SOURCE: TuSmith, Bonnie. “The Significance of the ‘Multi’ in ‘Multiethnic Literatures of the U.S.’” MELUS 26, no. 2 (summer 2002): 5-14.

[In the following essay, derived from a lecture delivered at the 2001 MELUS Conference, TuSmith challenges teachers to deal directly and frankly with the issue of race and racial identity in teaching multicultural texts.]

“She starts up the stairs to bed. ‘Don't get me up with the rest in the morning.’ ‘But I thought you were having midterms.’ ‘Oh, those,’ she comes back in, kisses me, and says quite lightly, ‘in a couple of years when we'll all be atom-dead they won't matter a bit.’” Some of you will no doubt recognize this passage from Tillie Olsen's often-anthologized mother-daughter story, “I Stand Here Ironing.” Well, half a century after the publication of the daughter Emily's glum prediction, we're still here. In a way, studying, reading, and writing imaginative literature implicates all of us in Emily's worldview. “Why bother?” outsiders ask us—and at times we ask ourselves. Today, American youth say “AS IF …”—or, “Do I care?”—to render this point. Obviously, some of us—we “suckers” at this conference, for example—do care. And this is the foundation to build on.

As people who believe that literature by ethnic Americans matters, we have the opportunity to challenge Emily's fatalism. Through an act of faith, we can reclaim two syllables in the English language and convert “AS IF” from a dismissal to a promise. We continue to create works of art and to share these creations with others because life has value and we are not “atom-dead.” As long as life has value, ethnic literature is valuable—for this body of literature brilliantly captures the life experiences and complex worldviews of a culturally and racially diverse people known as “Americans.”

I did not find my way back to academia until my mid-thirties, and to the study of multiethnic literatures of the United States until my doctoral dissertation in American studies. The first time around in college I had gravitated toward the newer discipline of comparative literature. At Queens College in New York, I instinctively knew that the English curriculum in literature was hopelessly entrenched—leaving marginalized “searchers” like me no room to expand my thinking. I took shelter in a crossover program that allowed me to include classical Chinese poetry, modern French novels, and seventeenth-century Spanish drama in their original languages. This seemingly eclectic menu taught me respect for the written word; it cultivated my interest in peoples and cultures across time and space. What was also built into the field of comparative literature, however, was the notion that American literature was a poor relation of “great world literature.” Europe was often equated with “the world,” and white male writers and professors were assumed to be—by birthright—unequivocally “great.” After a progressively alienating couple of years toward a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I dropped out of academia.

So here I am at the dawning of the new millennium, back in academia and the president of MELUS. Having served the first year of my three-year term, what would I like to say to all of you who made the effort to be here today? Well, presenting my argument for an ethnical approach to the study of American literature is a start. As a multicultural, multiracial society, our literary productions are both culture-specific and nation-bound. Emphasizing ethnicity—as MELUS does—is decidedly a political stance. We should not take our academic positioning lightly. I submit that when we use the term “multiethnic,” we should mean it. “Multiethnic” means that our separately categorized ethnic identities—be they African American, Latino/a, American Indian, or whatever—should be approached cross-culturally. Each of us is a member of at least one ethnic community that embraces other ethnicities, thereby moving all of us past the “us” against “them” habit of thought.

The model of multiethnicity undercuts balkanization. In announcing the theme of this year's conference the MELUS call for papers asked the question: “What is the relationship between the literature of particular ethnic groups and the broader study of multiethnic literature, and what are the possible tensions?”. I expect this and other key questions in the profession to be hashed out among us as we “take stock” of what we do. Speaking for myself, permit me to reiterate my position as stated in the preface to my 1993 book, All My Relatives: “To some academics claiming multiethnic knowledge or expertise means that the scholar is ‘asking for it,’ meaning that she or he can expect to be attacked from all sides for encroaching on others' ‘turfs.’ I am well aware of the risks and pitfalls of my critical approach. It might have been “safer” for me to have written a book on Asian American literature.” However, I went on to say, “if we continue to overlook the relationships and connections among American cultures and persist in separatism, we scholars are guilty of perpetuating misunderstandings that even now have serious repercussions in educational institutions and in the larger society.”

