U.S. Multi-Ethnic Literatures

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This paper discusses the origins, development, and contemporary use of American literature anthologies in China.  It theorizes the pedagogical goals of American literature anthologies in university classrooms, with special attention to their function as canonical gatekeepers and exclusion of multi-ethnic literature.  A review of leading commercial teaching anthologies underlines how the recent generation of editions beginning in the 1990s include negligible attention to women, African American, Hispanic, or indigenous literatures.  In response to perceived market pressure, most have remained sites of conceptual orthodoxy reproducing a standard line-up of traditional Old Canon writers.  To the limited extent that a few women and African American writers appear, they do so as artifacts of modernity in the concluding pages of anthologies.     
The paper next turns to American literature anthologies published in China that employ more inclusive editorial practices, such as Heath-style multicultural anthologies and women’s anthologies.  It addresses the role of Chinese interest in Chinese American literature in promoting recognition of the multicultural literary environment in the United States.  It finds an identifiable counter-trend towards re-conceptualization of US literature in Chinese production of teaching anthologies.   
A final section of the paper theorizes the differences between Chinese and US discussions of multicultural literature, noting the divergent potential political implications.  Commercial anthologies of US literature in China that use very limited representation of a few modern writers of color or women demonstrate the deployment of nominal diversity for commodification.  Editorial and publishing practices that uncritically de-contextualize locally-situated multiculturalism, de-historicize and dislocate literatures, and emphasize uni-directional cultural readings reproduce neoliberal trade regimes that promote branding, cultural homogenization, and global rather than local consumption.

This award-winning article introduces turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish American writer Miriam Michelson to MELUS readers. Although Michelson has been overlooked by scholars of American literature, we argue that she is an important voice in multi-ethnic women’s writing of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century West. In the essay, we position Michelson alongside Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far), another long neglected woman writer. Like Eaton’s, the recovery of Michelson’s fiction and journalism builds on and complicates our current understanding of American literary history by adding the voice of an underrepresented minority writer. We show that Michelson’s work offers a rich archive for scholars and teachers of women’s writing and cross-ethnic studies. We also demonstrate that Michelson’s fiction is an important resource for scholars of Jewish American literature and culture, who, in focusing on the immigrant experience in the New York ghetto, have largely ignored the Jewish experience on the multi-ethnic Western frontier. This article also serves as an introduction to the accompanying text, “In Chy Fong’s Restaurant,” a chapter from Michelson’s 1905 novel A Yellow Journalist. “In Chy Fong’s Restaurant” features the book’s main character, Rhoda Massey, a white journalist, going under cover--or passing--as a Chinese prostitute in order to report on corruption in Chinatown. Her plan is thwarted when a white missionary, not realizing her disguise, kidnaps Rhoda in an effort to save her soul. As we argue in this essay, “In Chy Fong’s Restaurant” offers a fascinating commentary on cross-racial and gendered power dynamics in turn-of-the-twentieth-century San Francisco.