The activist tradition in American literature has long testified to the power of words to change people and the power of people to change the world, yet in recent years many professional humanists ...have chosen to distract themselves with a postmodern fundamentalism of indeterminacy and instability rather than engage with social and political issues. Throughout her bold and provocative call to action, Elizabeth Ammons argues that the responsibility now facing humanists is urgent: inside and outside academic settings, they need to revive the liberal arts as a progressive cultural force that offers workable ideas and inspiration in the real-world struggle to achieve social and environmental justice.Brave New Wordschallenges present and future literary scholars and teachers to look beyond mere literary critique toward the concrete issue of social change and how to achieve it. Calling for a profound realignment of thought and spirit in the service of positive social change, Ammons argues for the continued importance of multiculturalism in the twenty-first century despite attacks on the concept from both right and left. Concentrating on activist U.S. writers-from ecocritics to feminists to those dedicated to exposing race and class biases, from Jim Wallis and Cornel West to Winona LaDuke and Paula Moya and many others-she calls for all humanists to link their work to the progressive literature of the last half century, to insist on activism in the service of positive change as part of their mission, and to teach the power of hope and action to their students.As Ammons clearly demonstrates, much of American literature was written to expose injustice and motivate readers to work for social transformation. She challenges today's academic humanists to address the issues of hope and purpose by creating a practical activist pedagogy that gives students the knowledge to connect their theoretical learning to the outside world. By relying on the transformative power of literature and replacing nihilism and powerlessness with conviction and faith, the liberal arts can offer practical, useful inspiration to everyone seeking to create a better world.
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.
InA 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 Anzaldúa. 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.
In Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global
Mobility, Arianna Dagnino analyzes a new type of literature
emerging from artists increased movement and cultural flows spawned
by ...globalization. This "transcultural" literature is produced by
authors who write across cultural and national boundaries and who
transcend in their lives and creative production the borders of a
single culture. Dagninos book contains a creative rendition of
interviews conducted with five internationally renowned writersInez
Baranay, Brian Castro, Alberto Manguel, Tim Parks, and Ilija
Trojanowand a critical exegesis reflecting on thematical, critical,
and stylistical aspects.
By studying the selected authors corpus of work, life
experiences, and cultural orientations, Dagnino explores the
implicit, often subconscious, process of cultural and imaginative
metamorphosis that leads transcultural writers and their
fictionalized characters beyond ethnic, national, racial, or
religious loci of identity and identity formation. Drawing on the
theoretical framework of comparative cultural studies, she offers
insight into transcultural writing related to belonging, hybridity,
cultural errancy, the "Other," worldviews, translingualism,
deterritorialization, neonomadism, as well as genre, thematic
patterns, and narrative techniques. Dagnino also outlines the
implications of transcultural writing within the wider context of
world literature (s) and identifies some of the main traits that
characterize transcultural novels.
Migration is both a demographic and a cultural phenomenon. As such, it both reshapes the global village and subverts the all-encompassing vision of the city, a space split between the blending of all ...new cultures and the need felt by many migrants to maintain their traditions and thereby contribute to a multicultural mosaic. This series of essays explores how the concepts of the melting-pot and the mosaic have shaped the representation of Paris and Montreal in francophone literatures. Migran.
Multicultural Comics: FromZap toBlue Beetleis the first comprehensive look at comic books by and about race and ethnicity. The thirteen essays tease out for the general reader the nuances of how such ...multicultural comics skillfully combine visual and verbal elements to tell richly compelling stories that gravitate around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality within and outside the U.S. comic book industry. Among the explorations of mainstream and independent comic books are discussions of the work of Adrian Tomine, Grant Morrison, and Jessica Abel as well as Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan'sThe Tomb of Dracula; Native American Anishinaabe-related comics; mixed-media forms such as Kerry James Marshall's comic-book/community performance; DJ Spooky's visual remix of classic film; the role of comics in India; and race in the early Underground Comix movement. The collection includes a "one-stop shop" for multicultural comic book resources, such as archives, websites, and scholarly books. Each of the essays shows in a systematic, clear, and precise way how multicultural comic books work in and of themselves and also how they are interconnected with a worldwide tradition of comic-book storytelling.
Introduces an array of fiction and poetry, examining how writers from Africa, Australasia, the Caribbean, Canada, Ireland, and South Asia have engaged with the challenges that beset postcolonial ...societies. Discusses many of the most-studied works of postcolonial literature, fromDisgrace, throughThings Fall AparttoWhite Teeth.
This study contributes to the current cosmopolitan debate by highlighting equal recognition and inclusion as a viable social engagement towards diversity, through which dominator binary rankings are ...transcended by valuing mutually empathic relationships. Set against the backdrop of Gandhi's Freedom Movement, Water pushes the boundaries of India's male-dominant cultural narratives beyond patriarchal predicaments by questioning the religious tradition and the oppressive constraints imposed on Hindu widows. By applying Riane Eisler's 'partnership model' to the analysis of the novel, with a brief reference to Deepa Mehta's homonymous film, I explore how Sidhwa's characters move toward more caring and life-enhancing scenarios by portraying relationships of mutual support, thus overcoming the rigid discourses imposed by dominator hierarchies.
By analyzing its position within the struggles for recognition and reception of different national and ethnic cultural groups, this book offers a bold new picture of Israeli literature. Through ...comparative discussion of the literatures of Palestinian citizens of Israel, of Mizrahim, of migrants from the former Soviet Union, and of Ethiopian-Israelis, the author demonstrates an unexpected richness and diversity in the Israeli literary scene, a reality very different from the monocultural image that Zionism aspired to create. Drawing on a wide body of social and literary theory, Mendelson-Maoz compares and contrasts the literatures of the four communities she profiles. In her discussion of the literature of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, she presents the question of language and translation, and she provides three case studies of particular authors and their reception. Her study of Mizrahi literature adopts a chronological approach, starting in the 1950s and proceeding toward contemporary Mizrahi writing, while discussing questions of authenticity and self-determination. The discussion of Israeli literature written by immigrants from the former Soviet Union focuses both on authors who write Israeli literature in Russian and of Russian immigrants writing in Hebrew. The final section of the book provides a valuable new discussion of the work of Ethiopian-Israeli writers, a group whose contributions have seldom been previously acknowledged. The picture that emerges from this groundbreaking book replaces the traditional, homogeneous historical narrative of Israeli literature with a diversity of voices, a multiplicity of origins, and a wide range of different perspectives. In doing so, it will provoke researchers in a wide range of cultural fields to look at the rich traditions that underlie it in new and fresh ways.
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