ABSTRACT
This book has analyzed a series of literary attempts to represent and to come to terms with American national identity in light of encounters between new immigrants and under-recognized, indigenous minorities, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth-centuries. The chapters treated three major twentieth-century writers, each of whom provided a representative insight into a crisis of identity formation that paralleled historical and social changes affecting modern America, including the New Immigration, the Great Migration, and globalization under the auspices of American Empire. By involving theories of culture and globalization in this effort, I have sought to re-frame the perpetual fixation on black-and-white studies of American literature in a new critical context, which is simultaneously global in outlook and subject matter and local in its sensitivity to the persistent questions of mobility, race, history, language, and geography in America. Read together, the works of Rushdie, Ellison, and Faulkner appear to be structured around issues of continuity and disruption in imagined communities; renderings of language as a signifier of American identity; organic local affiliations challenged by trans-nationally mediated racial
and political commitments; memory, geography, and blood as guarantors of American-ness as opposed to amnesia, mobility, and masquerade; and blackand-white understandings of American composition set against variegated ethnic patterns.
