Writing from inside another cultural location is a long-standing American literary tradition. I analyze contemporary American ethnic and diaspora texts as a continuation of this practice, but one that has been significantly transformed by the social movements and political struggles of the 1960s and 70s. This dissertation responds to the impact of the changes on the narratives and examines their effect on textual production. I study how the texture and the focus of the narratives become increasingly engaged with and responsive to the ideological and social shifts. I argue that the intensified attention to identity, participation, authenticity, and representation transformed the relationship to the dominant culture and the writing itself in ways that have significant implications for textual analysis and interpretation. I focus on the poetics and politics of representation in texts emerging from five cultural locations: Native American, African American, Asian American, Polish American, and the Caribbean. While some writers bring in experiences left out of the collective literary record, others redefine and amend what is already there. I analyze how Leslie Marmon Silko asserts and explores a Native American textual presence based in the oral tradition and examine how Toni Morrison revisits and redefines the African American narrative of the past. In the fiction of the Indian-born Bharati Mukherjee, I examine the new identities she creates for her Asian immigrants. In the work of Eva Hoffman and Jamaica Kincaid, I evaluate interpretations of childhood and of immigration as cultural loss, and the different attitudes toward the country and culture left behind.; This dissertation examines how writing across cultural boundaries is inevitably shaped by the contingencies of writing as and by the inherent need to address the dominant culture. I evaluate this dynamic, how it influences the text, and how it is read and interpreted. I analyze representations of displacement as cultural translation and see the generative ethos of these texts in the self-awareness created by the critical perspective. My analysis reveals how the deliberate assertion of Otherness against the larger context produces cultural confidence through what becomes a productive interplay between the autobiographical and the ethnographic.
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