Multiculturalism and Globalization

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 29, 2025

Since 1970 American literature has been characterized by an extraordinary proliferation of imaginative writing, a good deal of it by African, Native, Asian, and Latino Americans who have found success in all literary genres—fiction, poetry, memoir and autobiography, and drama. Many of these works appear on best-seller lists and are featured as required reading for colleges and secondary schools.

While this body of texts continues to grow, scholars have been looking backward to recover and recuperate lost or forgotten works, some of them non-English-language texts or those that were transmitted orally, including songs of enslaved African Americans or Asians imported for their labor, Hawaiian chants, the graffiti poems of Angel Island detainees, Native American orations, and travel accounts by Spanish explorers, some dating back to the sixteenth century.

With such diversity, one could argue that American literature has always been multicultural, perhaps even “global”; expressions of literary multiculturalism and globalization, however, do not merely involve acknowledging the presence of writers with diverse backgrounds and histories. Understanding multiculturalism merely as the existence of “minority” groups or as “a synonym of pluralism” (Palumbo-Liu) divests it of its connection to movements for social justice and change embodied by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

Acknowledging cultural diversity not only uncovers a rich literary history; it brings into focus the monocultural or racist thinking that had been and is responsible for the erasure of works, while also helping us to reconsider how we interpret “canonical” works that had never been neglected or lost—those by writers such as Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.

Thinking in multicultural or global terms helps not only to expand the American literary canon but also to transform the way it is interpreted. While writing and scholarship of the 1970s focused on defining overlooked and marginalized literary traditions, history, and identity, over time literary study has expanded to encompass transnationalism, comparative race and ethnic studies, and Postmodernist/poststructuralist ideas.

The increasing attention to and availability of multicultural literary texts in the 1970s were a reflection of the social movements of the previous decades. In this and the preceding decade, writers sought to define separate literary traditions associated with their different racial and ethnic groups. (In this volume the essays “African American Literature” and “Native American Renaissance” trace two of these traditions.)

Many Americans insisted that all blacks were alike, as were Asians, Latinos, and Indians—that they were non-American regardless of ancestry and nativity, bound together by cultural otherness and their inability or unwillingness to assimilate. To combat invisibility and resist stereotypes, many wrote autobiographies and coming-of-age novels, emphasizing their historical presence in the United States as well as ethnic or cultural pride.

For instance, the title character of Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda (1973) feels the humiliation of being Puerto Rican and poor in New York City; yet, the use of Spanglish and portrayals of an extended family and community in the autobiographical novel express a vibrant cultural synthesis. In Tomás Rivera’s Spanish-language novel …y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971; translated as …and the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987), Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith’s Estampas del valle y otras obras (1973; translated as Sketches of the Valley and Other Works; rewritten in English as The Valley, 1983) the writers draw a connection between Chicanos and the landscape of the Southwestern United States, a part of Mexico until the mid-nineteenth century. Likewise, in Homebase (1979) Shawn Wong traces the contributions of four generations of a Chinese immigrant family to American history as agricultural workers and builders of the cross-continental railroad.

The struggle to define an alternative identity and positive presence in American letters led to a type of cultural nationalism that promoted strict and usually narrow visions of identity. For some, insisting on a unitary identity, however, seemed the only effective—albeit limited—means of opposing and defending oneself against marginalization.

Wong, Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, and Lawson Fusao Inada, the editors of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) and its expanded 1991 version, The Big Aiiieeeee!, posited the notion of an “Asian universal knowledge” embedded in “Cantonese operas and Kabuki” and other “artistic enterprises” of Asian immigrants. In the anthology and their respective works, these writers focused on American-born, non-Christian, male writers; in addition, they identified writers only of Chinese and Japanese descent, the most established Asian American groups.

