The Ethnic in the Canon; or, On Finding Santa Anna's Wooden Leg

I hope my readers will take more satisfaction than I do in the annals of barbarians --Prescott's reflections on his Conquest of Mexico (Gardiner 157). Stop! I don't wish to hear any more! Almighty God! A member of my body, lost in the service of my country, dragged from the funeral urn, broken into bits to be made sport of in such a barbaric manner! (69). --Santa Anna, The Eagle I don't know what kind of scandal it started in those heady days of MELUS's formation, when Katharine Newman and the rest of the founding members debated the purpose of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States as they crafted the organization's first constitution in 1973, but certainly, what is now Article II, section 4 of the MELUS constitution must have appeared dubious to a group of scholars and teachers tired of canonical American literature and equally frustrated with the absence of multi-ethnic literary studies. After all, MELUS emerged as a reaction against the overemphasis of canonical (i.e. Anglo American) literary studies and proposed instead to expand the American literary tradition by recognizing the significance of ethnic American identity, recovering American literature written in languages others than English, and disseminating scholarship on marginal and minority American writers. It must have come as an afterthought to someone to suggest that the purpose of MELUS should also include examining mainstream literature for its ethnic content. Maybe there were heated debates over the issue; questions over whether or not the proposal was progressive or regressive; the proponent down with the cause or selling it out. Or maybe it passed unanimously, everyone agreeing that in American literature, as with American culture, marginal and mainstream bleed into one another and construct each other by dint of their oppositional complicity. Whatever the case, MELUS's founding members got it right: a society committed to the study of the significance of ethnic American identity must necessarily examine mainstream American literary and cultural production to understand the formative role ethnic and minority subjects play in American national identity. (1) Of course, most of the published work in MELUS's journal has ignored the suspect directive to examine the ethnic content in mainstream literature. Instead, essays on ethnic-authored minority texts fill the recent issues of MELUS and attest to the Society's success at creating, sustaining, and circulating scholarship on ethnic American literature. The proliferation of contemporary ethnic American literary production, its increasing cachet in academic circles and major bookstores, the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers series, the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, and individual editors who have researched and republished long-forgotten ethnic American writing seemingly offer little incentive to return to Cooper's dead Indians, Twain's "nigger" Jim, or Melville's motley crew of minorities for no other reason than cultural critique. Yet the unavoidable presence of racial Others in Anglo American cultural production, to recall Toni Morrison's argument, implicitly and explicitly demonstrates the historical if not colonial connection between Anglo America and marginalized ethnic Americans, certainly explaining why ethnic texts must be recovered from archives in the first place but also indicating the politicized interrelationship between mainstream American identity and its marginal subjects. (Morrison 5-6). Recently, for instance, the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project began the important task of locating, preserving, and republishing scores of Hispanic-authored texts in English and Spanish that would have otherwise remained lost in the oblivion of library and personal holdings. The Project's archival work has extended the history of Hispanic cultural production as tar back as the Spanish colonization of the Americas and has troubled in the process--perhaps unwittingly--the essentialist, nationalist sentiment that US Latina/o literary history works in opposition to Anglo American discourses. …