Multiculturalism and Globalization
Since 1970 American literature has been characterized by an extraordinary
proliferation of imaginative writing, a good deal of it by African, Native, Asian,
and Latino Americans who have found success in all literary genres—fiction,
poetry, memoir and autobiography, and drama. Many of these works appear on
best-seller lists and are featured as required reading for colleges and secondary
schools. While this body of texts continues to grow, scholars have been looking
backward to recover and recuperate lost or forgotten works, some of them non-
English-language texts or those that were transmitted orally, including songs of
enslaved African Americans or Asians imported for their labor, Hawaiian chants,
the graffiti poems of Angel Island detainees, Native American orations, and
travel accounts by Spanish explorers, some dating back to the sixteenth century.
With such diversity, one could argue that American literature has always been
multicultural, perhaps even “global”; expressions of literary multiculturalism and
globalization, however, do not merely involve acknowledging the presence of
writers with diverse backgrounds and histories. Understanding multicultural-
ism merely as the existence of “minority” groups or as “a synonym of pluralism”
(Palumbo-Liu) divests it of its connection to movements for social justice and
change embodied by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Acknowledging
cultural diversity not only uncovers a rich literary history; it brings into focus the
monocultural or racist thinking that had been and is responsible for the erasure of
works, while also helping us to reconsider how we interpret “canonical” works that
had never been neglected or lost—those by writers such as Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot,
Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Thinking in multicultural or global
terms helps not only to expand the American literary canon but also to transform
the way it is interpreted. While writing and scholarship of the 1970s focused on
defining overlooked and marginalized literary traditions, history, and identity,
over time literary study has expanded to encompass transnationalism, compara-
tive race and ethnic studies, and Postmodernist/poststructuralist ideas.
The increasing attention to and availability of multicultural literary texts in
the 1970s were a reflection of the social movements of the previous decades. In
this and the preceding decade, writers sought to define separate literary tradi-
tions associated with their different racial and ethnic groups. (In this volume the
essays “African American Literature” and “Native American Renaissance” trace
two of these traditions.) Many Americans insisted that all blacks were alike, as
were Asians, Latinos, and Indians—that they were non-American regardless of
ancestry and nativity, bound together by cultural otherness and their inability or
unwillingness to assimilate. To combat invisibility and resist stereotypes, many
wrote autobiographies and coming-of-age novels, emphasizing their historical
presence in the United States as well as ethnic or cultural pride. For instance, the
title character of Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda (1973) feels the humiliation of being
Puerto Rican and poor in New York City; yet, the use of Spanglish and portray-
als of an extended family and community in the autobiographical novel express a
vibrant cultural synthesis. In Tomás Rivera’s Spanish-language novel.. .y no se lo
tragó la tierra (1971; translated as... and the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987),