Likewise, works by Chicanos (a category of Hispanic American writing) tended to define identity narrowly. Luis Valdez, in plays such as Los Vendidos (1976) and in his work with the grassroots theater company El Teatro Campesino, for example, distinguished Chicano identity as “exclusively working-class, Spanish-speaking or bilingual, rurally oriented, and with a strong heritage of pre-Columbian culture” (Kanellos). Representations of other Latinos or Asian ethnic groups were obviously excluded by these definitions, as were female and gay experiences.

Even in their later expanded anthology, Chan and his colleagues singled out their contemporaries Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan for what they considered to be “fake” versions of Chinese culture and history and described David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1986; published, 1988) as “the fulfillment of white male homosexual fantasy,” charges that ignore the writers’ concerns with combating stereotypes based on gender and sexuality in addition to race.

Chicanas such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, too, felt the sting of cultural nationalism when they spoke out against sexism and “were identified as man haters, frustrated women, and ‘agringadas,’ Anglo-cized.”

Just as it is impossible to speak of American literature as a singular entity, it is impossible to describe the literary traditions of various racial or ethnic groups as homogenous. Writers emerging after the early attempts to establish cultural literary traditions began to recognize the limitations of narrowly defined Latino, black, Native American, or Asian American identity.

While cultural nationalisms formed a critical response to the racism and ethnocentrism of the dominant culture, they failed to recognize that ethnic and racial identity has always been linked to class, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, and age. The diversity within racial and ethnic categories became increasingly more obvious as writers added their voices.

Arte Público Press, founded in 1979, for example, brought attention to both Cuban American and Puerto Rican, or “Nuyorican,” literature in addition to Chicano/a writers. Works by Puerto Rican American writers represent the second largest contributions to Hispanic American literature and include writers Judith Ortiz Cofer, Sandra María Esteves, Victor Hernández Cruz, Tato Laviera, Esmeralda Santiago, Piri Thomas, and Ed Vega. The next largest belongs to Cuban Americans, who include Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Cristina García, and Oscar Hijuelos, the first Hispanic American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989).

Asian Americans are equally diverse; among them are writers whose ancestors come from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma. Hwang and Gish Jen are Chinese Americans; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Chang-rae Lee are Korean American writers; Jessica Hagedorn is Filipino American; Japanese Americans include Kimiko Hahn, Garrett Kaoru Hongo, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, and Janice Mirikitani; Americans with roots in India include Meena Alexander, Bharati Mukherjee, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Writers with Asian heritage who grew up in Hawaii, described as “local,” are Nora Okja Keller, Chris McKinney, Cathy Song, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Gay Latino and Asian Americans added their voices to further underscore diversity. Just as women writers delineated a “double marginalization” as women and racial/ethnic others, works by Arturo Islas, Rane Arroyo, Kitty Tsui, and Andrew Lam describe being outsiders in terms of race and sexuality, which also led to their ostracization by both their root and the mainstream cultures.

Since the 1990s works by ethnic Americans have brought increasing attention to international factors that affect the cultural makeup of the United States. Political instability in the Dominican Republic is represented in the works of Julia Alvarez and Junot Díaz, as is the exile experience of Vietnamese immigrants in works by Lan Cao and Andrew X. Pham.

Other changes also affect the cultural landscape of America. Steven George Salaita notes that since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, Arab Americans “are being analyzed widely and systematically as a discrete ethnic community.” Literary works by Arab Americans resist orientalist stereotypes while also revealing the diversity of their authors. In terms of religion, for example, Arab America is not monolithic. As Salaita notes, they “are Muslim (Shia and Sunni and Alawi and Isma’ili), Christian . . . , Jewish . . . , Druze, Bahai . . . immigrants and fifth-generation Americans . . . religious and secular, White and Black, Latin American and Canadian.” And, he adds, “Sometimes [they] are non-Arabs such as Circassians, Armenians, Berbers, Kurds, and Iranians.”

Arab American poetry has a long tradition in American letters and includes works by Naomi Shihab Nye and Agha Shahid Ali. Arab American fiction writers include Kathryn K. Abdul-Baki, Diana Abu-Jaber, Rabih Alameddine, Laila Halaby, and Laila Lalami.

