| My dissertation examines the ways in which American literature by ethnic women revises traditional constructions of nationhood through non-institutionalized spirituality. While traditional Americanist literary criticism focuses the origins of the national identity in European, particularly Protestant, literary traditions, I demonstrate how contemporary ethnic American women's fiction provides a broader understanding of the function of race, gender, and religion in the construction of the American nation and its foundational fictions. By examining ethnic women writers' innovative use of spirituality to construct cross-cultural and cross-national communities, I reconceive the development and function of the American novel. In Chapter One, I explore how the concept of American exceptionalism, and its connection to Protestantism, is taken up and ultimately supported in foundational American literary criticism by Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, and others. In Chapter Two, I show how Toni Morrison's Paradise attempts to overcome the exclusions of nationalism and exceptionalism found in mainstream America and the Black Nationalist Movement by using spirituality to create a more inclusive cross-cultural community. I propose in Chapter Three that unlike Morrison's text, which rejects nationalism, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead tries to strengthen the American Indian nationalist movement by suggesting that international spiritual coalitions of indigenous peoples offer a more effective model for resisting injustice than secular politics. In Chapter Four, I contend that Ana Castillo's So Far From God synthesizes Morrison's and Silko's positions on the relationships among literature, religion, and nationalism. Instead of either rejecting or supporting nationalism, Castillo's novel uses Chicana spirituality to try to revise and appropriate the Chicano Movement's national structures of resistance to combat local and international racism, sexism, and poverty. Through my analysis of these texts, I demonstrate how these writers shift the function of print culture, using the novel form to intervene in the process, described by Benedict Anderson, in which religious communities decline in the face of the combined powers of nationalism and print culture. My work revises familiar Americanist literary assumptions about print culture and national life, illustrating the possibilities novels contain to bring about social change and new imaginings of connections among disparate peoples. |
