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Prior to 1983, the vast majority of recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction were men and only two were nonwhite: Scott Momaday and James McPherson, who won the prize, respectively, in 1969 for House Made of Dawn and 1978 for Elbow Room.3 As these examples indicate, American literature of the last few decades of the twentieth century and into the twentyfirst century has become much more diverse at least in part as a result of the increasing number of women writers from nonwhite and hybrid cultural and racial origins who are producing literary texts that address issues of gender, race, and ethnicity within the American context and that have achieved stature on the basis of popular and/or critical acclaim.
As the number of Americans characterized by a multiracial and/or multicultural heritage increases and racially/culturally hybrid individuals become the norm rather than the exception or the effaced, questions of identity become a key arena of exploration. Indeed, within the realm of contemporary fiction, depictions of the search for a clearer understanding of what a hybridized identity might look like or entail dominates the literary landscape and hits a chord with American readers. While American literature written by nonwhites has always to a certain extent engaged this problem of identity for those marked as racially and/or culturally other, the current drastically changing national demographics makes the topic particularly relevant to all Americans. For American women whose identities straddle races and cultures, the issue of identity is further complicated in that gendered constructions of women differ among cultures and subcultures, thus requiring additional negotiations.
In addition to changing demographics and the beginnings of an acknowledgment that American culture is being hybridized at an ever increasing rate, American culture of the twentyfirst century is also being shaped by the post9/11 political climate that has not only brought to the forefront the nation’s vulnerability to massive terrorist attacks but also highlighted issues of racial and cultural differences.