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Notes from the editor: race, space, and "national" boundaries.

Article Excerpt
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,...

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