I was working on Tripmaster Monkey ... and seeing how everything connects with everything. Here was the monkey, a Chinese monkey, but he might have been an Indonesian monkey too.... During the '60s the hippies were trying to stop the war by being monkeys, by clowning and trying to levitate the Pentagon and using monkey magic to try to stop the war. Then I was thinking, Oh, so the monkey flew all the way from China to America, and I see monkey antics right here in American culture. Then I noticed that wherever we go--any city I've ever been to--is a global city. There are people from all over the world in every city.... If you were going to write a great American novel, then it is also the global novel. --Maxine Hong Kingston (Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim, MELUS 33.1) I do not accept that anyone is permanently fixed by his or her identity; but neither can one shed specific structures of race and culture, class and caste, gender and sexuality, environment and history. I understand these, and other cross-cutting determinations, not as homelands, chosen or forced, but as sites of worldly travel: difficult encounters and occasions for dialogue. --James Clifford (Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century 12) Place often has been connected integrally with race in American literature, as particular regions come to embody the homes of various racial groups or the sites of important literary movements. The so-called Harlem Renaissance is but one manifestation of such a phenomena; I could also reference Chicano/a authors' creation of a space called Aztlan that (as Marissa Lopez explains in this issue) might unite the Chicano/a community. Paradoxically, however, for ethnic American writers place itself has never been a fixed geographical space, and the boundaries and borders have always encompassed both national and international spheres. So place, while being crucial to formulations of ethnic identity and ethnic literary movements, always has been a rather abstract concept, both everywhere and nowhere. As James Clifford suggests, it may be more productive to view place not as a homeland but as a site of difficult dialogue where the national can be contested and constructed by its interaction with international and transnational roots and routes. The essays in Volume 33.1 of MELUS contemplate the role of place in definitions of ethnic and racial identity, even as they manifest awareness that for ethnic American writers, who are often voluntarily and involuntarily both placed and displaced, this concept is also somewhat unstable and porous. For example, Jean Toomer has generally been viewed as a New York, Harlem-based writer, but Emily Lutenski's archival research in 'A Small Man in Big Spaces': The New Negro, the Mestizo, and Jean Toomer's Southwestern Writing demonstrates that Toomer saw himself in dialogue not only with US-based formulations of ethnic spaces, but also with a broader geographical and discursive matrix of race, location, and modernity. The Southwest provides a space where, during this historical moment, racial discourses center not on codification, but on indeterminacy, racial mixing, and a futuristic cosmic race. As Toomer himself puts it in a quote from the archives that aptly illustrates Lutenski's point: Taos is an end-product. It is the end of the slope. It is an end-product of the Indians, an end-product of the Spaniards, an end-product of the Yankees and puritans. It must be plowed under. Out of the fertility which death makes in the soil, a new people with a new form may grow. I dedicate myself to the swift death of the old, to the whole birth of the new. In whatever place I start work, I will call that place Taos. (Drama of the Southwest [Notes]) Taos comes to represent not the old place of deterministic racial identity and affiliation, but a new, more unbounded space of cosmic multiracial and interracial consciousness. …