Editor's Introduction: Transgressing the Borders of "America"

Abstract

All lives I could live, all people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that world is. --Aleksandar Hemon (2) As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman's sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in creation of yet another a new story to explain world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to planet. --Gloria Anzaldua (103) A recent article by Liesl Schillinger in New York Times titled Passport Lit: Words Without Borders notes that in 2009 finalists for US's National Book Award in fiction include three authors not born in this country, two of whom currently live abroad: Irish author Colum McCann (who won prize) was born in Dublin but now lives in New York; Marcel Theroux, a son of writer Paul Theroux, was born in Uganda and currently lives in London, yet deploys a distinctly idiom; Daniyal Mueenuddin grew up in Pakistan and Wisconsin and currently lives in southern Punjab but spends time in London. Schillinger contends that such nominations challenge criticism of fiction made by, for example, Horace Engdahl, spokesman for Swedish Academy (which awards Nobel literature prize) as isolated, too insular (WK 1). According to Schillinger, these selections demonstrate that American idea not only translates, it disregards boundaries. Schillinger views this as a recent development in letters, yet if we look to ethnic and immigrant texts written since at least early twentieth century (if not before), we see that idea of a firm national demarcating America often has been put into question and that identity frequently has been viewed as multigeographical, transnational, and only artificially contained by actual legal boundary of US. Writers discussed in this issue of MELUS, in particular, are likely to undermine idea that US literature exists (or can exist) apart from literatures of other countries, nations, and peoples; they are likely to see borders as permeable spaces where cultures come into contact in a creative process that leads to continual modification of meaning of America. These writers transgress borders of America, but they also question meaning of this term. As perhaps symbolized by Tino Villanueva's vibrant watercolor, crayon, and pencil artwork Flashpoints, which graces this issue's cover, may become a space where cultures converge, interact, deconstruct each other, and are remade in a productive fusion and fission, an almost chemical (but certainly visceral) transformation that leads to new forms of language, subjectivity, and nationhood. Yet in productive chaos of Villanueva's Flashpoints a center--possibly a black hole--exists, holding still amid swirling energy and galaxies that orbit it. We may read this as emblem of something in that is stubbornly resistant to being remade, a sort of black (w)hole that translates all too well, sucking away energy and power of other cultures in favor of a dark nothingness. The artists discussed in this issue, then, do not deny US's continued presence on world stage as engine of transnational dominance and power; nor do they overlook painfulness of living on borders and in margins that, as Gloria Anzaldua has famously phrased it, constitute ah open wound where the Third World grates against first and bleeds (3). These essays explore painful yet emplastic elements of this border culture, but they also depict ways that idea of America as a coherent ideological and geographical space still holds force. …