A Survey of Multicultural San Francisco Bay Literature, 1955-1979: Ishmael Reed, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, and the Beat Generation (review)

"San Francisco is a city where people are never more abroad than when they are at home" said Benjamin F. Taylor. This statement is surely fitting for Brian Flota's A Survey of Multicultural San Francisco Bay Literature, 1955-1979, a book that establishes the Bay Area as a meeting ground for a multicultural milieu of writers whose work—much of which dealt with issues of race and heritage—was a challenge to the hegemonic "imagined community" of the era (27). Though the Golden City may call to mind Jack London, Mark Twain, and John Steinbeck, Flota here surveys a cadre of writers outside of the canon, writers who, he states, "brought an outsider's view to an outsider's city" (106).

San Francisco may also summon visions of bongos, berets, and Beats (the pejorative "beatnik" was coined there by columnist Herb Caen after all), yet Flota goes beyond the standard retelling of the events—the Six Gallery Reading, the "Howl" obscenity trial—that united the East Coast Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg) with the Bay Area poets (Rexroth, McClure, Snyder) by teasing out the multicultural, inclusive heart of the two distinct movements that marked the Beat Generation's coalescence and rise to prominence. "The Beats," Flota writes, "moved the literati from academia into coffee shops, bars, and clubs, setting the parameters for a more inclusive (and multiculturalist) American literary culture" (62). Yet the Beats also tended to romanticize and simplify the struggles "ethnic others" faced—Kerouac's depiction of Mexican cotton pickers and black jazz musicians in On the Road (1957) is certainly evidence of this. Nonetheless, Flota maintains that Beat writers "laid the groundwork necessary for a more ... inclusive multiculturalist literary scene in the Bay Area" (20).

Flota follows with a fascinating disquisition on how the father of bebop, Charlie "Bird" Parker, inspired Kerouac, Bob Kaufman, and Ishmael Reed and how each writer appropriated Parker's artistic rebelliousness and mutability as well as his yen for improvisation (Bird also makes appearances in their works). Each revered Bird—a musical multiculturalist himself, at home with Shostakovitch as much as Ellington—for his ability to transcend the scope of traditional jazz music and overcome cultural barriers in Jim Crow America with an ease they hoped to emulate in their respective writings.

Multicultural San Francisco Bay Literature truly comes into its own when Flota turns the discussion to figures such as Reed (Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down [1969]), José Antonio Villarreal (Pocho [1970]), Frank Chin (The Chickencoop Chinaman [1971]), and Maxine Hong Kingston (Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book [1989]). Flota goes deep here, exploring how these writers reflected the idiosyncrasies and difficulties of intercultural exchanges among their respective cultures and white cultural preeminence. His chapter on Reed's disavowal of racial chauvinism through novels and poems that embrace everything from hoodoo to Egyptology to cowboys to circus performers is especially well worth the attention of scholars of the multicultural West.

Flota seems to be of the same mind as Reed, for Multicultural San Francisco Bay Literature is a sharp rejoinder to those who practice a similar chauvinism regarding the American literary canon. His book provides vital insight into a lively regional movement that reflected real America: a multifaceted, multicultural community with something to say.