While the lines between foreign nationals, immigrants, and those born in America (first-generation vs. second-generation, Asian vs. Asian American, or Chicano vs. Mexican, for example) were important to writers in the 1960s and 1970s, those lines are increasingly being blurred as writers adopt transnational perspectives, exploring pan-Pacific, transatlantic, and other cross-cultural connections and identities.

Writers in all genres continue to address issues of identity, assimilation, and cultural heritage, but they do so with increased attention to craft and experimentation with form. Although more-recent writers are less inclined to focus on the social inequities that earlier generations wrote about, they are not blind to them. Their inclination, however, is to focus on the creative possibilities of hybridity in culture as well as form.

The dynamic process of identity formation is reflected in the fragmentation of Cha’s Dictee (1982), which combines prose and poetry interspersed with photographs, diagrams, and documents. Linguistic play, a mixture of Spanish, English, and Spanglish, in the poetry of Alberto Ríos and the fiction of Díaz and Ana Castillo transforms literary English to suggest the multiple textures of different cultural perspectives.

Kiana Davenport includes legends and rituals as markers of a Hawaiian identity rooted in place rather than in the images on tourist postcards. Within the narrative of Dogeaters (1990), Hagedorn interweaves poetry, excerpts from letters and other works, news items, and a gossip column to get at different perspectives of postcolonial Filipinos. These works and others continually remind readers of the changing nature of America’s cultural negotiations and the continuities between the United States and other nations.

The emphasis on considering race and ethnicity as a central subject of interest has also led to a reexamination of the social, political, and economic conditions which historically shaped (and continue to shape) identity in literary works by Americans with Jewish, Italian, and Irish backgrounds. More recently, “whiteness” has become a focus for studying racial formation. Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992), for example, suggests how the social and political category of “white” has been constructed and protected in relation to those defined as racial “others.”

The richness of works by writers of different cultural backgrounds makes it impossible to speak of American literature as a monolithic or unified entity. Any interpretation needs to situate ethnic American literature within the historical and cultural contexts of its cultural tradition while also working through parallels and connections to other ethnic American discourses. The emphasis must always be on plurality. Although this makes the categorization and analysis of American literature a more complicated task, it is ultimately more rewarding than accepting the illusion of homogeneity.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) the narrator protests stereotypical and racist labels, “‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words” because, as she says, “they do not fit my skin.” Other ethnic American writers have sought to dismantle shallow stereotypes through their works by presenting complex characters in particular social and historical situations. Students interested in exploring how writers resist racist images might begin with an investigation of stereotypes about particular ethnic groups.

Good starting points are offered in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature (2005) entries “African American Stereotypes,” “Arab American Stereotypes,” “Chinese American Stereotypes,” “Italian American Stereotypes,” “Jewish American Stereotypes,” “Mexican American Stereotypes,” and “Native American Stereotypes.” Using a novel, short stories, a play, or poem(s) mentioned in this essay or in listed critical works and anthologies, students might consider the following questions: Are these stereotypes reflected or addressed in the work? Does the writer challenge the stereotype? If so, in what ways? How does the writer represent his/her cultural or ethnic identity? One might also compare how stereotypes are challenged or co-opted in works by two different writers from similar traditions or across different cultural traditions.

Coming-of-age novels trace the development of the protagonist from childhood or adolescence into adulthood and usually involve disillusionment as he or she moves from innocence to experience, ignorance to knowledge, or idealism to realism. The identities of ethnic American adolescents are shaped by the culture(s) of their families as well as by dominant society. The volatility of adolescence combined with cultural negotiations that ethnic Americans undertake make the genre particularly powerful and appealing to American writers of diverse cultural backgrounds.

Analyzing coming-of-age novels draws out the unique challenges that race and ethnicity impose on the development of nonwhite protagonists. What happens when characters realize that their skin color, religion, food, and habits are different from those of their friends? How does this awareness affect their sense of self and/or their attitudes toward their family members and root culture? How is the process of growing up complicated by the realization of “minority” status in a predominantly white society? Is the awareness of cultural difference empowering or disabling to the individual? Why or why not?

