The IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship
Volume 4 – Issue – I

The IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship
Volume 4 – Issue – I

The IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship
Volume 4 – Issue – I

America has long and vigorously been taken up with the issue of cultural identity, the one and
the many. Its literary authorship, Puritans to Postmoderns, has been no less so engaged. Who
gets to say what writing best speaks for the culture? Has there been a preemptive strike in which
a largely white, male, protestant body of voice is taken to preside? With the 1960s and the
culture-wars the terms of debate radically altered. A whole-scale revision of who speaks, who
writes, who is to be listened to, and who (and what) is to be taught, has been talking place. The
language, often warring, has been that of canon and multiculturalism, mainstream and
periphery, a one ‘agreed’ hierarchy of imaginative expression as against a huge and actually
long ethnic plurality of idiom and memory. The differing claimants have been many and
vociferous. This essay addresses the issues in some fullness. It looks again at the various
working terms of reference, and then at what in the past has gone into the formation of the
American literary canon. There follows a selective analysis of four multicultural arenas—
Native America, Afro-America, Latino/a America and Asian America.

Keywords: multicultural, canon, ethnicity, whiteness, native, African American, Latino/a,
Asian American, transnational, pluralism

Richard Donovan