Beyond the Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory (review)

Beyond the Borders is part of a decade long critical trend positioning the reading of American literature through the rubrics of postcolonial theory. This theoretical turn, anticipated in classic American studies works such as Richard Drinnon’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (1980) was formalized in the 1993 anthology The Cultures of United States Imperialism and has since then been followed by more specifically postcolonial theory oriented works such as Edward Watts’ Writing and Postcoloniality in the Early Republic (1998), Malini Johar Schueller’s U.S. Orientalisms (1998), John Carlos Rowe’s Literary Culture and U.S Imperialism (2000), Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt’s Ed. Postcolonial Theory and the United States (2000), Richard King’s Ed. Postcolonial America (2000) and Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts’ Ed. Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (2003). The specific focus of Beyond the Borders is American ethnic literature as well as literature produced from regions significantly affected by US imperialism such as Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, the Phillippines, and Haiti. Following an introductory chapter which summarizes the rest, the book is divided into four parts: the first, comprising an excellent essay by Chadwick Allen on the importance of comparative postcolonial perspectives for the teaching of Native American literature including classic colonialism and settler colonialism; the second focusing on different kinds of ethnic literatures to be read through postcoloniality–Native-American, Chicana, African-American, Chinese-American; the third dealing with border regions such as Puerto-Rico, Haiti, and Canada; and the final section reading together ethnic literature produced in the US and abroad.

The strength of Beyond the Borders is the attempt of many of the contributors to seriously engage ethnic literatures with issues of postcolonial theory such as indigeneity, nationhood, oppression, cultural appropriation and hybridization rather than simply turning multiculturalism into postcoloniality as is the case with a number of essays in the contemporary ethnic section of Singh and Schmidt’s Postcolonial Theory and the United States. Exemplary in this respect is Paul Lyons’ essay on indigeneity in Hawai’i, his questioning of the inclusion of Hawai’ian writing in anthologies of American literature and his development of a located pedagogy in reading Hawai’ian literature. The anthology is also unique in having a large number of essays focusing on the pedagogical issues surrounding the teaching of ethnic literatures and postcoloniality such as Chadwick Allen’s and John Hunt Peacock’s essays on Native American literature and Angela Noele Williams’ on Filipino literature. There is also an important attempt to include works from relatively unexamined ethnic groups such as Burmese-American writing as well as Indonesian writing.

The anthology could have benefitted, however, from the exclusion of essays in which the engagement with postcolonial theory is perfunctory at best and which simply channel well worn arguments about ethnic alienation into those of colonialism and imperialism. Renny Christopher’s essay about Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American literature, which makes the unfounded claim that Vietnamese-American writers are unique in Asian-American writing in wanting to keep alive issues of homeland, exemplifies this kind of essay. Such essays beg the question of what difference postcolonial theory makes to the understanding of ethnic literature. There is also the unaddressed theoretical issue of what comprises American literature. The volume includes essays on Canadian writing without any discussion of why these should be included. While the questioning of hegemonic nationhood is indeed desirable, without a discussion of the geopolitical limits of American literature, scholarship runs into the dangers of duplicating United States cultural and political imperialism. In addition, like Singh and Schmidt’s and King’s anthology, this one (with the exception of two essays), focuses exclusively on contemporary ethnic literature. The problem with such a focus is the perpetuation of the idea that United States ethnic literature is a post World War II phenomenon or that postcolonial concerns are only relevant to contemporary literature. Both arguments are problematic in that they tend to erase much of...