In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism
  • Elizabeth Ammons
American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism. By Molly Crumpton Winter. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2007. 216 pp. Cloth, $36.50.

Molly Crumpton Winter groups four writers—Mary Antin, Zitkala Ša, Sutton Griggs, and Sui Sin Far—to argue persuasively for the centrality of ethnic texts in American literature at the turn into the twentieth century. While calling the four a cross section, and therefore an illuminating field for her inquiry into ethnic writing during the period, Winter is also careful not to homogenize. She emphasizes that no single writer can speak for an entire community and addresses directly the contrasts among the four, particularly with reference to their exploration of ethnic identity and national citizenship. At the same time, she is not afraid to offer some broad and very useful generalizations, such as her observation that the perspectives of these writers, along with other ethnic writers of the time, anticipate developments in racial theory only now becoming widely current in the United States.

American Narratives is refreshingly free of academic lumber yet thoroughly scholarly. Winter mentions theorists (Bhabha, Said, Bakhtin) but is not driven by them. She includes historical and literary historical contexts yet does not let either overwhelm her textual analyses. She recognizes other critics' readings of texts from time to time but does not get caught up in tedious disputes (appearing nowadays, more often than not, in copious, labored footnotes). The result is a highly readable book that helpfully foregrounds the primary texts themselves.

In Winter's view, issues of assimilation, integration, and citizenship link the work of ethnic writers at the turn into the twentieth century, even as the positions of the individual writers differ considerably. American Narratives breaks from the pack to make a strong case for respecting Mary Antin's endorsement of assimilation, stresses Zitkala Ša's profound ambivalence on the subject, describes Sutton Griggs' effort to balance African American racial solidarity with national affiliation, and investigates Sui Sin Far's employment of "selective acculturation," a strategy that Winter believes [End Page 184] effectively countered white racist charges of Asian unassimilability. Only a few things detract. The appendix listing ethnic-focused texts of the era is deficient in not mentioning easy-to-find reissues of many of the items, and the chapter on Zitkala Ša lacks sufficient attention to the psychic and physical violence of the Indian boarding schools. The book's merits outweigh such problems, however. American Narratives provides an excellent introduction to the four authors discussed and to the idea that American realism must be conceptualized as a multiracial construct.

Elizabeth Ammons
Tufts University
...

pdf

Share