Now I know that some will say it is not possible to study so many ethnic literatures and cultures. Any one grouping, such as African American or Asian American, is already a full-time job. It is understandable that people of Mexican ancestry, for example, would gravitate toward Chicano/a Studies, or black academics would be found in African American Studies. I think that this is both understandable and desirable. Having to deny one's racial and ethnic identity has been a special burden for people of color in the US educational system. However, the expectation that an ethnic person of color can teach only his or her color is equally problematic. There's also the knee-jerk suspicion when white folks do the “colored” thing, or “colored” folks do the “white” thing. From the various ways that we self-select without adequately examining our assumptions, I think we do the profession a great disservice. The pursuit of learning is not advanced by allowing an individual's “subject position”—these days, meaning what a person looks like—to dictate what the person can study or teach.

So I believe that in ethnic literature, we need to study a single ethnic group—perhaps the one with which we most identify—while, at the same time, study multiethnically. This means that as a professional, a Latina literature scholar should view both her Latino/a organization and MELUS as her “home base.” From this ethnical perspective, MELUS is not a luxury—an extra conference to attend if one has additional money and time—but a necessity. For it is here that we have the opportunity to engage one another in a more meaningful way. Yes, the MLA, ASA, ALA, NCTE, etc., are larger organizations that are also including ethnic literature in their conference sessions. Therefore, some would argue, the vital role that MELUS once played no longer obtains. But has the mom-and-pop organization that was formed at the MLA convention twenty-seven years ago become irrelevant? I don't think so. By featuring multiethnicity, MELUS continues to serve a vital function in the study of American literature. In listening to the stories of America's ethnic communities, we have a better chance of working through the societal ills wrought by self-serving individualism and greed.

For our cross-cultural conversations to really make a difference in the American educational system and, through it, in the broader American society, we must take more responsibility for what we do and how we go about doing it. When you think about it, MELUS is premised on equality—with all the accompanying risks and messiness that true equality entails. When each and every ethnically identified work of literature is welcomed at the table with the premise that it is equally worthy, then serious evaluation can and should take place. As readers and scholars, we can begin to articulate the strengths and weaknesses of a literary work based on a set of openly identified criteria. We should also be prepared to have our criteria challenged and our assessment of a specific text altered through this challenge. Intellectual debates like these will help make us better readers and stronger writers.

At this point you might be saying to yourselves, but this is what literature people do—you're not telling us anything new. It is my contention that, while we know what we should do in the profession, thus far in the decanonization of American literature we have barely scratched the surface of literary criticism. Our approaches to ethnic texts often fall short of substantive critical analyses. We find ourselves overlooking linguistic limitations, inadequate narrative structures, clueless implied authors, poorly researched “facts,” for example—all in the name of “multiculturalism.” We are quick to excavate and promote hitherto bypassed works from marginalized groups, but we hesitate to evaluate these works for fear of exposing our individual cultural limitations and personal prejudices. Better to tout cultural relativism, we tell ourselves. But the cultural relativist stance has its pitfalls. A few years ago there was a news story of a Chinese man in the Midwest who shot and killed his wife. Apparently, the American judge agreed that killing one's wife for adultery might have been perfectly acceptable in China and so, out of respect for the man's “cultural difference,” he was found not guilty.

Multiculturalism should not be confused with cultural relativism. The former concept simply acknowledges the existence of various human communities—a self-evident condition that the hegemonic American culture would like to deny—while the latter concept disavows our individual and collective responsibility toward one another in our common humanity. Admittedly, navigating the cultural beliefs and practices of various peoples is tricky. When it comes to multiethnic literary studies, retaining a clear sense of one's discipline is a good start. John Reilly's 1978 MELUS article, “Criticism of Ethnic Literature: Seeing the Whole Story,” asks us to do just this. According to Reilly,

Literature refers to reality filtered through verbal structures that are governed by laws of their own. As a result, the assertion of ethnicity in literature can be made only through a procedure by which a writer resolves formal problems, and it can be completed only as the audience makes sense of it in terms of their competence with literary expression. What moves from recognition of identity to creation of a strategy for handling reality still is not literature until the individual author sustains her or his ethnic identity through a sequence of formal choices.

The study of literature necessarily involves studying the series of formal choices made by the author. When a piece of writing is called literature, the label points to its constructedness, its craft. Literature is art, and a work with literary merit is a literary artifact. The ethnic cultural context of a short story, poem, or novel does not detract from its artistic merit. If, as critics, scholars, and teachers, we read ethnically identified texts exclusively for their cultural content, their political message, their historicity, or whatever, we are not really treating them as literary works of art—as artistic creations. The reader's “competence with literary expression” is assumed to be irrelevant when it comes to evaluating an ethnic work. The fallacy of this approach has struck me time and again.

