Editor’s Introduction: Space, Land, and the Global Environment of Ethnicity

The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become. And that means shaping hearts and minds for our life together on this planet.

—Kwame Anthony Appiah (88)

In a recent book about American literature, Caroline F. Levander remarks that the question, “Where is American literature?” can be “a compass” that leads us into unexpected places: “into the mall, the cloud, the movie theater, and almost always to the edge of familiar terrains” (188). The same can be said for the question, “Where is multi-ethnic US literature?” Our field has always been diverse and multifaceted, but recently it has come to encompass even broader spaces, environments, and media for the articulation of ethnicity. MELUS has featured or will feature essays and interviews on Norwegian American immigrant authors, Jewish American comics, visual culture and race, television, film, Asian American performance art, Cambodian American rap, mixed-race literature, cross-racial collaboration, white ethnicity, and other diverse topics.

At times, of course, this makes attempting to define the space, land, and environment of multi-ethnic American literature difficult. A potential author recently wrote to ask whether MELUS would be interested in publishing an interview with a writer who had emigrated from China to the United States as an adult; she writes in English, yet her novels are predominantly set in China. Was this multi-ethnic literature of the US, wondered the author? I answered this question as I usually do: “While ‘the United States’ has come of late to mean (broadly) authors or works of literature that in some way are set in, cross over, or are imbued with US ideologies, politics, settings, characters, or writing styles, we have not totally disregarded this term.... What might be of great interest is the ways this author’s writing has been affected by her life in the US and the rhetoric and style of US multi-ethnic and Anglo-American authors.” Multiethnic literature no longer signifies simply a place-bound or geographical space. Content matters more than geographical location, and the space, land, and environment of US ethnicity have become mobile, global, mutating, and fluctuating. A very loose connection to the conception of the US needs to be present in the texts, but the construct of the United States is now more of an ethos or symbolic figuration than a geographical or even geopolitical spatialization.

Of course, this does not definitively answer the question, “Where is multi-ethnic literature of the United States located?” or even, “What is multi-ethnic literature of the United States?” Yet it does provide a useful starting point to comprehend some of the shifts this term has undergone in the last decade. The essays chosen for this issue of MELUS in some way interrogate the space, land, and environment of ethnicity, showing this environment’s exilic, mobile, and mutating quality. Our cover image—from Jean-Paul Bourdier’s Leap into the Blue (2013)—is meant to symbolize the openness that currently constitutes the global space, land, and environment of US ethnicity. Bourdier’s copper-colored female figure could be any race; she stares out into an open landscape that could be anywhere. We know that the multi-ethnic subject—who is often imprinted with oppressive stereotypes not only of race and ethnicity but also of gender, class, and particular kinds of embodiment—perhaps does not have so much freedom to make a “leap into the blue,” but we also want this issue to hint at some of the broader possibilities for multiethnic literature that this images implies. The grouping of writers discussed in this issue indicates possibilities not only for spatial sovereignty but also intellectual autonomy to become truly diasporic, translocal, and transnational subjects not defined by geographical, national, environmental, or physical limitations. These essays also thoroughly interrogate the concept of “America” itself—and by extension, the process of Americanization that the nation attempts (and often fails) to enforce.

Fittingly...