A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism by Douglas Christopher;

Author:Douglas, Christopher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8014-5728-9
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

CHAPTER 6

Toni Morrison, Frank Chin, and Cultural Nationalisms, 1965–1975

When Wright placed Bigger Thomas and Mr. Dalton in a northern setting and pointed up the fact that Bigger’s condition resulted from Dalton’s hypocrisy, he opened a Pandora’s box of problems for white liberals and Negro leaders, neither of whom could bring themselves to share his vision. [. . .] This liberal ideology—both social and literary—of the northern Daltons has [recently] become the primary target of the Afro-American writer and critic.

—Addison Gayle Jr., The Black Aesthetic, 1971 (xix)

Américo Paredes’s anthropology was a residual formation during the integrationist second phase of racialized minority literature (1940–1965), but it also anticipated the turn to anthropology’s culture characteristic of the cultural nationalisms developed in the following decade, nationalisms that went on to lay the foundations for our current paradigm of literary multiculturalism. As I will show in these next four chapters, these cultural nationalisms in the African American, Asian American, Native American, and Chicano traditions were instantiated through a double gesture of refuting assimilationist sociology and returning to the Boasian principles of cultural anthropology that had enabled authors like Zora Neale Hurston, D’Arcy McNickle, and Américo Paredes. These refutations and returns were frequently explicit, as writers and intellectuals in the four traditions overtly contested the integrationist assimilationism that had come before, but they were also sometimes covert, with lines of influence and circuits of articulation that can be traced nonetheless.

This chapter examines the cultural nationalisms developed in the African American and Asian American literary traditions. The first section looks at Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye in conjunction with Addison Gayle’s 1971 collection The Black Aesthetic; together with Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (addressed in chapter eight), they form a constellation of African American literary and cultural nationalism articulated through a refutation of Brown’s sociology and a return to Hurston’s anthropological project. The second section deals with an analogous constellation for Asian American letters: Frank Chin’s plays The Chickencoop Chinaman (written in 1971 and first produced in 1972) and The Year of the Dragon (1974) and the 1974 Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers, edited by Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong. The next chapter examines N. Scott Momaday’s 1968 House Made of Dawn, a novel—said to have begun the Native American Renaissance—likewise characterized by this double gesture. Chapters eight and nine extend this genealogy of literary multiculturalism by looking at two literary works that took up and mythically extended the anthropological question of cultural survivals, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Gloria Anzaldúa’s considerably later work Borderlands/La Frontera.

Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye is an inaugural novel of American literary multiculturalism. Absolutely crucial to its multiculturalist ethos is its rejection of sociology’s model of culture, in which newly ethnicized racial minorities were, like other ethnic groups, to assimilate into the dominant white society. Also crucial to its emerging multiculturalism was its rejection of the integrationist politics that sociology’s culture had fostered: as we shall see, Morrison and Hurston rejected segregation, but understood that

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