I think that in our efforts toward cultural inclusiveness we have at times gone overboard. A memorable experience for me is a conference session I once attended on Bharati Mukherjee's novel Jasmine. The first two presenters—both South Asian Americans—attacked the novel for its assimilationist heroine and her series of relationships with white men. Neither presentation engaged the text as a fictional work but, rather, faulted the author for presenting an Asian Indian woman and her culture in an unattractive light. The third presenter, an English graduate student from Europe, gave a thorough critical reading of the novel that concluded in a generally positive assessment of the work. While her paper offered significant insights that demonstrated her competency, she was, alas!, “white”—and a European to boot. The audience ignored her analysis and joined the two “cultural insiders” in bashing Mukherjee. It didn't matter to anyone that the presumed experts were in anthropology and psychology, respectively, and showed little comprehension of Jasmine as a work of art. It seemed that as long as a reader claimed common ethnicity with the writer, he or she was competent—even entitled—to judge the literary work.

If we students of literature do not insist on professionally valid appraisals of ethnic texts, we are encouraging this type of essentialist thinking and behavior. Literature by ethnic writers becomes fair game for anyone with a chip on his shoulder, any opportunist seeking a shortcut to glory. To counteract this trend, we must be willing to engage one another in open dialogue and honest assessment. We must be willing to hold one another accountable for imposing double standards and invalid, extra-literary criteria on ethnic texts. For example, when one of the few studies published to date on John Wideman's opus measured the success of each work against a norm of Afrocentricity, or when stories by African American women were labeled “good” only if they featured sufficiently strong black women, we should have stepped forward to challenge the critics' premise. Did the fact that, in both examples, the critics in question were African American and some of us were not deter us from publicly debating the criteria applied to these ethnic writers? If so, and the idea isn't that far-fetched, we have a real problem.

People of color are confused. White people are confused. Given the tainted history of American society and our generally unsuccessful attempts at moving past deep-seated mistrust among the “races,” how do we begin to engage one another in honest dialogue? Nearly a decade ago, Harvard law professor Derrick Bell published Faces at the Bottom of the Well with the subtitle, “The Permanence of Racism.” Resistance against racial oppression, even if racism is immutable, seems the best Bell and others are able to offer. In the context of today's conference, if “racism” is as American as apple pie, where does this leave MELUS? For one thing, the literature that we study offers us a unique opportunity to be better people. For some time we have known that since there is no significant biological difference among humans, race is manmade. The suffering caused by racist beliefs and attitudes, however, has been very real. So, through the study of ethnic literature, we have the chance to work on our own racial prejudices and offer a serious challenge to “the permanence of racism.”

In an undergraduate course I taught on Alice Walker and Ernest Gaines a couple of years ago, a student wrote the following in her self-assessment paper:

The saddest part of the class was its own racial lines that were drawn in the seating arrangements by the student themselves. The class was mainly white with three “minorities” (whatever that means) that sat in their own pocket up in the front of the class. I didn't notice this segregation until two weeks into the quarter. Here we are, living in America, the land of the free, yet we can't integrate on our own. I found it utterly depressing. And, of course, I didn't go up and say, “Hi, my name is Jessie. What's yours?” NO, that would be wrong and could turn out to be extremely embarrassing. It makes me so mad that I am constrained by my own ideologies, and that knowing this, I do nothing to change them.

An African American student from the class made this statement in his assessment piece: “Everything was as close to perfect as you could get in a class, except for the people. But, who cares about the people. You made the class very enjoyable.” Also in the same class, I can't forget what happened when a Chicana student sitting in the back of the room—actually, someone who had given me a hard time in a Latino/a literature course a year earlier—spoke up one day when her classmates started to complain about an assignment. “Professor TuSmith is an excellent teacher,” she told the class. She then explained why she thought I was so excellent. The upshot of this bold gesture was social ostracism. Not one classmate supported her effort that day, and I noted with pain that the white students gave her the cold shoulder for the rest of the term.

Such classroom dynamics and student self-reports have taught me that we must find better ways of confronting the “Big R” in our professional and personal lives—and that none of us can do this alone. Would the white majority students in this particular class have behaved differently if my defender had been white? Was there any way that the Chicana student's opinion could have been taken in stride, leading to an open discussion between her and her peers? In a course on African American writers taught by an Asian American woman, did our interaction necessarily have to break down along racial lines? The complexities of teaching ethnic American literature in our increasingly segregated society cannot be underestimated.

