in the blurred genre works of Maxine Hong Kingston. In The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980), Kingston's texts are developed as postmodern fragments of traditional 'talk story,' myths, and the draconian rules imposed by Chinese parents. 'No Name Woman,' a talk story about the father's sister who is forced to have an illegitimate child in the pigsty, and who then commits suicide, is used by MaMa to caution the author from transgressing the family's rigid sexual codes. 'Shaman,' another talk story written by the author, exemplifies MaMa's attempts to tell her children 'chilling' ghost stories to cool off the unbearable heat in the family's Stockton laundry. In both cases these oral tales are powerful stories of survival migrant cultures used by the Chinese Americans to fight the discriminatory United States government policies against Asians.
When Kingston declares that China Men is a book about 'claiming America,' her declaration characterizes the mood of a new generation of United States postmodern realist writers of color. Like Carpentier's and García Márquez's speculative chronicles, China Men (at times, also written in the oppositional poetic style of William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain) is a highly inventive history of Gold Mountain (U.S.A.). Kingston's earliest episodes begin in fact where Williams's leave off — around 1850 — and the book ends with visions of American violence and the Vietnam war. At the same time, Kingston documents in fragmentary pieces the California Gold Rush and describes in excruciating detail the various racist Exclusion Acts the United States government passed against Asians.
Against the American grain, Kingston's China Men not only challenges whitemale constructions of American history but also aligns itself with the discovery by the professional historians that 'all is fiction' and that there can never be a correct version of history. Because the narrator's father does not talk story — only the women do ('You say with few words and the silences') — Kingston invents dif- ferent versions of the father's migration from China to America. In one of her most speculative and magical versions, the author describes how, perhaps, he sailed first to Cuba, where the sky drops -533- rain the size of long squash, or to Hawaii, where papayas grow to the size of jack-o'-lanterns. Another version imagines how a smuggler brought him to New York by ship, locked in a crate, and how he rocked and dozed in the dark, feeling 'the ocean's variety — the peaked waves that must have looked like pines; the rolling waves, round like shrubs, the occasional icy mountains; and for stretches, lulling grasslands.' Still another version has BaBa coming to America, not illegally, but 'legally' — he arrives in San Francisco to endure incarceration at the Immigration and Naturalization Service prison on Angel Island.
The ultimate goal of Kingston's China Men is thus to elaborate a logic of postmodern possibility, divergence, and the politics of the possible through a rhetoric of speculative historiography. Like Islas, Kingston explores the dialectics of the differential in order to emphasize cross-cultural interpenetration and transculturation rather than assimilation. In other words, Kingston offers alternatives to mythologies predicated on the lingering white supremacist 'master narratives' of Anglocentric cultural centrality.
In sum, all the precursors fall into place in our new postmodern realist genealogy: the writers of the 'Boom,' like Carpentier and García Márquez, and their heirs, the United States writers of color, recover alternative histories in the unrecorded texts of history (songs, cuentos, and talk story) at the very moment when historical alternatives are in the process of being systemically expunged — CIA and FBI archives notwithstanding. Unlike the historical fantasies of other epochs, the postmodern narratives by these writers do not seek to diminish the historical event by celebrating the so-called death of the referent or of the subject, nor do they wish to lighten the burden of historical fact and necessity by transforming it into what Jameson calls 'a costumed charade and misty revels without consequences and without irrevocability.'
Their postmodern narratives, however, can be seen as entertaining a more active relationship to resistance and the politics of the possible, for they construct a speculative history that is simply their substitute for the making of the real kind. Postmodern cuento, fabulation, or talk story is no doubt the reaction to social and historical bankruptcy, to the blocking of possibilities that leaves — as Jameson stresses — 'little option but the imaginary.' Their very invention and -534- contagious inventiveness, however, privileges a creative politics by the sheer act of multiplying events they cannot control. Postmodern realist invention thus by way of its very speculation becomes the figure of a larger politics of the possible and of resistance.
