Contemporary Multicultural Literature of the U.S.
Multicultural literature has flourished in the U.S. since 1900. African American, Asian American, Native American, and Latino/a writers have created some of the most important and exciting texts in this time period. Multicultural literature grows both forward as writers write new texts, and backward as writers and scholars discover or recover texts that were not noticed when they were written. Figuring out how to unravel this complex literary history will be one of our overarching concerns. We will read essays, short stories, novels, plays, and poetry that have helped to shape literary multiculturalism. We will focus on crucial moments at the beginning (1910s-1930s), middle (late 1950s-1970s), and end (1990s-2007) of the century to explore our topic. Writers covered will include: Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Luis Valdez, D'Arcy McNickle, Alice Walker, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Linh Dihn, Jessica Hagedorn, Sherman Alexie, and Amiri Baraka.