The language of citizenship: The future of the minority voice in contemporary American fiction (Ralph Ellison, Chang-rae Lee, Octavia E. Butler, Maureen F. McHugh)

This study examines the work of four writers from diverse literary traditions who share a concern with the role of minority voices in an increasingly multi-ethnic and multilingual America. I explore the ways in which Ralph Ellison, Chang-rae Lee, Octavia E. Butler, and Maureen F. McHugh dramatize the difficulties that confront racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities who seek membership in a socio-political system that neither recognizes them as citizens nor welcomes their civic participation. While voice has long been regarded as a fundamental means of gaining social and political recognition in America, I argue that having a say has not been enough for minorities to secure citizenship rights nor achieve a sense of cultural belonging. For Ellison, Lee, Butler, and McHugh, minority voices that are considered linguistically alien or ideologically objectionable are often ignored, suppressed, or even maligned in cultural and political arenas. To negotiate these obstacles, they foreground speech and language as instruments for performing different cultural identities and explore various rhetorical strategies and expressive forms as means to gain cultural mobility and political power. In the process, they raise questions concerning the desire for authenticity and the instability of performative identities.; My choice of the four authors in my project, who "belong" to very different literary categories (African-American literature, Asian-American literature, and Science Fiction), is motivated by my interest in the speculative quality of their fiction, and the new models that they envision for the minority voice in an American past, present, and future. I trace the various racial, ethnic, and gender configurations of the minority-as-outsider in the four time periods represented: the 1940s in Ellison's Invisible Man; the 1990s in Lee's Native Speaker; the 21st century in Butler's Parable books; and the distant future of the 22nd century in McHugh's China Mountain Zhang . These texts offer a cumulative history of the resonances of minority voices in the past, and speculate on the roles these voices might play in the nation's future. Ultimately, they expose the restrictions imposed on the minority voice even as the nation extols the assertion of voice as an essential form of participatory citizenship.