The Significance of the “Multi” in “Multiethnic Literatures of the US”

Presidential Address March 2, 2001 MELUS 2001 Conference Knoxville, Tennessee "She starts up the stairs to bed. `Don't get me up with the rest in the morning.' `But I thought you were having midterms.' `Oh, those,' she comes back in, kisses me, and says quite lightly, `in a couple of years when we'll all be atom-dead they won't matter a bit.'" Some of you will no doubt recognize this passage from Tillie Olsen's often-anthologized mother-daughter story, "I Stand Here Ironing." Well, half a century after the publication of the daughter Emily's glum prediction, we're still here. In a way, studying, reading, and writing imaginative literature implicates all of us in Emily's worldview. "Why bother?" outsiders ask us--and at times we ask ourselves. Today, American youth say "AS IF ..."--or, "Do I care?"--to render this point. Obviously, some of us--we "suckers" at this conference, for example--do care. And this is the foundation to build on. As people who believe that literature by ethnic Americans matters, we have the opportunity to challenge Emily's fatalism. Through an act of faith, we can reclaim two syllables in the English language and convert "AS IF" from a dismissal to a promise. We continue to create works of art and to share these creations with others because life has value and we are not "atom-dead." As long as life has value, ethnic literature is valuable--for this body of literature brilliantly captures the life experiences and complex worldviews of a culturally and racially diverse people known as "Americans." I did not find my way back to academia until my mid-thirties, and to the study of multiethnic literatures of the United States until my doctoral dissertation in American studies. The first time around in college I had gravitated toward the newer discipline of comparative literature. At Queens College in New York, I instinctively knew that the English curriculum in literature was hopelessly entrenched--leaving marginalized "searchers" like me no room to expand my thinking. I took shelter in a crossover program that allowed me to include classical Chinese poetry, modern French novels, and seventeenth-century Spanish drama in their original languages. This seemingly eclectic menu taught me respect for the written word; it cultivated my interest in peoples and cultures across time and space. What was also built into the field of comparative literature, however, was the notion that American literature was a poor relation of "great world literature." Europe was often equated with "the world," and white male writers and professors were assumed to be--by birthright--unequivocally "great." After a progressively alienating couple of years toward a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I dropped out of academia. So here I am at the dawning of the new millennium, back in academia and the president of MELUS. Having served the first year of my three-year term, what would I like to say to all of you who made the effort to be here today? Well, presenting my argument for an ethical approach to the study of American literature is a start. As a multicultural, multiracial society, our literary productions are both culture-specific and nation-bound. Emphasizing ethnicity--as MELUS does--is decidedly a political stance. We should not take our academic positioning lightly. I submit that when we use the term "multiethnic," we should mean it. "Multiethnic" means that our separately categorized ethnic identities--be they African American, Latino/a, American Indian, or whatever--should be approached cross-culturally. Each of us is a member of at least one ethnic community that embraces other ethnicities, thereby moving all of us past the "us" against "them" habit of thought. The model of multiethnicity undercuts balkanization. In announcing the theme of this year's conference the MELUS call for papers asked the question: "What is the relationship between the literature of particular ethnic groups and the broader study of multiethnic literature, and what are the possible tensions? …