8 - Multiethnicities: Latino/a and Asian American fiction

Summary

Throughout the years following World War II (and particularly since the 1960s), there have been spectacular advances in the quantity and influence of multicultural American authorship. Just as Latino/a and Asian American populations have grown increasingly prominent in the United States, so a plenitude of new literary fiction – novel and novella, story and story cycle – has emerged to match and indeed engender a rethinking of what “ethnic” and allied notions actually signify. This, to be sure, includes reaffirmation and continuance of the Latino/a literary spectrum, the Chicanismo signaled in the fiction of Tomás Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, and Rolando Hinojosa, and a women's generation to include Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo, together with the rosters of new storytelling by Riqueños/as, Cuban Americans, Dominican Americans, and others whose origins in the Latin and Caribbean Americas give a hemispheric reach to Hispanic voice. An awakened Asian American literary consciousness equally invites its due; narratives that severally but always uniquely pursue American lives filtered through China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indo-Pakistan and other South Asian countries, by such writers as Maxine Hong Kingston, Toshio Mori, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lan Cao, Jessica Hagedorn, and Bharati Mukherjee.