Assignment paper-8 Topic American multiculturalism.

                                                                                                                 

 ASSIGNMENT

Name: Maheta Arati R.

Class: M.A.

SEM: 2

Roll no: 3

Paper: 8 (The cultural Studies)

Topic: American Multiculturalism

Submitted to: Department of English

                     (MKBU)

Guided by: Dr. Dilip Barad

 Year: 2014-15

 Batch:  2013-15

Words: 1,744

v     What is multiculturalism?

Ø     Multiculturalism relates to communities containing multiple cultures.

Ø     The term is used in two broad ways like this

                                                  

Ø  Multiculturalism is often contrasted with the concepts of ‘’assimilationism’’ and has been described as a ‘’salad bowl’ or ‘’cultural mosaic’’ rather than a ‘’melting pot’’

Ø  Multiculturalism centers on the thought in political philosophy about the way to responds to culture and religious differences.

Ø  It is closely associated with ‘’identity politics’’, the politics of difference’’ and ‘’the politics of recognition’’ it is also a matter of economic interest and political power.

Ø  Multiculturalism has mainly been used a term to define disadvantaged group, including, African American, women, Gay/lesbian and the disabled.

Ø  Many theorists tend to focus their arguments on immigrants who are ethnic and religious minorities, minority nations and Indigenous peoples.

Ø  Many nations –states in Africa, Asia and the Americas are ‘Multicultural’ in descriptive sense.

·       Multiculturalism  happened in different countries like :United States, United Kingdom, South Korea,Singapore,Phillippines,Maxico, Malaysia,Japan,Indonesia,India,Australia,Argentina,Canada.Continental Europe,Bulgaria,Germany,Netherlands.

vAmerican Multiculturalism

Ø  In the United States multiculturalism is not clearly established in policy at the federal level, but ethnic diversity is common in both rural and urban areas.

Ø  Mass immigration was a feature of the United States economy and society since the 1^st half of 19^th century.

Ø  The absorption of the stream of immigrants became in itself a prominent feature of America’s national myth.

Ø  The idea of ‘Melting Pot ‘is a metaphor that implied that each individual immigrant and each groups of individual immigrant assimilated into American society at their own pace which as defined above is not multiculturalism this is opposed to assimilation and integration.

Ø  As a philosophy multiculturalism began as a part of the ‘Pragmatism movement’ at the end of the 19^th century in Europe and United States then as political and cultural pluralism at the turn of 20^th century.

Ø  It was partly in response to a new wave of European imperialism in Sub-Saharan Africa and the massive immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans to United States and Latin America.

Ø  Philosophers,psychologists,historian and early sociologist  such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, George Santayana, Horace Kallen,John Dewey,W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke developed concepts of cultural pluralism which known today as Multiculturalism.

Ø  William James in his book entitled Pluralistic Universe (1909) refers the idea of a ‘’plural society’’.

Ø    Leon Botstein believes a combination of traditional and newer perspectives offers the best alternative: student must read Aeschylus Dante and Shakespeare ‘’because what Shakespeare and Dante and the so called Great Books are all about  is penetrating through details to what’s really essential about the common experience of being a member of this Species.’’

Ø  But at the same time that one reads Thucydides or the subject of being a member of a seafaring, global power, one should also read Bernal Diaz’s account of the conquest of Mexico.

Ø Every American should understand Mexico from point of view of the observers of the conquest and of the history before the conquest…….No American should graduate from College without a framework of knowledge that includes at least some construct of Asian History, Of Latin-American History, of American History

Ø Some images of American Multiculturalism

v    African American Writers

Ø  African American Studies is widely pursued in American literary criticism, from the recovery of 18^th century.

·        Most prominent Writers and their Works.

Ø  Phillis Wheatley to the experimental novels of Toni Morison.

Ø  In Shadow and Act(1964).

Ø  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’’

Ø  This seems to obvious even to mention today,  when American arts,fashion,music,and so much besides is based upon African American Culture, from Oprah to Usher.

Ø  But in Ellison’s day the 1950s such as an argument was considered radical.

Ø  African American writing often display a folkloric conception of humankind, a double consciousness’ as W.E.B. Du Bois called it arising from bicultural identity,irony,parody,tragedy and bitter comedy in negotiating this ambivalence attacks upon presumed white cultural superiority a naturalistic focus on survival.

Ø  Ellison urged black writers to trust their own experience and definitions of reality.

Ø  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’’

Ø  This elevation of black folk culture to art is important and it led  to divisions among black artist

Ø  E.g. Zora Neale Hurston’s reliance upon folklore and dialect annoyed some of her fellow artists of the Harlem Renaiissance,such as Langston Hughesh,who wished to distance themselves from such ‘’roots’’ and embrace the new international forms available in literary modernism.

Ø  Out of such painful cultural origins evolved African American literature, which may be divided into several major periods,

Ø  1) Comprising Colonial.

Ø  2) Antebellum.

Ø  3) Reconstruction.

Ø  4)Pre-world war-1

Ø  5) Harlem Renaissance.

