A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism

The word "multiculturalism" has been heavily theorized in recent decades by historians, social scientists, and cultural critics. Perhaps most reflective of the range of work done on the topic is Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield's anthology, Mapping Multiculturalism (1996), which features essays by writers such as Wahneema Lubiano, Michael Omi, George Lipsitz, and Angela Y. Davis. Christopher Douglas's A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism contributes to the field of multicultural studies by crystallizing the ways ideas from sociology and anthropology have influenced the politics and forms of literature by minority writers in America. Douglas does not philosophize on the meaning of the word "multiculturalism" or theorize on the relationship between pluralism and political recognition (as does Amy Gutmann in her anthology, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition [1994]). Rather, he traces the historical dialogue between literature and the social science traditions that characterizes the term's cultural and political valences. The goal of this approach is to disengage multiculturalism from its reliance on identitarian politics and racial prescription. As Douglas argues, "[T]o the extent that multiculturalism grounds appropriate culture in race (or in any other identity), it reinstalls the disturbing (and faulty) thinking that social being is inherited" (9-10). Such a genealogy exposes the ways in which ideas that laid the groundwork for our current pluralist vision of American society were conceived and applied in practice. Douglas reads his chosen novels vis-à-vis the discourses that mobilized public policy and social movements and influenced how conceptions of race and culture came to govern American social life.

Douglas structures the history of multicultural writings in the United States into three periods by anchoring it in debates surrounding the definitions of race, culture, and identity. Chapter One covers the period spanning the 1920s and 1930s. Douglas describes the study of anthropology during this time as undergoing a paradigm shift from racial to cultural anthropology. Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas pioneered this shift in his attempts to detach culture from race. Douglas shows how Zora Neale Hurston and D'Arcy McNickle, both of whom had done anthropological research in addition to writing fiction, were heavily indebted to Boas's work. Hurston and McNickle viewed African American and Salish cultures, respectively, as wholly separate from dominant white American society, and both espoused anti-assimilationist politics in their writings.

The 1940s, Douglas argues, marks another paradigm shift precipitated by the work of Robert Park and the University of Chicago's Department of Sociology. Park projected the disappearance of minority culture through his studies of modern migration and the stages of acculturation in urban communities. Whereas Boas saw culture as having long-term endurance, Park, observing how communities acculturated within one or two generations, argued that culture changes fairly quickly. Douglas asserts that literary production during this period reflects the growing dominance of Parkian sociology during World War II and the Cold War. The writers Douglas examines in Chapters Two through Four—Richard Wright, Jade Snow Wong, Ralph Ellison, and John Okada—challenged racial mystification by depicting sociological concepts such as the generation gap, the marginal man, and environmental determinism. Douglas also points out that such interweaving of literature and sociology played no small part in enabling the NAACP's successes following the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education.

Douglas characterizes the third period, the mid-1960s to the present, as one of cultural literary nationalism that evolved from Boasian anthropology. He positions novelist and folklorist Américo Paredes as a key figure leading the transition into contemporary literary multiculturalism and follows with discussions of Toni Morrison, Frank Chin, N. Scott Momaday, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Anzaldúa as exemplars of this period's cultural nationalism and its rejection of the assimilationist project of Parkian sociology.

Proposing a "unified field theory" of American multicultural literature (5), Douglas argues for treating African American, Asian American, Native American, and Mexican American literary traditions not as separate entities but as part of a unified field. The book's most provocative insights come from tracing novelists' responses to the literary and political tides of their time, responses that reflect intraracial contestations as well as cross-ethnic affinities. Richard Wright, for example, criticized Zora Neale Hurston's ethnographic depictions in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) for what he saw as racist clichés grounded in minstrel conventions. Hurston in turn criticized Wright's Uncle Tom's Children (1938) for its caricatured portrayal of black oppression in the South. Nearly two decades later, Hurston sounded her apprehensions about Brown v. Board of Education, invoking the trope of the "disappearing Indian" in her warning against the potential consequences of the case's outcome on African American culture. In 1974, Frank Chin et al. overtly modeled the ethos behind Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers after the cultural nationalism of the Black Power movement. In the introduction to John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), Chin praises the novel for repudiating the stereotype of the sojourning (and thus perpetually foreign) Asian. Douglas argues that in doing so, Chin ignores the novel's otherwise assimilationist tendencies. Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye (1970), set in 1941, alludes to psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark's famous doll experiment, which played a key role in the Brown v. Board of Education case. In 1953, a few months before Brown, the State Department sponsored Jade Snow Wong to speak about her novel Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), which was largely received as an ethnography on the assimilation of Asians in America. As disparate as these moments may seem, Douglas contends that they constitute a "unified field theory" that explains the logic of racial symbolism in America as an interlocking web of associations.

By tracing what Douglas terms the "feedback loop," in which authors take up sociological ideas that speak to them and adapt them for their own social agendas, we are able to understand the political reasons that drew writers to anthropology or sociology. Even though the book emphasizes the influence of social science on literature rather than vice versa, it prompts an examination of how literature can influence the social sciences. As Douglas asserts, understanding the deliberate and self-conscious ways individual writers appropriate social and political theory can help de-legitimize social science-based ethnic studies that treat literary work as merely "a kind of data set for proving, illustrating, or disproving social science theory about cultures and their content" (308). In this respect, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism serves as an inspiring model for scholars who aim for more nuanced interdisciplinary research.