Whose America: The Contemporary Argument

The idea

The literature of the last fifty years argues about who gets to write the American story, and the argument changed both the reading list and the forms. The witness dates the shift to the close of the nineteen eighties, when minority writing became a major fixture of the landscape in drama as well as prose. Toni Morrison sits at the centre of it. She edited other writers at Random House before publishing her own first novel in nineteen seventy, built Beloved out of a newspaper account of Margaret Garner, and named her own method enchantment, a blend of historical realism with tales she had been told as a child, because that was how the world was for the Black people she knew. Alice Walker took a Pulitzer and used her standing to put Zora Neale Hurston back in print. The Asian American writers arrived with Kingston's The Woman Warrior, then Tan and Lahiri, and the critical frame that came with them was the identity plot, the twentieth century's replacement for the nineteenth's marriage plot: a tension between the individual and the collective, and a quarrel over what counts as authentic. Native American fiction flowered from Momaday's Pulitzer through Silko's chant novel to Erdrich's reservation tetralogy, and its recurring subject is the loss of a traditional life based in nature. Latino writing arrived as what the witness calls a relatively new group, with Hijuelos, Cisneros, Anaya and Mora on the border. Beside all of that the period kept writing about war, remembered rather than fought, in O'Brien's lists and Komunyakaa's black wall, and about systems nobody can see whole, in DeLillo's photographed barn and Wallace's footnotes that eat their essay. The exam tests the widened list, and the way to meet it is to read the passage rather than hunt for the name.