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

307 In Imperceptible Mutabilities, the Naturalist sets loose some giant fake cockroaches, equipped with hidden cameras, in the kitchen of two African Americans. Gathering data about his subjects,he imagines the act of observation as itself invisible to his research group. The point of such knowledge will occur to “an inquisitive observer”:how do these minority subjects fit into American modernity? Problematically, “our subjects”devote a good deal of their “natural”conversation to discussing the abnormal size of the cockroaches, and how they strangely do not run when threatened. Parks captures the modern social science fantasy of being able to “observe the object of study—unobserved”(27) while the minority object acts “naturally,”as though the observer were not there. “Wonder what I’d look like if no one was lookin,” one such object wonders (28). While a certain vein of postmodern social science no longer imagines the observing act as having no effect on the observed culture or its subjects, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism has established the constitutive observational feedback loop between the social sciences and the multicultural literatures of the United States. Literary authors read,studied,and sometimes wrote the very social science concerned with cultural others—ethnography, anthropology, and sociology—that, like the Naturalist, has imagined itself, as an act and as a discipline, to be invisible to its subjects. Likewise, that social  Conclusion The Multicultural Complex and the Incoherence of Literary Multiculturalism THE NATURALIST: Thus behave our subjects naturally. Thus behave our subjects when they believe we cannot see them when they believe us far far away when they believe our backs have turned. Now. An obvious question should arise in the mind of an inquisitive observer? Yes? HHH. How should we best accommodate the presence of such subjects in our modern world? —Suzan-Lori Parks, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, 1995 (29) 308 A GENEALOGY OF LITERARY MULTICULTURALISM science has sometimes used literary texts as though they were “natural” acts by the objects of study,as happened with Morrison’s Bluest Eye and Wright’s Native Son. But even when the very circularity of use is not so evident,I have shown that social science ideas were always part of the intellectual fabric of race and culture that helped constitute American literary multiculturalism as it developed in the twentieth century. It is therefore deeply problematic for the social sciences and ethnic studies to use the literary texts that they helped make conceptually possible to substantiate either an idea about “culture,” or what minority cultural values or practices might really be or—worse—mean. Social science and ethnic studies may use literary texts as evidence for particular conceptions of culture or as the content of culture,but this data sample is thoroughly muddied. Literary writers, especially racialized or ethnic ones, have long been using social science research as an intellectual resource. What I have offered here is not only a theory of influence—whereby African American, Asian American, Native American, and Mexican American authors read and so were shaped by social science ideas—but also a theory of articulation within a feedback loop,whereby authors seemed to take up ideas that already spoke to them, and then powerfully changed, and sometimes misread, those ideas which then sometimes became the fodder for further social science. They took, in other words, what they needed, and sometimes that formal or informal training conferred powerful benefits for their work. When we try to figure out what drew these writers to anthropology or sociology, what is at stake is not merely biographical sequence and in which phase the writers wrote, but that there were personal, aesthetic, and political reasons that drew the writers into productive relationships with social science discourse, such that it gave them, as Hurston put it, a “spyglass” with which to look at the self and at one’s community. The feedback loop describes the individuals and the trajectory of multicultural American literature in the twentieth century as a whole: that mid-century writers used and were energized by social science concepts of culture that were in turn partly invented or inspired by social scientists’ exploration of “literary” texts like folklore, myths, life writing of immigrants, or novels about urban life. Recognizing this circuit delegitimizes the contemporary social science–based ethnic studies practice of treating literary work as a kind of data set for proving,illustrating , or disproving social science theory about cultures and their content. It is not that anthropology’s “spyglass” was a pair...

Share