A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism

New
Hardcover
2009
$118.88

As an anthropology student studying with Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston recorded African American folklore in rural central Florida, studied hoodoo in New Orleans and voodoo in Haiti, talked with the last ex-slave to survive the Middle Passage, and collected music from Jamaica. Her ethnographic work would serve as the basis for her novels and other writings in which she shaped a vision of African American Southern rural folk culture articulated through an antiracist concept of culture championed by Boas: culture as plural, relative, and long-lived. Meanwhile, a very different antiracist model of culture learned from Robert Park's sociology allowed Richard Wright to imagine African American culture in terms of severed traditions, marginal consciousness, and generation gaps.

In A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism, Christopher Douglas uncovers the largely unacknowledged role played by ideas from sociology and anthropology in nourishing the politics and forms of minority writers from diverse backgrounds. Douglas divides the history of multicultural writing in the United States into three periods. The first, which spans the 1920s and 1930s, features minority writers such as Hurston and D'Arcy McNickle, who were indebted to the work of Boas and his attempts to detach culture from race.

The second period, from 1940 to the mid-1960s, was a time of assimilation and integration, as seen in the work of authors such as Richard Wright, Jade Snow Wong, John Okada, and Ralph Ellison, who were influenced by currents in sociological thought. The third period focuses on the writers we associate with contemporary literary multiculturalism, including Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday, Frank Chin, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Anzaldua. Douglas shows that these more recent writers advocated a literary nationalism that was based on a modified Boasian anthropology and that laid the pluralist grounds for our current conception of literary multiculturalism.

Ultimately, Douglas's unified field theory of multicultural literature brings together divergent African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and Native American literary traditions into one story: of how we moved from thinking about groups as races to thinking about groups as cultures-and then back again.

Synopsis

As an anthropology student studying with Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston recorded African American folklore in rural central Florida, studied hoodoo in New Orleans and voodoo in Haiti, talked with the last ex-slave to survive the Middle Passage, and collected music from Jamaica. Her ethnographic work would serve as the basis for her novels and other writings in which she shaped a vision of African American Southern rural folk culture articulated through an antiracist concept of culture championed by Boas: culture as plural, relative, and long-lived. Meanwhile, a very different antiracist model of culture learned from Robert Park's sociology allowed Richard Wright to imagine African American culture in terms of severed traditions, marginal consciousness, and generation gaps.

In A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism, Christopher Douglas uncovers the largely unacknowledged role played by ideas from sociology and anthropology in nourishing the politics and forms of minority writers from diverse backgrounds. Douglas divides the history of multicultural writing in the United States into three periods. The first, which spans the 1920s and 1930s, features minority writers such as Hurston and D'Arcy McNickle, who were indebted to the work of Boas and his attempts to detach culture from race.

The second period, from 1940 to the mid-1960s, was a time of assimilation and integration, as seen in the work of authors such as Richard Wright, Jade Snow Wong, John Okada, and Ralph Ellison, who were influenced by currents in sociological thought. The third period focuses on the writers we associate with contemporary literary multiculturalism, including Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday, Frank Chin, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Anzaldua. Douglas shows that these more recent writers advocated a literary nationalism that was based on a modified Boasian anthropology and that laid the pluralist grounds for our current conception of literary multiculturalism.

Ultimately, Douglas's unified field theory of multicultural literature brings together divergent African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and Native American literary traditions into one story: of how we moved from thinking about groups as races to thinking about groups as cultures-and then back again.

$118.88

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 384
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 01 May 2009
ISBN 10: 0801447690
ISBN 13: 9780801447693

Media Reviews

Superbly researched and intellectually provocative, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism should be required reading for those interested in multiculturalism. -Choice

A beautifully researched and well-argued analysis, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturism is a must-read for all those devoted to a deeper appreciation of the interpenetration between literary works and the social sciences. -MFS: Modern Fiction Studies

A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism is history of the present in a particularly vivid form. Christopher Douglas takes a familiar phenomenon-the multicultural novel-and shows how it came into existence. One of the many impressive things about this book is Douglas's complete command of the extraordinary range of authors and cultures he addresses. Very few books move as comfortably as this one does among African American, Native American, Chicano, and Asian American literary texts. -Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago

Christopher Douglas has developed a new and exciting way of reading multicultural literatures, arguing for the formation of a literary tradition that is based on a group of authors' engagement with social science theories of race and culture. He draws connections among a wide range of narratives that span most of the twentieth century, tracing patterns of literary and intellectual influence that haven't been fully acknowledged before. Thanks to its original and provocative analysis, this book makes a major contribution to research on ethnic literatures. -Daphne Lamothe, Smith College

Author Bio

Christopher Douglas is Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right and A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism, both from Cornell.