ from those that dominate in any given nation or culture. However, more positive consequences are also emerging. Focusing specifically on the case of the United States, which continues to pride itself on its status as an immigrant nation, the racial demographics of the country are changing at such a rapid pace that whites will no longer be in the majority after the first few decades of the twenty-first century. Although this movement toward an increasingly diverse population has been marked historically by the problems just noted, I want to suggest that indications of the positive potential of this diversity are also emerging. Indeed, many people are beginning to accept the reality of an increasingly multicultural nation and are reaching across differences to form communities and build coalitions as they work to imagine and start creating a future free of oppressive practices. Although such work—in the realms of theory and of practice—has been in progress most visibly since the beginning of the civil rights movement, it has progressively moved past a white-black binary as it attempts to address not only a much broader notion of diversity but also, crucially, processes of hybridization. InT   Introduction deed, I want to argue that processes of hybridization make possible all sorts of creative other ways of rethinking ideas of community and coalition building that are crucial to addressing the future of the multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural nation that the United States has become at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this book, I focus in particular on the recent contributions of American women novelists to the process of reimagining community and coalition building within the context of an increasingly multicultural and multiracial America. Specifically, this book examines the ways in which much fiction by prominent American women at the end of the twentieth century draws upon and creates hybrid versions of other than dominant conceptions of community and coalition. Crucially, these other versions of community and coalition derive from a variety of ethnic American traditions and differ substantially from established Western notions and forms of community and coalition. Moreover, this fiction’s engagement in processes of revising and revitalizing notions of community and coalition work results in a reimagining of viable, dynamic forms of agency, of the possibility of engaging in actions that have effects out in the world. Indeed, I argue for positioning these literary texts as active participants in current intellectual debates about the possibility of agency at a historical and cultural moment in which subjectivity itself and, consequently, agency have been called into question. Although I did not set out to work specifically with texts written by American women descended from racially marked ethnic groups—from ethnic backgrounds more difficult to blend into dominant white America because of overt differences in skin color and facial features, such as African American, Asian American, Native American, and Mexican American—and/or choosing to draw from the rich systems of thought, histories, and lived experiences of these hybridized cultures, it slowly became apparent that analyses of these particular texts had the most to contribute to my project. What had initially triggered the project was a more general observation that late twentieth-century fiction by women tends to address agency in terms that highlight to a much greater degree than fiction by men the importance and necessity of community and coalition building and that, indeed, the fiction of these women often revises dominant Western conceptions of community and coalition building within the literature they produce, which then leads to new approaches to the very ideas of subjectivity and agency. Indeed, literary texts by men during the same period tend to focus on the cultural paranoia result- Rethinking Community for the Twenty-First Century  ing from the absence...