American Multicultaralism

Topic:- “ AMERICAN MULTICULTARALISM ”

Name:- Chauhan Sejal Arunbhai

Subject:- The Cultural Studies

Paper:- 8

Roll No:- 28                                                                                    

M.A. Part- I Sem - II

Year:- 2013-15

Submitted to :- Dr.Dilip Barad

M.K.Bhavanagar University .

                      “ AMERICAN MULTICULTURALISM “

We know that five types of Cultural Studies.

 

Lets have look on American Multiculturalism.

        In 1965 the Watts race riots drew worldwide attention. The civil Rights Act had passed in 1964, and the backlash was well under way in 1965: murders and other atrocities attended the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. President Lyndon Johnson signed the voting Rights Act. The “long, hot summer” of 1966 saw violent insurrections in Newark, Detroit, Clevelond, Chicago, Milwaukee, Atlanta, San Francisco the very television seemed ablaze. The Black Panther Party was founded. James Meredith, the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, was wounded by a white segregationist. Julian Bond, duly elected State Representative, was denied his seat in the Georgia House. Nearly all African American students in the South attended segregated school, and discrimination was still unquestioned in most industries. Interracial marriage was still illegal in many states.

       Now, nearly a half century later, evolving identities of racial and ethnic groups have not only claimed a place in the mainstream of American life, but have challenged the very notion of “race”, more and more seen by social scientists as a construct invented by whites to assign social status and privilege, without scientific relevance. Unlike sex, for which there are x and y chromosomes, race has no genetic markers . In fact, a 1972 Harvard University study by the geneticist Richard Lewontin found that most genetic differences were within racial groups, not between them. In the new century, if interracial trends continue, Americans will be puzzled by race distinctions from the past since children of multiracial backgrounds may be the norm rather than the exception. And given the huge influx of Mexican Americans into the United States over the last fifty years, immigration patterns indicate that by the year 2050 Anglo-Americans will no longer be the majority, nor English necessarily the most widely spoken language. Administrators of the Census faced multiple problems with its assignment of racial categories, for many biracial or multiracial people did not identify with any of them.

•                 Henry Louis Gates, uses the word “race” only in quotation marks , for it “pretends to be an objective term of classification”, but it is a “dangerous trope……of ultimate, irreducible difference between culture, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which more often than not also have fundamentally apposed economic interests “. Without biological criteria “race” is arbitrary: “ Yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of natural differences into our formulations. To do so is a pernicious act of language , one which exacerbates the complex problem of cultural or ethnic difference rather than to assuage or redress it “ “Race” is still a critical feature of American life , full of contradictions and ambiguities; it is at once the greatest source of social conflict and the richest source of cultural development in America. American Multicultuarlism

•         Latina/o Writers

•         African Indian Literatures

•         Asian American Writers

1.     AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITERS:-

African American studies is widely pursued in American literary criticism, from the recovery of eighteenth century poets such as Phillis Weatley to the experimental novels of Toni Morrison. In shadow and Act novelist Ralph Ellison argued that any

             “ Viable theory of Negro American Culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole.” 

African American writing often displays a folkloric conception of humankind; a “double consciousness”, as W.E.B.DuBois called it arising from bicultural identity; irony, parody, tragedy, and bitter comedy in negotiating this ambivalence; attacks upon presumed white culture superiority; a naturalistic focus on survival; and inventive reframing of language itself, as in language games like “jiving”, “sounding”, “signifying”, “playing the dozens”, and rapping. These practices symbolically characterize “the group’s attempt to humanize the world “, as Ellison puts it. Ellison urged black writers to trust their own experiences and definitions of reality. He also upheld folklore as a source of creativity; it was what “ black people had before they knew there was such a thing as art.” This elevation of black folk culture to art is important, and it led to divisions among black artists; for example, Zara Neale Hurston’s reliance upon folklore and dialect annoyed some of her fellow artists of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, who wished to distance themselves from such “roots” and embrace the new international forms available in literary modernism.

