outline_us_lit

Sherman Alexie (1966- ), aSpokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, isthe youngest Native-American novelistto achieve national fame.Alexie gives unsentimental andhumorous accounts of Indian lifewith an eye for incongruous mixturesof tradition and pop culture.His story cycles includeReservation Blues (1995) and TheLone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight inHeaven (1993), which inspired theeffective film of reservation lifeSmoke Signals (1998), for whichAlexie wrote the screenplay. SmokeSignals is one of the very fewmovies made by Native Americansrather than about them. Alexie’srecent story collection is TheToughest Indian in the World(2000), while his harrowing novelIndian Killer (1996) recalls RichardWright’s Native Son.GLOBAL AUTHORS: VOICESFROM THE CARIBBEAN ANDLATIN AMERICAWriters from the EnglishspeakingCaribbeanislands have been shapedby the British literary curriculumand colonial rule, but in recentyears their focus has shifted fromLondon to New York and Toronto.Themes include the beauty of theislands, the innate wisdom of theirpeople, and aspects of immigrationand exile — the breakup of family,culture shock, changed genderroles, and assimilation.Two forerunners merit mention.Paule Marshall (1929- ), born inBrooklyn, is not technically a globalSHERMAN ALEXIEPhoto: Associated Press /Wide World Photoswriter, but she vividly recalls herexperiences as the child ofBarbadian immigrants in Brooklynin Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959).Dominican novelist Jean Rhys(1894-1979) penned Wide SargassoSea (1966), a haunting and poeticrefiguring of Charlotte Brontë’sJane Eyre. Rhys lived most of herlife in Europe, but her book waschampioned by American feministsfor whom the “madwoman in theattic” had become an iconic figureof repressed female selfhood.Rhys’s work opened the way forthe angrier voice of Jamaica Kincaid(1949- ), from Antigua, whoseunsparing autobiographical worksinclude the novels Annie John(1985), Lucy (1990), and TheAutobiography of My Mother(1996). Born in Haiti but educatedin the United States, EdwidgeDanticat (l969- ) came to attentionwith her stories Krik? Krak! (1995),entitled for a phrase used by storytellersfrom the Haitian oral tradition.Danticat evokes her nation’stragic past in her historical novelThe Farming of the Bones (1998).Many Latin American writersdiverge from the views commonamong Chicano writers with rootsin Mexico, who have tended to beromantic, nativist, and left wing intheir politics. In contrast, Cuban-American writing tends to be cosmopolitan,comic, and politicallyconservative. Gustavo PérezFirmat’s memoir, Next Year inCuba: A Chronicle of Coming of Agein America (1995), celebratesbaseball as much as Havana. The152