Students might also consider comparing a coming-of-age novel from the 1970s to one written more recently, paying close attention to attitudes about race and ethnicity. Do you see a change in attitude on the part of the protagonists? What social or historical reasons might there be for differences/similarities? Another way to approach this topic is to consider the way ethnic American writers use the coming-of-age novel to counteract historical and social marginalization.

In other words, how does the act of self-definition challenge those who would define them stereotypically? Some suggested works and comparisons: Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) or Wong’s Homebase (1979) with Chin’s Donald Duk (1991) or Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land (1996); Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) with Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997); Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989) with Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003); Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar (1973) with Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine (2002); Rivera’s … y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), or Mohr’s Nilda (1973) with Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), or Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007).

Like coming-of-age novels, memoir and autobiography by ethnic American writers trace the development of identity, tracing similar movements from innocence to experience, ignorance to knowledge, or idealism to realism, with an emphasis on ethnicity and race. In The Hunger of Memory (1982), for example, Richard Rodriguez describes his education as a transformation into “a public man” which entails loneliness, and “a movement away from the company of family,” from the Spanish language of his parents and Mexican traditions, and from “private” or ethnic identity.

In this work, Rodriguez describes his intellectual development within an “either/or” context; he either becomes an “assimilated man” or remains forever alien and unsuccessful. Other writers have conceived different models of cultural contact, finding alternatives to binaries that make, for example, “nonwhite” and “white” or “minority” and “majority” mutually exclusive terms. Meena Alexander in Fault Lines: A Memoir (1993), Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet (2001), and Diana Abu-Jabar in The Language of Baklava (2005) all exhibit more hybrid and heterogeneous understandings of ethnic American identity, as does Richard Rodriguez in his second book, Days of Obligation (1992).

Focusing on a memoir or autobiography, students could consider creative ways writers express multicultural identity. How do they demonstrate the ways “majority” and “minority,” foreign and native cultures, come together to challenge, alter, and revitalize one another? For help in identifying primary works, students might consult Joe Rodriguez’s “United States Hispanic Autobiography and Biography: Legend for the Future,” in Francisco Lomelí’s Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art (1993), and Guiyou Huang’s Asian American Autobiographers (2001).

The British Indian writer Salman Rushdie has described magical realism as the “commingling of the improbable and the mundane.” An important aspect in contemporary fiction, magical realism is a term applied to realistic narratives that include “magical” and supernatural happenings as accepted and integrated aspects of everyday life. In her introduction to Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (2004) Wendy Faris offers this definition: “Very briefly defined, magical realism combines realism and the fantastic so that the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them.

Furthermore, that combination of realistic and fantastical narrative, together with the inclusion of different cultural traditions, means that magical realism reflects, in both its narrative mode and its cultural environment, the hybrid nature of much postcolonial society. Thus the mode is multicultural.” Students interested in this topic might begin by examining the elements of magical realism of a particular work. How do these elements challenge or revise Western European notions of reality? How do magical realist techniques help writers to bridge cultural differences and gaps? How do writers “integrate them into contemporary U.S. culture in order to enrich or remedy it?” (Lois Parkinson Zamora, “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction,” in Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., p. 542).

Works to consider include (but are not limited to) Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995), Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), Kiana Davenport’s Shark Dialogues (1994), E. L. Doctorow’s Loon Lake (1980), Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Chitra Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices (1997), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990).

In his introduction to MultiAmerica (1996) Ishmael Reed challenges readers to imagine “a new, inclusive definition of the common [American] culture” that takes into consideration cultural, racial, and ethnic differences. He writes: “I think that a new definition of a common culture is possible, and that because of their multicultural status, Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans with knowledge of their own ethnic histories and cultures as well as those of European cultures are able to contribute to the formation of a new, inclusive definition.”

