WHAT AMERICAN ETHNIC LITERATURE SHOULD BE

American Ethnic Literature

2007

American Ethnic Literature

What does it mean to be inclusive of "ethnic " literature in American "English " classrooms ? Educators across the country struggle to comply with industry standards as well as their own sense of what "globalization in literature " may comprise . The ideology of teaching the British canon is breaking down , particularly in the wake of the post-colonial criticism movement two decades ago , as well as the more immediate and pervasive influence of the World Wide Web , which connects people in different countries with different communication practices at

the speed of fingers tapping on a keyboard . Diversifying the standard literary canon to include and character of different cultural and racial backgrounds means opening the master list of great works to marginalized text and voices . Ideally , the goal of including "ethnic literature into the American education traditional should be to create a more complete view of the American culture as a great cultural melting pot and expose the ways in which all Americans share Otherness

Multicultural literature carries with it certain stereotypes as to what gets included and what gets excluded . Part of this is a response to the reader 's own ignorance or misinformation . Mary Frances Pipino wrote that Students often are unaware of their own cultural values and the ways their values can be contradictory or ambivalent ' For example , a person may consider The House on Mango Street to be "multicultural " in that the author , Sandra Cisneros , speaks Spanish and her main character Esperanza , relates the effect cultural machismo has on her life as a young Hispanic woman . The novel Ceremony functions in a similar way Author Leslie Silko gives the reader a glimpse into the life of a young Native American man , describing his violent experience as a soldier and as a man caught between cultures in a turbulent physical environment The main character , Tayo , functions as both an entry point for readers unfamiliar with Native American culture , and as the ubiquitous Outsider ' even in the Native American community . Both of these texts conflate the traditional ' American experience (that is , the paternal Anglo-Saxon Christian experience ) with the experience of the outsider (the disenfranchised racial minority

Silko and Cisneros incorporate ethnicity as a factor that both unites and repels . Esperanza struggles against the expectations of her culture as she dedicates herself to her studies and writing . Tayo is at home neither in the white ' community where he is physically Other , or in the Native American community , where his whiteness ' is known regardless of its visibility . Readers and students have an opportunity to read about a culture that is perhaps different from their own , or perhaps novels such as these are an opportunity to see racially similar characters as protagonists rather than antagonists or worse , utterly marginalized if ever present background noise

Traditionally , American students have had to satiate themselves on a steady diet of Caucasian male central characters . Studies in literature often revolve around the icons of English writing , such as Chaucer Shakespeare , Milton , Wordsworth...