American Literature - Minority Literatures

Minority Literatures

One of the key developments in late-20th-century American literature was the rise to prominence of literature written by and about ethnic minorities beyond African Americans and Jewish Americans, who had already established their literary inheritances. This development came alongside the growth of the Civil Rights movements and its corollary, the Ethnic Pride movement, which led to the creation of Ethnic Studies programs in most major universities. These programs helped establish the new ethnic literature as worthy objects of academic study, alongside such other new areas of literary study as women's literature, gay and lesbian literature, working-class literature, postcolonial literature, and the rise of literary theory as a key component of academic literary study.

After being relegated to cookbooks and autobiographies for most of the 20th century, Asian American literature achieved widespread notice through Maxine Hong Kingston's fictional memoir, The Woman Warrior (1976), and her novels China Men (1980) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. Chinese-American author Ha Jin in 1999 won the National Book Award for his second novel, Waiting, about a Chinese soldier in the Revolutionary Army who has to wait 18 years to divorce his wife for another woman, all the while having to worry about persecution for his protracted affair, and twice won the PEN/Faulkner Award, in 2000 for Waiting and in 2005 for War Trash. Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and went on to write a well-received novel, The Namesake (2003), which was shortly adapted to film in 2007. In her second collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, released to widespread commercial and critical success, Lahiri shifts focus and treats the experiences of the second and third generation. Other notable Asian-American (but not immigrant) novelists include Amy Tan, best known for her novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), tracing the lives of four immigrant families brought together by the game of Mahjong, and Korean American novelist Chang-Rae Lee, who has published Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft. Such poets as Marilyn Chin and Li-Young Lee, Kimiko Hahn and Janice Mirikitani have also achieved prominence, as has playwright David Henry Hwang. Equally important has been the effort to recover earlier Asian American authors, started by Frank Chin and his colleagues; this effort has brought Sui Sin Far, Toshio Mori, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto and others to prominence.

Latina/o literature also became important during this period, starting with acclaimed novels by Tomás Rivera (...y no se lo tragó la tierra) and Rudolfo Anaya (Bless Me, Ultima), and the emergence of Chicano theater with Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino. Latina writing became important thanks to authors such as Sandra Cisneros, an icon of an emerging Chicano literature whose 1984 bildungsroman The House on Mango Street is taught in schools across the United States, Denise Chavez's The Last of the Menu Girls and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Dominican-American author Junot Díaz, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which tells the story of an overweight Dominican boy growing up as a social outcast in Paterson, New Jersey. Another Domincan author, Julia Alvarez, is well known for How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies. Cuban American author Oscar Hijuelos won a Pulitzer for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and Cristina García received acclaim for Dreaming in Cuban. Well known Puerto Rican authors from this period include novelist Nicholasa Mohr, playwright José Rivera, poet Judith Ortiz Cofer, and the Nuyorican Poets Café.

Spurred by the success of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize winning House Made of Dawn, Native American literature showed explosive growth during this period, known as the Native American Renaissance, through such novelists as Leslie Marmon Silko (e.g., Ceremony), Gerald Vizenor (e.g., Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles and numerous essays on Native American literature), Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine and several other novels that use a recurring set of characters and locations in the manner of William Faulkner), James Welch (e.g., Winter in the Blood), Sherman Alexie (e.g., The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), and poets Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjo. The success of these authors has brought renewed attention to earlier generations, including Zitkala-Sa, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle and Mourning Dove.

More recently, Arab American literature, largely unnoticed since the New York Pen League of the 1920s, has become more prominent through the work of Diana Abu-Jaber, whose novels include Arabian Jazz and Crescent and the memoir The Language of Baklava. Other important authors include Etel Adnan and poet Naomi Shihab Nye.