Students might consider engaging Reed’s proposition by analyzing works by ethnic Americans. How does the particular work contribute to “a new, inclusive definition” of American literature? How does the work insist upon a broader definition of American identity that includes racial and ethnic difference? Another way to approach this topic would be to focus on the forms and narrative techniques that ethnic American writers use.

A common feature is the use of multiple forms and genres in a single work. As Maria Lauret notes in the introductory essay to Beginning Ethnic American Literature (2001), “frequently autobiography functions as theory, prose is shot through with poetry and song, narrative is also (counter-) historiography. Linguistic mixtures occur too, most obviously in the bilingual texts of Chicano/a writers, but also when African American writers make use of the black vernacular as a ‘native tongue,’ or when Asian Americans and Native Americans intersperse their English with words and phrases from their first language.”

How do writers use these techniques and mixtures to challenge and revitalize monocultural definitions of American literature and identity? How does form express cultural hybridity? In analyzing a work, consider whether a writer is calling for the inclusion of ethnic American writers as part of mainstream America or is challenging the very definition of America.

RESOURCES

Primary Works
Asian Women United of California, ed., Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
Collection of fiction, poetry, and essays by fifty-three women, representing the diversity of Asian American writers whose cultural roots are in China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other Asian countries. Also included are a useful timeline of events important to Asian American history and essays tracing historical and social contexts.

Wesley Brown and Amy Ling, eds., Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land: A Multicultural Anthology of American Fiction (New York: Persea Books, 2002).
Revised and updated version of the 1991 edition that provides a basic introduction to multicultural American literature, in the form of short stories from writers of various ethnic backgrounds linked by the immigrant experience.

Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Fanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein, eds., Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 2001).
Includes the section “Wandering and Return: Literature since 1973,” the introduction to which provides an overview of the development of more-recent writing and discussion of thematic concerns.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, eds., Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (New York: Penguin, 1994).
Divided into the sections “Uprooting,” “Performing,” “Naming,” “Negotiating,” and “Re-envisioning.” This collection features up-and-coming and established poets such as Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Louise Erdrich, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Soto.

Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa, eds., Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004).
Short fiction by nineteen American authors of Egyptian, Lebanese, Libyan, Palestinian, and Syrian descent. Themes addressed include immigration, alienation, and assimilation.

Nicholás Kanellos, ed., En otra voz: Antología de literatura hispana de los Estados Unidos (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).
Spanish-language anthology tracing the history of Hispanic writing in the United States from colonial times to the present. The book is divided chronologically into three sections, each addressing a different aspect of the U.S. Hispanic experience, from those born in the country, those who have immigrated, and those living in exile.

Kanellos, ed., Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Comprehensive anthology of writing from colonial times to the present that underscores the diversity of Hispanic literature in the United States through its representation of Chicano, Nuyorican, Cuban American, and Latino writings. The book is organized chronologically, and each section is also divided by content to underscore cultural, historical, and political issues influencing writers.

Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California, Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women (Boston: Beacon, 1997).
Comprehensive anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays by writers of Asian descent that updates and expands Making Waves.

Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Highlights contributions that expand definitions of American literary and popular culture. The book includes a chronology and guide to further reading.

Criticism
Mary Jo Bona and Irma Maini, eds., Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).
Useful collection of essays charting the growth of ethnic American writers and the academic fields that study them. Beginning with an essay on the history of the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS) and its journal, this volume provides individual chapters on Chicano/a, Italian American, African American, Native American, and Asian American literatures.

Louis Freitas Caton, Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics: Romancing the Postmodern Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Uses theory derived from European Romanticism to analyze contemporary works, which Caton argues allows for a focus on aesthetic form as well as themes related to politics and history.

King-kok Cheung and Stan Yogi, eds., Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Modern Language Association, 1993).
Useful list of primary sources divided by ethnicity and geographical region, secondary sources, and literature about Asians and Asian Americans written by non-Asians.

Teresa Córdova, “Roots and Resistance: The Emergent Writings of Twenty Years of Chicana Feminist Struggle,” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Sociology, edited by Félix Padilla (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994), pp. 175–202.
Overview of the efforts of feminists within the Chicana movement that provides excellent historical context for discussing literary works.

