(Un)Certain Mothers: the Intersectional Formation of the Multicultural Novel

This dissertation proposes that the defining gambit of U.S fiction’s so-called multicultural era is “maternal archeology”: the impulse to recover and affirm ethnoracial identification through (symbolic, biological, historical, etc.) foremothers. It offers a cultural history of multiethnic women writers in the U.S. to trace when, how, and why this maternal archeology became the primary drive of the multicultural novel. This project facilitates the discourse around ethnoracial formations and multiculturalism—both of which have become weighed down by conceptual indeterminacy. Post-Civil Rights, "maternal archeology" was ethnoracialized women’s cultural response to the denigration of motherhood in the twentieth century while simultaneously revising the assimilationist literary tradition of “paternal amnesia”: in the first half of the century, ethnic traditions (and the fathers that represent them) were cast aside in favor of acculturating under a rubric that saw Americanization and women’s liberation as synonymous processes. Many feminists of color chafed against Anglo-American feminist activism that marginalized their ethnoracial concerns; concomitantly, the masculinism of ethnoracial nationalist movements failed to attend to the gendered concerns of their members.

Chapter I traces the ways in which intersectional Black feminists laid the groundwork for what would become the multicultural novel. Chapter II then applies this framework to Chicana and Chinese American contexts by exploring how maternal archeology acquires different valences for those holding intermediate ethnoracial positions along the Black-white axis. Lastly, Chapter III articulates the moment wherein the multicultural novel ceases to be an appropriate model. In the 1990s, some authors advanced an intercultural (rather than multicultural) ideology. Contemplating their awkward, triangulated racial status, these writers turn to Jewishness to explore the complicated state of ethnoracial formations at the end of the twentieth century. Together, these chapters offer a cultural history of the complex ways in which authors have sought to answer the questions: who am I? Whose am I?