And, as one commentator has observed, “the ‘average’ US resident. By the middle of the twenty-first century, it has been calculated, “non-white” and third world ethnic groups will outnumber whites in the US. From 1990 to 1997 alone, seven and a half million foreign-born individuals entered the US legally, accounting for 29.2% of population growth. Since she wrote that, the growth in immigration-especially immigration from outside Europe-has been radical. “American literature, especially in the twentieth century, and notably in the last twenty years,” Toni Morrison wrote in 1992, “has been shaped by its encounter with the immigrant” (92). The second has to do with that perennial seedbed of change in America, immigration. There has been a fourfold increase, for instance, in the past 30 years, in those claiming Native American descent, and in 1997 the census bureau calculated that by 2050 Hispanics would account for nearly one in four of the American population. The first is that particular ethnic groups that have been here for centuries have gained additional presence and prominence. And the world is here, in the US, for two seminal reasons. “The world is here” (56), Reed declared in “America: The Multinational Society” (1988), an essay published, in book form, in the year American Literary History first appeared.
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But the US itself has become what Ishmael Reed has called “the first universal nation” (55), and some of our sense of what it means now to be an American can be telegraphed in a series of numbers and names that have become almost iconic and suggest the very opposite of triumphalism: 9/11, the “war on terror,” Al Quaeda, Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay. In the global marketplace, it may well be America that is now the biggest item on sale in a postcolonial world, it equally well may be that the imagination has now been colonized by the US. American culture may have become internationally dominant but the US itself has been internationalized America may be the sole remaining superpower, but it is a superpower that seems haunted by fear-fear, among other things, of its own possible impotence and potential decline. That, perhaps, suggests several tensions that this great deal of history of the past two decades has generated. In the last 20 years alone, since the first issue of American Literary History appeared, the US has witnessed the disintegration of its sinister other, the USSR, and it has also borne witness to the birth of a world characterized by transnational drift, the triumph of global capitalism, and the re-emergence of religious fundamentalism. By now, the US has a great deal of history. it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature” (23). The eminent Anglo-American Henry James once observed that “the flower of art blossoms only when the soil is deep.
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