Christopher Douglas, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009).
Interprets African American, Native American, Chicano, and Asian American literary texts in the context of theories derived from sociology and anthropology.

Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004).
Comprehensive examination of magical realism as a trend in contemporary fiction from around the world, identifying its major characteristics and narrative traits.

Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
Exploration of contemporary Jewish American literature within the context of current debates about multicultural literature; provides a historical overview of Jewish American fiction.

Helena Grice, Candida Hepworth, Maria Lauret, and Martin Padget, Beginning Ethnic American Literature (Manchester, England & New York: Manchester University Press, 2001).
Examines the work of African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos/as, and Native Americans within cultural, historical, and literary contexts; divided into four sections, each focused on a literary tradition offering a brief overview, a discussion of critical issues, and essays on individual novels.

Guiyou Huang, Columbia Guide to Asian-American Literature since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
Traces the literature of Asian America from the end of World War II to the beginning of the twenty-first century within historical contexts. In addition to fiction, poetry, and drama, the work discusses major anthologies and memoir/autobiography.

Huang, ed., Asian American Autobiographers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001).
Alphabetically arranged entries that provide biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on Asian American memoirists and autobiographers.

Huang, ed., Asian-American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002).
Entries on forty-eight Asian American poets, each entry consisting of a short biography, discussion of major themes, a summary of critical reception, and critical sources.

Huang, ed., The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature, 3 volumes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008).
Comprehensive resource featuring entries on Asian American writers, individual works, topics, events, and terms.

Nicholás Kanellos, Hispanic Literature of the United States: A Comprehensive Reference (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003).
Essential resource on the history of U.S. Hispanic literature with useful discussion of major trends, movements, and themes. The “Who’s Who of Hispanic Authors of the United States” will help students quickly identify important literary figures.

Jeff Karem, The Romance of Authenticity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004).
Discusses the problems of using authenticity when assessing the value of ethnic American literature for both writers and literary critics. Examples are given from works by African American, Latino, and Native American literatures.

A. Robert Lee, Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003).
Comparative analyses of recent ethnic writing that has enlarged the spectrum of American literature.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn, and Gina Valentino, eds., Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
Collection of thirteen essays on the transnational and diasporic aspects of Asian American literature. Writers discussed include Ha Jin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, and Karen Tei Yamashita.

Francisco Lomelí, ed., Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993).
Collection of fifteen essays examining Hispanic literature (from the sixteenth century to the present) with a variety of approaches.

Emmanuel S. Nelson, ed., The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature: A–Z (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005).
Accessible resource providing information on hundreds of ethnic American authors, works, topics, and traditions.

David Palumbo-Liu, ed., The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
Essays that delineate the historical, theoretical, and practical considerations of canon formation for ethnic American literatures. Overall, they suggest strategies of incorporating texts without losing a sense of their historical specificity and differences.

Ishmael Reed, ed., MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (New York: Viking, 1997).
Anthology of essays, including personal reflections, by writers who argue against monoculturalism in American society and art. The introduction by Reed sets forth an argument for multiculturalism.

Steven George Salaita, Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Focuses on the development of contemporary Arab American literature with the purpose of defining it in more-complex ways than has been done in previous studies. Salaita uses interpretive methods drawn from Native American literary studies to propose new interpretive approaches.

Jelena Šesnić, From Shadow to Presence: Representations of Ethnicity in Contemporary American Literature (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007).
Describes four comparative approaches to multicultural literature: cultural nationalism, ethnic feminism, borderlands and contact zones, and the diasporic model.

Bonnie TuSmith, All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
Proposes alternatives to the practice of reading works by ethnic Americans through Euro-American contexts.

Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).
Anthology of essays offering a variety of approaches. Taken together, they trace the origins of magical realism from Germany to contemporary literature, demonstrating the international scope of magical realism in works from Europe, Latin America, North America, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Australia.