Imagining America: Morrison, Kingston and a nation of men

"A nation of men" is borrowed from Emerson's utopian vision of an American intellectual community. The racial and gender specificity of this imagined utopia highlights the ironic stance contemporary female intellectuals of color must adopt in order to appropriate a vision of America allied with canonized American intellectuals. In my first chapter I contextualize the dissertation relative to recent critical re-evaluations of classic narratives of American literature. I argue that property ownership is the crucial problem in nineteenth-century American literature, and that the representation of disputed property in pre-Civil War literature is a displaced reflection on slavery.; In the second chapter I explore Toni Morrison's authorization of herself as a public intellectual. In the third chapter I discuss Morrison's appropriation of historical romance as the literary model for Song of Solomon. I read her appropriation of canonical images of hell in Sula as a transition between the anti-nostalgia of The Bluest Eye and the romance. In these two chapters I explore the failure of the American dream--a narrative of property acquisition and self-reinvention--for African American characters like Song of Solomon's Macon Dead.; The fourth chapter delineates the long-running feud between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston over literary representations of Asian American culture. I argue that Chin's nationalist vision of Asian American authenticity is as confining as the orientalist representations of Asian Americans Chin attacks. The fifth chapter explores Kingston's re-writing of gendered genres: domestic fiction in The Woman Warrior and travel fiction in China Men. The final chapter focuses on Tripmaster Monkey. Kingston's allusions in this novel not only critique racist representations of Asians and Asian Americans but destabilize the hierarchical relationship between "high" and "popular" culture. Kingston's integration of artifacts from multiple cultural sources is a literary technique, borrowed from Whitman and Joyce, intended to build bridges between divided communities.; I conclude with a brief discussion of the Berkeley Free Speech movement, and the "culture wars" of the late 1980s. I explore the spatial metaphors that emerge from these two moments that forced the nation to re-imagine the relationship between intellectuals and political activity.