A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism (review)

Christopher Douglas’s A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism has already garnered diverse praise—from glowing reviews in Modern Fiction Studies and MELUS to a position on Choice’s 2009 list of “Outstanding Academic Titles.” Reviewers have been attracted by Douglas’s promise of a “unified field theory” of his title subject and by the wide sweep of his narrative, which attempts to cover close to a century and addresses African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and Native American literatures (5). They have also been deeply—and rightly—impressed by the book’s innovative interdisciplinarity.

Douglas’s framework focuses on locating “a constitutive feedback loop between the social sciences and the multicultural literatures of the United States,” one in which “even when the very circularity of use is not so evident . . . social science ideas were always part of the intellectual fabric of race and culture that constitute American literary multiculturalism” (307–08). He articulates three phrases in the development of this loop: an “anthropologically enabled culturalist literature” of the 1920s and 1930s embodied, albeit sometimes critically, in works by writers like Zora Neale Hurston and D’Arcy McNickle (as well as, decades later and in ways both residual and anticipatory, Americo Paredes); a “sociologically enabled assimilationist and integrationist literature” that displaced earlier approaches, dominating the field between roughly 1940 and 1965 and including works by writers like Richard Wright, Jade Snow Wong, Ralph Ellison, and John Okada; and a literature of “cultural nationalism enabled by a return to anthropology” advanced by authors such as Toni Morrison, Frank Chin, N. Scott Momaday, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Anzaldúa (250).

At the heart of the first two phases, Douglas asserts, is a set of differences between the senses of culture and race advanced by anthropologist Franz Boas and the Chicago school of sociology led by Robert Ezra Park—differences that Douglas argues deeply shaped “minority” literatures. Douglas highlights Boas’s separation of “culture” as a category from biological senses of race and his emphasis on “pluralism, relativism, and historical particularity” that fought against both nativism and amateur anthropology’s obsession with evolutionary “progress” (202). Park, in direct contrast, focused on “modern migration, stages of acculturation in the urban melting pot, and cultural assimilation” that flattened or destroyed difference, even though color presented a unique problem for such (4). Sometimes the ties between literature and these social science constructions were direct and clear, as in Hurston’s work for and with Boas, and Wright’s contact with Park and company; more often, Douglas tracks down less obvious traces of engagement in authors’ biographies, contexts, and texts. Douglass argues that third-phase multiculturalism both rejects the second phase’s “minority assimilation” and (re)turns to many of Boas’s principles, even as it “undoes” a key piece of them by “reattaching culture to race,” making possible “the treatment of culture as a kind of identity and the object of ambition” (202). Douglas is especially critical of this final phase, which he sees, invoking Walter Benn Michaels, as thoroughly identitarian and so focused on a “kind of imagined revivalism,” so “deeply conservative in politics” that it “distract[s] us from material conditions and questions of redistribution” (323–24).

Douglas’s careful consideration of the dialogues on race and culture between social science practitioners and select authors in various “minority” traditions is both rare in contemporary criticism and quite useful, as are many of his less-common forays into broader sociopolitical questions—from the State Department’s sponsorship of an Asian tour by Wong to connections between the social science/literature nexus and the legal strategies and language surrounding Brown v. Board of Education. Through this novel work, Douglas offers not only a way of rethinking the conflicts between Hurston and Wright, but also a careful reconsideration of Hurston’s later anti-Brown stance; not only a persuasive rereading of Okada’s Cold War politics, but also a deep challenge to contemporary invocations and appropriations of No-No Boy; and not only a sense of the pre-Alice Walker...