Bernard Bell review some primary features of African American

 writing and compares values systems:

              “ Traditional white American values emanate from a providential vision of history and of Euro-Americans as a chosen people, a vision that sanctions their individual and collective freedom in the pursuit of property, profit, and happiness. Radical Protestantism, Constitutional democracy, and industrial capitalism are the white American trinity of values. In contrast, black American values emanate from a cyclical, Judeo-Christian vision of history and of African-Americans as a disinherited, colonized people, a vision that sanctions their resilience of spirit and pursuit of social justice.

                A Chosen People. It is a great historical irony that black Americans adopted the same metaphor of the Hebrew people being led into a promised Land of freedom that was earlier employed by the first white settlers in Virginia and New England, especially the puritans who were fleeing religious intolerance. It is a further irony that their descendants turned to slavery and other exploitative economic systems to make their promise come even truer. As Bell correctly stresses, no other ethnic or social group in America has shared anything like the experience of American blacks: Kidnapping, the Middle Passage, Slavery, Southern Plantation life, emancipation. Reconstruction and past Reconstruction, Northern migration, urbanization, and ongoing racism .

            Out of such painful Cultural origins evolved African American literature, which may be divided into several major periods, comprising,  colonial, Antebellum, Reconstruction, Pre-World War I Harlem Renaissance Naturalism and Modernism, and Contemporary. Some of the most widely taught writers of the earlier periods include Harriet E.Wilson, whose our Nig: or sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story white House, North was the first novel published by an African American; Linda Brent, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, author of Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted Wilson’s and Bront’s heroines must fight merely to survive; Harper’s confronts the dilemma of a light skinned mulatta “passing as white. At the turn of the century the novel of Charles Waddell Chesnutt heralded a turn toward Naturalism but also made use of traditional folk elements; his novel of the Wilmington race riots, The Marrow of Tradition, indicts white hypocrisy and cowardice. Chesnutt was remarkable in his incisive understandings of the troubled intersections of race and gender in the south.  

The Harlem Renaissance signaled a tremendous upsurge in black culture, with an especial interest in primitivist art. The so-called New Negroes, whom Hurston sarcastically dubbled the “ Niggerati”, celebrated black Culture Hughes, and others including countee  Cullen were the center of literary life and black culture in the New York of the Roaring Twenties.

2.Latina/o Writers:-

         Latina/o Hisponic Mexican American Puerto Rican Nuyorican Chicano or may be I Juichol or Maya. Which names to use? The choice often has political implications.

         We will use the term “ Latina/o” to indicate a broad sense of ethnicity among Spanish speaking people in the United States Mexican Americans are the largest and most influential group of Latina/o ethnicities in the United States.

         Though there is of course no one Culture that can accurately be described as Latina/o, the diversity of Spanish Speaking peoples with different origins, nationalities, religious , skin colors Class , identifications, politics, and varying names for themselves has had an enormous impact upon “American” Culture since its beginnings. These characteristics are now rapidly entering the mainstream of everyday life, so that “American Literature” and “American Studies” are now referred to as “ Literature of the Americas” “ Studies of the Americas”. Republicans and Democrats vigorously court the “ Hispamic Vote “ like never before, and Latinalos are reflected at an unprecedented rate in the arts, broadcasting, and entertainment. This is also true of literature and film, as the phenomenal careers of Sandra Cisneros and Robert Rodriguez, show. Cisneros, of San Antonia, rose to national fame with her first book, The House on Mango Street, the story of a young girl growning up in a Chicago barrio. Mango Street was published by a then relatively obscure press in Houston called Arte public, now a major publisher of Latina/o books Rodriguez, an Austin, Texas, resident, has made award winning films from El Mariachi to Spy Kids.

          The history of the indigenous Cultures of the new world is punctuated by conquests by Indian nation; European countries , especially Spain, Portugal, France, and England; then by the United States. Over time, there emerged in former Spanish possersions a mestizo Literary Culture in addition to the Colonial and native Cultures.

          What would become Mexican American Literature developed through combinations of Spanish with indigenous art forms to create new  folk Cultures and literatures.

