A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism

Introduction: Multiculturalism’s Cultural Revolution

1 A spectacular articulation of our current paradigm of multiculturalism comes at the end of Barbara Kingsolver’s 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible. Its occasion is a visit, by the three surviving and reunited Price sisters, to the royal palace at Abomey, the ancient seat of the kingdom of Dahomey, now a UNESCO world heritage site and a famous tourist attraction. One of its kings constructed his section of the palace with slaves’ blood rather than water in the mud walls; he was also buried with forty-one of his wives—that is, he was buried dead but they alive. For one sister, the reactionary Rachel, this and the use of “the skulls of their favorite enemies” (480) as building material are just more indications of African brutality and savagery, and as she points out to Leah, such brutality preexisted European invasion. But Leah (the most sympathetic sister, who has gone native) and, we are to suppose, Kingsolver, are reluctant to criticize such practices, and their reluctance is based on cultural relativism: that “we couldn’t possibly understand what their social milieu was, before the Portuguese came”(489). “You just can’t assume that what’s right or wrong for us is the same as what was right or wrong for them,”she continues,in a nice summary of this constitutive principle of multiculturalism (490). In this and other instances, The Poisonwood Bible is one sign of multiculturalism ’s triumph at the end of the twentieth century. But this example also reveals the paradigm’s roots in the anthropological formulation of the culture Introduction Multiculturalism’s Cultural Revolution 2 A GENEALOGY OF LITERARY MULTICULTURALISM concept at the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, the white Kingsolver drew both this relativist lesson and its example of the palace of skulls directly from an African American anthropologist writing sixty years before. That anthropologist heard this palace described by Cudjo Lewis, one of the last Africans to be brought to slavery in America in 1859, when he recalled his capture by the kingdom of Dahomey and his forced march to its capital. As the palace is glossed, The skulls of the slaughtered were not wasted either. The King had his famous Palace of Skulls. The Palace grounds had a massive gate of skull-heads. The wall surrounding the grounds were built of skulls.You see,the Kings of Dahomey were truly great and mighty and a lot of skulls were bound to come out of their ambitions. While it looked awesome and splendid to him and his warriors, the sight must have been most grewsome and crude to western eyes. Imagine a Palace of Hindu or Zulu skulls in London! Or Javanese skulls in The Hague! What you think of the palace will depend on where you stand culturally: it will be either “awesome and splendid” or “grewsome and crude.” Cultures generate values, according to this point of cultural relativism, and neither culture should pretend to objectively or universally judge another’s practices . The anthropologist who recorded Cudjo Lewis’s tale was Zora Neale Hurston,1 and her lesson of cultural relativism was that established by her mentor, Franz Boas, as a founding plank in cultural anthropology, and, this book will show, literary multiculturalism in the United States. It is a mark of literary multiculturalism’s success and anthropology’s theoretical underpinning of its project,that Barbara Kingsolver a half century later has learned its lesson—perhaps, I shall suggest, too rigidly. A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism is about the development and triumph of literary multiculturalism as it was formed through a circuit of articulation between the social sciences and minority literary writers in the middle of the twentieth century. The primary contribution that social science offered these mid-century writers was a comprehensive concept of culture to replace the destroyed notion of race. It was Franz Boas, the famous Columbia University anthropologist, who effected both. He conducted a decades-long assault on the scientific basis of racial thought, putting in its place a concept of group differences as not immutable, genetically inherited, natural, and hierarchical, but rather as malleable, learned, conventionally arbitrary, and relative. That move allowed the writers examined in this book to redescribe their difference from white America as cultural, not racial. Boas developed a model of culture as something that endured over long periods of time; that INTRODUCTION 3 had to be understood and evaluated holistically...