This tour d'horizon brings dispatch, a savvy insider flair, to its account of the ethnic literary efflorescence generally agreed to have launched in the America of the 1960s. If that decade, and its aftermath, indeed ranks as change-era – civil rights and Vietnam, new feminism and pop youth culture, music and drugs – then no less can be said to have happened in terms of styles and directions of authorship. Using Raymond Williams's dialectic of “residual” and “emergent” cultures, and with a keen awareness of New American Literary Studies, as Carolyn Porter designated them in the 1980s, with their emphasis on hybridity, gender, border, trans-temporality, anticanon, mixed genre and voicing, Cyrus Patell gives his focus to four supposed minority seams, those of Asian, Native, Latino/a and gay America. The upshot is a study as fluent as it is pertinacious, not without dips, but overall a trove of well-taken cross-lights.

You may or not buy into the residual-emergent approach as a way of insisting that matters have moved on from multicultural as working auspice. Patell, rather, argues for cosmopolitanism, the notion that to regard the abundant texts in play as merely multicultural is to en-canton them within the ambit only of identity politics. He so uses “cosmopolitan” as watchword, the signifier of the writing's larger, even global, reach. As to the literary achievement of Afro-America, that lies outside his remit on the grounds that it can assume residual status given a provenance stretching from slave narrative through the Harlem Renaissance to Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. Emergent writing may well have become “a crucial part of the liberation movements of the 1960s” (115), but that, however irrefutably important, can be thought only one dimension of its impact.

“What must the emergent ethnic writer do to break through the stereotypical assumption of Eurocentric readers?” asks Patell at the outset (37). His riposte is a virtual blitz of literary mapping. A brisk comparative run-through opens proceedings, starting from Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey (1989) (“I write for everybody living today” (quoted at 36)) and Jessica Hagedorn's Philippines-centered Dogeaters (1990) as key reflexive and counter-orientalist narratives. Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) posits a Pueblo ancient-in-the-modern recognition of an alternative to any one-note American mainstream way of being. Paul Monette's Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992) likewise delineates alternative touchstones, gay and LGBT voice as implicated not just in the daunting fight for un-closetedness but also in a richly communitarian tradition. Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (1982), controversial as it may be in Chicano/a circles, wins scrutiny for its refusal of all minority status, an insistence upon full access not just to the cultural mainstream but also to its very language. Patell's other contenders do no less, N. Scott Momaday to Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria Anzaldúa to Myenne Ng, Tony Kushner to Jill Johnston. The idea of keeping these and each kindred literary name in some shared minority corral edges towards farce.

Patell's chapters each in turn give savviest comparative detail to his argument. There is helpful historicization of how Asian, Hispanic, gay, and latterly Arab and Muslim literary work has been situated at subcultural arm's length. Touchstones from Gold Mountain to Nuyorican Poets Café, the Southwest as Occupied America to 1969 Stonewall, win due focus. Consideration goes out to the shifting tempers of canon formation, with F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) as footfall and Melville as case study, and the impact of a one determinative mainstream upon a literary spectrum from Abraham Cahan and Richard Wright through to the generation de nos jours, be that, say, Sherman Alexie and Andrew Holleran, or Meena Alexander and Esmeralda Santiago.

Occasionally the account can give way to an overinsistence on thematic reading (blips include Rubbio for Rubio in José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho and Stiner for Stan Steiner). But Emergent U.S. Literature leaves little doubt of a scholar–critic who knows his way around the playing field, his account nothing if not genuinely bracing. On offer is cartography, and argument, to be taken up and relished.