Another form of postmodern realism in the United States is in some ways more quotidian than the previous ones. Here a new K Mart/mass cultural realism, minimalized and self-examining, has grown up in the various writings of Raymond Carver, Helena María Viramontes, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone, and others. If, as Malcolm Bradbury noted, there has been for our postcontemporary generation 'warfare in the Empire of Signs, there is also every sign…that the Empire can indeed strike back.' While these writers hardly share a homogeneous ideological sensibility, they do share a common sense that a crisis in representation is clearly at hand. Our old- fashioned and socially constructed American realism (Howells, Dreiser, and Norris) is now increasingly combined with a minimalism that deals with the new underclass of silenced peoples in our cities of quartz (workers, women, and so-called ethnic minorities) who typically feel adrift, or who feel that their histories have been systematically erased by urban planners and Immigration and Naturalization Service death squads, or who feel 'controlled' by their access to controlled substances.
Raymond Carver, for example, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) addresses the local, urban vernaculars and blends them by focusing on slight plots and elliptically structured dramatic conflicts. Minimalist in form, perhaps symptomatic of the reading public's dwindling attention span, Carver's texts, as John Barth suggests in A Few Words About Minimalism (1986), dramatize 'the most impressive phenomenon of the current (North American, especially the United States) literary scene (the gringo equivalent of el boom in the Latin American novel): the new flowering of the (North American) short story.' While Barth's comments on the 'flowering' of the postcontemporary short-story scene are on target, I am distressed by his Anglophonic mapping of the hemisphere. Like that of many United States mainstream writers, Barth's criticism remains largely confined to well-established and long-standing disciplinary and geopolitical borders, with the result that our American (using the adjective in its genuine, hemispheric sense) literary history -535- remains largely provincial. For Barth, there is no real dialogue between Latin American writers and 'gringo' postmodern minimalists. In any case, America, for him, becomes a synonym for the United States.
In a more pertinent and global essay entitled The Short Story: The Long and Short of It (1981), Mary Louise Pratt suggests that the formal marginality of short story cycles enables them to become arenas for the development of alternative visions and resistances, and often introduces women and children as protagonists. Marginal genres such as the short story thus are often the site of political, geographical, and cultural contestation. Likewise, Renato Rosaldo in his postmodernist essay, Fables of the Fallen Guy (1991), on the minimalist short story cycles of Alberto Ríos's The Iguana Killer (1984), Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1985), and Denise Chavez's The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), argues that these writers' worlds are 'fraught with unpredictability and dangers, and yet their central figures have enormous capacities for responding to the unexpected.' Deconstructing disciplinary and generic borders of all sorts (unlike Barth and the INS), these Chicana/o writers collectively move toward liminal terrains and border zones that readily include newly arrived migrant workers from south of the border, Anglos, African Americans, and heterogeneous neighborhoods.
Similarly, Helena María Viramontes's short-story cycle The Moths and Other Stories (1985) focuses on the internal and external urban borders that often disrupt the neighborhoods of East Los Angeles. These borders, Viramontes suggests, are reproduced in our ethnic neighborhoods by urban planners who provide us with the maps for the hegemonic discourse of boundaries. Such glossy, postmodern designs, from Portman's Westin Bonaventure hotel to the sprawling freeways, thus serve to erase and displace the old, ethnic neighborhoods. In 'Neighbors,' for example, postmodern urban planners destroy the Chicano barrios in East Los Angeles: 'the neighborhood had slowly metamorphosed into a graveyard…. As a result, the children gathered near in small groups to drink, to lose themselves in the abyss of defeat, to find temporary solace among each other.'
Although a prolific novelist, poet, and essayist, Joyce Carol Oates may be best known for her 'neorealist' short stories, which are frequently exercises in postmodernist experimentation. Like Carver and -536- Viramontes, she focuses on ordinary characters whose lives are vulnerable to powerful threats from a (patriarchal) society.
