A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism

Uncovering the unacknowledged role of sociology and anthropology in nourishing the politics and forms of minority writers in America.

Christopher Douglas is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Reciting America: Culture and Cliché in Contemporary American Fiction.

Superbly researched and intellectually provocative, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism should be required reading for those interested in multiculturalism.

A beautifully researched and well-argued analysis, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturism is a must-read for all those devoted to a deeper appreciation of the interpenetration between literary works and the social sciences.

Daphne Lamothe, Smith College:

Christopher Douglas has developed a new and exciting way of reading multicultural literatures, arguing for the formation of a literary tradition that is based on a group of authors' engagement with social science theories of race and culture. He draws connections among a wide range of narratives that span most of the twentieth century, tracing patterns of literary and intellectual influence that haven't been fully acknowledged before. Thanks to its original and provocative analysis, this book makes a major contribution to research on ethnic literatures.

Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago:

A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism is history of the present in a particularly vivid form. Christopher Douglas takes a familiar phenomenon—the multicultural novel—and shows how it came into existence. One of the many impressive things about this book is Douglas's complete command of the extraordinary range of authors and cultures he addresses. Very few books move as comfortably as this one does among African American, Native American, Chicano, and Asian American literary texts.