American Multiculturalism

Prepared by: Minkal Italiya

M.A English semester: 2

Batch: 2018-20

Enrollment No: 2069108420190020

Roll no: 19

Email id: italiyaminkal@gmail.com

Submitted to: Smt. S. B Gardi, Department of English, MKBU

Paper no-8: Cultural Study

Topic: American Multiculturalism

American Multiculturalism

Ø Introduction

The Culture- is itself a huge question. It is very hard to define. Basically culture is preety much everything  about society, everything that is common to the majority of the people in society. As far as cultural is concerned , it is a even very hard to define.

What is Culture?

        The word ‘Culture’ comes from ‘Culture’ and ‘colere’. It means to protect, to cultivate and to honour. By the 19^th century in Europe it’s meaning was different. The word culture is associated with power and the Elite culture controls the terms of debate relation to the culture.

                                 What is cultural Study?

As Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out,

Cultural studies is not “a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda”, but a “loosely coherent, group of tendencies, issues and questions”.

Cultural studies is composed of elements of elements of Marxism, post structuralism, post modernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies and postcolonial studies: those field that concentrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and alienation.

There are the five types of Cultural Studies:

1.British Cultural Materialism

2.New Historicism

3.American Multiculturalism

4.Postmodernism and Popular Culture

5.Postcolonial Study

What is American Multiculturalism?

In 1965 the watts race riots drew worldwide attention.The civil Rights act had passed 1964.There were murders and other atrocities attended the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. President Johnson signed voting-Rights Act. The Black panther party came to existence. All African American Students in the south attended segregated schools and discrimination was still illegal in many states ‘Race problem’ was challenged. Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view of the observed of the conquest and of the history before the conquest. No American should graduate from college without a framework of knowledge that includes at least same construct of Asian history, of Latin- American history; of African history.

1)   African American writers

In shadow and Act novelist Ralph Ellison argued that any,

“viable theory of Negro American Culture abligates us to fashion culture as a whole”.

              American arts, fashion, music and so much besides is based upon African American Culture, from oprah to usher.African American writing displays a folkloric conception of humankind a “double consciasness”. As W.E.B. ‘Dubois called it arising from biculture identity, comedy in negotiating this ambivalence; attacks. Whites believed their culture to be superior Ellison requested Black writers to have faith in their own experiences and definitions of reality. It seems as if they did so. Toni morission’s’ Bluest eye’Gwendolin brooks ‘we real cool’and many others authors wrote about their culture and their efforts of long struggle.

              “Black people had before they knew there was such a things as art”-Elison  Hurston. Hughes, Countee, Cullen were the literary life and black culture. African American writing continued to enter the main stream with the protest novels of the 1940s.The 1940s brought Black Arts movement. There was struggle between Black and white literature.

2)   Latin/o Writers

They are Mexican American. This term indicates a broad sense of ethnicity among Spanish-Speaking most influential group of Latina/o ethnicities in the united States. This culture describes the diversity of Spanish speaking people with different origins, skin, color, region, class , identification, politics and varying names for themselves has had an enormous impact upon “American” culture since its begnings.

The history of indigenous cultural of the New World is punctuated by conquests by Indian Nations. European countries especially Spain, Portugal, France and England them by United State. Mexican American literature was the combination of Spanish art and their culture. They create new folk cultures and literatures. The Chicago Movement of the 1960s and 1970s ment renewed Mexican American political awareness and artistic production. La Llorona originates in India folklore. She is said to have been a woman who murdered her children after discovering her husband was unfaithful and according to the legend she was condemned to an eternal penance of sorrow. She wanders on the roads at night crying for her lost children. Like the other female figures, she stands for a combination of the extremes of purity and guilt.

3)American Indian Literature

 For American Indian, stories are source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by EuroAmericans. A term ‘Native American’ is preferred by most academics and many tribal members, who find the term Indian a misnomer and sterotype as in cowbody Indians and Indian give that helped whites wrest the continent away from indigenous people. American Indian is often preferred by Indians over ‘Native American Indian Movement’ or the ‘Association for the study of American Indian Literatures’.

Two types of Indian literature have evolved as fields of study.

Traditional Indian Literature and Mainstream Indian literature The first one includes tales, songs and oratory that have existed on the North American continent for centuries, it was composed in tribal languages and performed by tribal audiences. Mainstream Indian literature refers to work written by Indians in English in the traditional genres of fiction, poetry and autography. Traditional Indian literature is not especially accessible for the average reader and it is not easy to translate from Cherokee into English. The oral and performative function and contextual frames do not translate well. Indian do not separate literature from their everyday life, rather than they listen the songs and chants with no distinction between high and low culture. Myth and stories of the tribal people are designed to perpetuate their heritage and instruct the young, cure illness, ensure victory in battle or secure fertile fields. It is a literature that is practical. The earliest mainstream Indian author in the anthologies is Samson Occom, a Mohegan school master, who published as early as 1772.

Later writers of 19^th and 20^th centuries are William Apes, Yellow Bird, Simon Pokagnon, Sara Winnemucca Hopkins and Mourning Dave. They dealt with native rights, the duplicates of U.S. government and military leaders, racial ambivalence, creation myths, trickster humor and tribal constancy in the face of  repeated assaults.

4)   Asian American Writers

Asian American literature is written by people of Asian descent in the United States.  In the literature they express their experience of living in society that views them as alien. Asian immigrants were denied citizenship as late as 1950s. Asian American writers include Chinese, Japanese. Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Polynesian and many other peoples of Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Pacific. These culture present a bewildering array of languages religion, social structures and skin colours and hence the category is even more broad and artificial than Latino or American Indian.

Asian American literature can be said to have begun around the turn of the twentieth century, primarily with autobiographical paper from of this was the ‘picture bride’ story written by Asian woman seeking American husbands, Chinese women make up the largest and most influential group of Asian American writers.

Increasing attention in Asian American studies has been focused on writers from Hawalliu, Gaum and the Philippines including Hawallian writers Carolyman Lei-lanilau, author of “Ono Ono Girl’s Hula” and Lois Ann Yamanka author of ‘Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers’. Works written about the Pacific by Anglo- American authors such as Herman Melville’s “Typee”,  Robort Louis Stevenson’s “ Treasure Island”, Jack London’s “The House of Pride” are now read in opposition to work by local writers.