Multiculturalism in American Literature

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In 1975, the African-American writer Ishmael Reed put culture at the center of politics: “If I have you revering my art, behaving like me and adopting my psychology, then I’ve got you. If I’ve got your head, I’ve got you.” Confronted with the whiteness of U.S. publishing and school curricula, Reed and his peers saw literature as a key front in this broader struggle over the making and unmaking of American identity. Yet the question of literature’s contribution to the struggle elicited stark disagreement. Would it counter racial stereotype with accurate representation or refuse the burden of racial representativeness? Would it lay claim to the American nation on behalf of the racially minoritized, or throw in with different political horizons? Would it address the white reader unfamiliar with the realities of racial oppression, or the non-white reader seeking a different relation to histories already lived? These disagreements would only intensify in the following decades as the call for multicultural representation became increasingly institutionalized – with syllabi and publishing undergoing modest diversification, and universities framing racial difference as a strategic asset. Moving from the late 20th century to the present, our course attends to how these political ambitions and desires informed the writing, publishing, and teaching of American literature by writers of color. It asks how these authors not only engaged in activism by literary means, but also reckoned with the artistic and political dilemmas that attended this doubled pursuit. To this end, the bulk of our readings will draw from literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including authors like Gloria Anzaldua, Paul Beatty, Maxine Hong Kingston, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Wendy Trevino.