Ø  6)Naturalism& Modernism

Ø  7)Contemporary

Ø  Some of the most widely taught writers of the earlier periods includes Harriet E.Wilson’s Our Nig or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a two story White House, North(1859) was the 1^{stnovel published by an African American Linda Brent, author} of Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl.

Ø  Charles Waddell Chesnutt a turn towards naturalism but also made use of traditional folk elements his novel of the Wilmington race riots The Marrow of Tradition.

Ø  The Harlem Renaissance Niggereti celebrated black culture.

Ø   Spurred by the Depression and the failures of Jim Crow in the south, naturalist author Richard Wright attacked White American society at the start of the Civil Rights movement in works such as Native son and Black Boy.

Ø  The 1960s brought Black Power and the Black Arts Movement.

Ø  Major figures were Amiri Baraka, Margaret Abigail Walker, Ernest Gaines, John Edger Wide man and Ishmael Reed in related arts E.g.music, the big names were Chuck Berry, B.B.King, Aretha Franklin.

Ø  Toni Morrison’s work the Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved.

v2) Latina/o writers

Ø  Latina/o Hispanic. Mexican American. Puerto Rican.Nuyorican.Chicano.

Ø  Or maybe Huichol or Maya. Which names to use?

Ø  The term ‘’Latina/o used to indicate a broad sense of ethnicity among Spanish-speaking people in the United States.

Ø  Mexican Americans are the largest and most influential group of Latina/o ethnicities in the U.S.

Ø  ‘’American Literature’’ and ‘’American studies ‘’are now referred to as Literature of Americas and studies of America.

Ø  Sandra Cisneros and Robert Rodriguez show Cisreros of San Antonio with her 1^st book The House on Mango Street, was published by a then relatively obscure press in Houston Called Arte Publico now major publisher of Latina/o book.

Ø  In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,Gloria Anzalua demonstrate how Latinas live between two culture,countries,two languagesetc..

Ø  She describes another way in her poem ‘’To Live in the Borderlands Means You.

Ø  Cod switching is a phenomenon studied by linguists.

Ø  Juan Flores and George Yudice write that since the discovery of America transformed the ocean into a frontier that Europeans might cross to get New World.

Ø  They define America as a ‘’living Border.

Ø  The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s meant renewed Mexican American Political awareness

Ø  Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless me Ultima, perhaps the best known Latina/o novel

Ø  Latina/o fictions are Oscar Zeta Acosta author of Revolt of the Cockroach People.

Ø  Richard Rodriguez’s memoir Hunger of Memory is the best example of the Latina/o writer of America.

v  3)American Indian Literatures

Ø   In predominantly oral cultures storytelling passes on religious beliefs, moral values, political Codes and practical lessons of everyday life.

Ø  for American Indians stories are a source of strength in the fact of centuries of silencing by Euro-Americans.

Ø  Again a word on names Native American seems to be the term proffered by most academics and many tribal members who find the term Indian a misnomer and stereotype as in ‘’cowboys and Indians’’ or ‘’Indian giver’’ that helped whites wrest the continent away from indigenous people.

Ø  Yet ‘’American Indian’’ is often preferred by Indians over ‘’Native American’’ 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.

Ø  Two types of Indian Literatures have evolved as fields of study.

Ø  The Traditional Indian Literature is not especially accessible for the average reader, and it is not easy to translate form Cherokee into English.

Ø  The earliest mainstream Indian author in the anthologies is Samson Occom, a Mohegan School master who published as early as 1772.

Ø  Later writers of the 19^th century and early 20^th century such as Williams Apess, Yellow Bird (John Rollin Ridge) Simon Pokagnon, Sara Winnemucca Hopkins, D’Arcy McNickle and Mourning Dove,delt with native rights the duplicities of U.S.Government and military leaders, racial ambivalence.

Ø M.scottMomaday’s House Made of Dawn.

v 4)Asian American Writers

Ø  Asian American Literature is written by people of Asian descent in the U.S.,addressing the experience of living in a society that views them as ‘’Alien’’;

Ø  Asian immigrants were denied citizenship as late as 1950s.

Ø  Edward Said has written of ‘orientalism’or the tendency to objectify and eroticize Asians and their work has sought to respond to such stereotyping.

Ø  Asian American writers include Chinese, Japanes, Korean, Fillipino, Vietnames, Malaysian, Polynesian and many other peoples of Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Pacific.

Ø  Asian American Literature can be said to have begun around 20^th century primarily with autobiographical ‘’Paper Son’’ stories and ‘’confession’’.

Ø  Asian American autobiography inherited these descriptive strategies as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoires of Girlhood among Ghosts.

Ø  Jade Snow Wong’s female Bildungsroman was called Fifth Chinese Daughter.

Ø  The 1^st to become known in the West tended to be daughters of diplomats or scholars or those educated in Western mission Schools two Eurasians sisters, Edith and Winifred Eaton were typical.

Ø  They immigrated with their parents to the U.S.and while Edith published stories of Realistic Chinese people in Mrs. Spring Fragrances,Winnifred who adopted the Japanese Pen Name ‘’Onoto Watanna’’was the author of Japanese novel of a highly sentimentalized nature.

 Multiculturalism means to mixtures of culture.