This essay examines how four American authors — Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Leslie Marmon Silko — use physical objects, place, and homeland to explore the identity struggles of historically marginalized groups in the United States. Analyzing Walker's "Everyday Use," Kingsolver's "Homeland," Tan's "Half and Half," and Silko's "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," the paper argues that for African-American, Native American, and Chinese-American protagonists, self-definition is never assumed but must be negotiated through contested relationships with heritage, domestic space, and cultural memory. Each work reveals a different dimension of the hyphenated American experience.
The search of so-called "hyphenated" Americans — whether African-American, Chinese-American, or Native American — for a source of identity is chronicled in the works of Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Leslie Marmon Silko. For Americans who are members of historically marginalized groups, having a place in the world is never assumed. Identity is something to be negotiated, contested, and fought over, often through the use of physical objects that represent home and heritage, in the stories of these authors. Their protagonists attempt, with varying levels of success, to find a means of self-definition that relates to contemporary American life yet still honors the past.
In Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," the two daughters of the narrator, Mrs. Johnson, are shown as embracing polarized visions of African-American womanhood. One daughter, Maggie, is content to stay at home and embrace traditional African-American culture in a largely segregated area of the country. The other daughter, Dee, tries to construct a new African heritage for herself. Dee embraces the objects of her childhood that she once rejected, regarding them as artifacts of history and sources of political pride — yet it is Maggie who knows how to make the quilts for "everyday use" that Dee wants only to frame and display.
Both daughters are shown as incomplete. The reader cannot fully embrace Maggie's acquiescent nature and her refusal to fight for a better life, but Dee does not appreciate her mother's strength or the real, lived experience of Mrs. Johnson's heritage. Walker's story ultimately suggests that heritage is not merely symbolic; it must be practiced and inhabited to retain its meaning.
In Barbara Kingsolver's short story "Homeland," the contemporary Native American characters are shown as having to make do with physical representations of the past that have been stripped of their original meaning. The central character, Great Mam, decides she wants to see the homeland of her Cherokee people before she dies, but she can only gaze upon it: the old land and the old ways have been lost, as has the seamless continuity between Native past and present. The homeland she reaches is a tourist attraction, a pale simulacrum of what it once was.
Yet her family remains strong, even as they live their lives very differently from their dying matriarch. Kingsolver suggests that cultural survival may require adaptation rather than preservation in its original form — a painful but necessary concession to historical dispossession.
"Rose reclaims her home as a Chinese-American identity anchor"
"Native and white worldviews clash at a burial ritual"
No culture remains static in America, and all people and all cultures must change to survive: that is why establishing an identity in America is so difficult. Across these four works, Walker, Kingsolver, Tan, and Silko each illuminate a different facet of the hyphenated American experience — showing that the negotiation of identity through objects, place, and heritage is neither simple nor ever fully resolved, but remains an ongoing and essential human endeavor.
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