My vision for MELUS is that we learn to take risks with one another to help transcend the color line in American society. The three students I cited here—one white, one black, one Latina—all suffered from the unnamed racial divide. Peer pressure mandated that no one crossed the line. So, while the students might have gained a great deal from the writers that we studied, they also “policed” one another to ensure that the lessons they learned from these powerful writers did not change their interpersonal interaction. They hid behind politically correct behavior and kept the potentially life-transforming message gleaned from Walker and Gaines at arms length. And I witnessed their resistance, their denial, their pain.

From my years as a multiethnic literature teacher and scholar I have concluded that the first thing we need to give up is our investment in appearing nonracist. Whether you think you are less racist than the next person is not the issue. I am talking about the energy that people on college campuses seem to invest in not seeming racist—in not being accused of being racist. The way to accomplish this—students in my classes would like to believe—is to ignore race. Individuals devote so much energy to this task that they literally have no room to interact with one another in a meaningful way. A few years ago I gave a talk at a private university in the Midwest. Before stepping up to the podium I half jokingly asked my host, “Is there anything I'm not allowed to talk about with this audience?”. “Oh, you can say anything,” she hastened to assure me. Then she added, “The only thing we don't talk about around here is race.” I'm going to be lynched was my immediate thought.

I may be dating myself, but do you remember the commercial for an ant-trap back in the 1980s? All the ants needed to hear was one word—Raid!—and they ran for their lives. Well, the “R” word that has the same effect in academia is race. The problem is, race continues to be a hot issue in many of the ethnic works that we MELUS folks study and teach. For us to do the works justice, we necessarily have to work through our own fears and discomfort with the subject. If we're not just ivory-tower intellectuals and mind-deadening pedagogues, if we believe that our labor in higher education means something and can make a difference, then we need to practice what we preach. Each of us must make the commitment to challenge racist behavior and racist thought—both in others and in ourselves.

Now some of you might be thinking, if I were to address racial issues more openly in my classroom, I could get into a lot of trouble. I could hurt myself professionally since no one would understand that I took chances because I believed in education. I have two responses to this objection. First, some of you know that Maureen Reddy and I are working on a collection of essays titled Race in the College Classroom. Judging from the 70 submissions we received nationwide and the commitment everyone has shown toward this project so far, I would say that you are not alone. My second response comes from a point Alice Walker made many years ago. According to Walker, when Zora Neale Hurston won second place for her play Color Struck, she marched into a reception, threw her scarf over her shoulder, and yelled, “Color Struck!”. Walker's comment was, you have to admire someone who refuses to be humbled by second place. This anecdote has stayed with me over the years. Besides Hurston's unconventional ways and Walker's appreciation of them, the fundamental issue is that second place isn't bad in a game whose rules you didn't make up. Especially for people of color in the US, sometimes second place is equivalent to first place.

So what does this have to do with the objection about taking risks? Well, we must remember that the game is rigged. Always abiding by unspoken rules—no matter how senseless they might be—and hoping to stay “safe” by doing this has contributed to our interracial problems, I believe. Whether we're talking about students in ethnic literature courses or members of MELUS, the invisible color line—the one that dictates segregated seating or tells us that a white man can't challenge a woman of color if he disagrees with her (as a MELUS member recently confided to me)—is truly alive and well in America. When seasoned MELUS folks still tiptoe around one another on issues of race, we are not very good role models for our students. So I urge you, I urge all of us, to take the opportunity at this year's conference to engage one another as ethnical multiculturalists in confronting the demon of race. Do what the white woman in my class wished she had the courage to do. Walk up to someone who looks different from you and say, “Hi, my name's Jessie. What's yours?”.

In the novel Mother Tongue by Demétria Martinez, I found a memorable line that I'd like to close with. Referring to her Salvadoran refugee lover, the Chicana narrator says, “He told me that in the darkness, with the santos, no one can tell he's an illegal. I told him no human being on earth is illegal” Considering how many Americans—first generation, second generation, indigenous, or whatever—have unthinkingly convinced ourselves that humans can be “illegal,” this quiet passage tucked away in a small book serves as a wake-up call. “No human being on earth is illegal”—ultimately, this reflects the spirit of the “multi” in “multiethnic literatures of the United States.”