Multi-Ethnic “Literature” of the “United States”: Thinking Beyond the Borders

How has the journal MELUS influenced the field of multi-ethnic literature of the United States? As an editor of the journal for eight years (2006-14) and a reader for more than twenty, I am in an excellent position to consider this question. As editor, I was at the frontline of several controversies having to do with what the “United States” and “literature” signified in a transnational, multimedia-saturated world. My aim was to push against borders and boundaries of various kinds while not entirely abandoning MELUS’s core identity as a journal. At times my editorial work entailed a tricky series of negotiations between authors, guest editors, evaluators, and members of the editorial board, but the results were well worth it, as illustrated below.

When Margaret Hillenbrand’s essay, “Letters of Penance: Writing America in Chinese and the Location of Chinese American Literature,” arrived on my desk electronically in the fall of 2011, I was fascinated, but I did not exactly know what to make of it. It concerned a 1993 Chinese-language television drama Beijingren zai Niuyue (Beijingers in New York) set in New York and a short story by the Taiwanese American writer Bai Xianyong called “Zhijiage zhi Si” (“Death in Chicago” [1964]). The television show Beijingers in New York originally was based on a novel by Cao Guilin (1991). Both the novel and the television series were giant cultural phenomena in China, consumed by millions of viewers and readers, but how could either piece be considered “US literature”? For that matter, was the original short story by Bai Xianyong American, ethnic, multi-ethnic, or Chinese literature? Hillenbrand argues that works such as these—created in and about the United States, although not necessarily intended for US audiences—lie in liminal spaces between the American and the Sinophone world and therefore belong to both. One evaluator agreed entirely, another said no, and a member of the editorial board was on the fence. After excellent revisions to the essay by the author, the reports were even more polarized. I finally was convinced (with some valuable help from the author herself) that such texts merit further study now that the idea of transnational American literature has taken both root and wing. As Hillenbrand argues, such works do not simply scrutinize “the ethno-linguistic shape of American literature” but also widen its geographical spaces (45). A panel of academic judges awarded this article the Katharine Newman best essay prize for 2014, so they must have been persuaded as well.¹

As I write this today, the terms US and literature are once more in flux, and so MELUS is again ahead of the curve. In September 2013 the Man Booker Prize—the United Kingdom’s most prominent literary award, traditionally given to writers from the Commonwealth and Ireland—opened itself up to writers of “literary fiction writing in English, whether from Chicago, Sheffield or Shanghai” (“Man”), and indeed included two US-born writers on its shortlist of six books. The prize was awarded to the Australian novelist/filmmaker/journalist Richard Flanagan for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013). The opening of the Man Booker prize to US writers follows a development I noted in an earlier editor’s column, “Transgressing the Borders of ‘America’” (2010); here I discussed the fact that several of the finalists for the US National Book Award in fiction for that year were authors born outside the United States, individuals who were currently living abroad. “American” literature and “world” literature now seem intermixed, at least from the point of view of such coveted literary prizes.

Is everything “American” literature, then? Has the United States simply colonized other world literatures, or have they colonized the United States? It will be the place of Gary Totten, MELUS’s new editor, to negotiate this border, which is always fluctuating and creating new formations. I also do not want us to forget that actual borders exist—“alien” bodies have to struggle to move across them and “illegals” are left to drown in the oceans between continents.^2...