           The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s meant renewed Mexican American political awareness and artistic production World War II had greatly accelerated the process of Mexican American acculturation. Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, perhaps the best known Latino novel, focuses on the impact of World War II on a small community in New Mexican with their academic training in Spanish and Latin American literatures, Rolando Hinojosa- Smith and Tomas Rivera wrote primarily in Spanish and frequently in estampas, or sketches, sometimes only a few paragraphs in length. Two other key contributors to Latin fiction are Oscar Zeta Acosta, author of the Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), and Richard Rodriguez., author of the memoir Hunger of Memory (1981), and more recently a commentator on PBS’S News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

American Indian Literatures:- 

           In predominantly oral cultures , storytelling passes on religious beliefs, moral values, political codes, and practical lessons of everyday life. For American Indians, stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro- Americans.           

          Again, a word on names: Native American seems to be the term preferred by most academics and many tribal members, who find the term Indian a misnomer and stereotype as ion “ Cowboys and Indians” or “ Indians giver” that helped whites wrest the continent away from indigenous people. And yet “ American Indian , as demonstrated in the names of such organizations as the American Indian Movement (AIM) or the Association for the study of American Indian Literatures (ASAIL), as Alan R. Velie notes 3. The best names to use would be those of the hundreds of tribes, with an awareness of their differing languages, beliefs, and customs, confusingly lumped together as “ Indian ”. Just as most Europeans identity themselves as French or Dutch or Basque rather than “ European” , so too American Indian identities are tribal.

             Two types of Indian Literature have evolved as fields of study. Traditional Indian Literature includes tales, songs, and oratory that have existed on the North American continent for centuries, composed in tribal languages and performed for tribal audiences, such as the widely studied Winnebago Trickster cycle. Today, traditional literatures are composed in English as well. Mainstream Indian literature refers to works written by Indians in English in the traditional genres of fiction, poetry, and autobiography .Traditional literature was and is oral; because the Indian tribes did not have written language, European newcomers assumed they had no literature, but as Velie observes, this would be like assuming that the Greek of the Iliad and the Odyssey had no literature either, far from the stereotype of the mute Indian, American Indians created the first American literatures.

4. Asian American Writers:-

              Asian American literature is written by people of Asian descent in the United States, addressing the experience of living in a society that views then as alien. Asian immigrants were denied citizenship as late as the 1950s. Edward said has written of orientalism, or the tendency to objectify and exoticize Asians, and their work has sought to respond to such stereotyping. Asian American writers Include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Polynesian, and many other peoples of Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Pacific. These cultures

Present a bewildering allay of languages, religions, social structures, and skin colors, and so the category is even more broad and artificial than Latina/o or American Indian. Furthermore some Asian American writers are relatively new arrivals in the United States, while other trace their American forebears for generations, as Mexican Americans do. Names can get trickly here too: people with the same record of residence and family in the United States might call themselves Chinese, Chinese American, Amer-Asian,  or none of the above. In Hawali the important distinction is not so much ethnicity as being “local” versus haole (white).

              Asian American literature can be said to have begun around the turn of the twentieth century, primarily with autobiographical “paper son” stories and “confessions”. Paper son stories were carefully fabricated for Chinese immigrant men to make the authorities believe that their New World sponsors were really their fathers. Each tale had to provide consistent information on details of their fictitious village life together confessions were elicited from Chinese women rescued by missionaries from prostitution in California’s booming mining towns and migrant labor camps. A later form of this was the “ Picture bride” story, writer by Asian women seeking American husbands.

                Asian American autobiography inherited there descriptive strategies, as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Women Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) illustrates. This book at first caused confusion in the Chinese American, Literary community: was it a subtle critique of its narrator, or an unapologetic description of what it fells like for her to grow up a Chinese American Women. The fact that it was sold as nonfiction supported the latter notion. The liminality of genre here is significant. Identity may be individually known within but s not always at home in the outward community.

               Thus, here we see that brief information about American Multiculturalism.