Universal Reading or Ethnically Specific Literature?

Jhumpa Lahiri writes about Bengali-Americans. Nathan Englander writes about Jews. Susan Choi writes about Asian-Americans.

Or do they? Is writing about characters of a certain ethnicity the same as writing about or for them? Is writing about an ethnic group’s narrative distinct from drawing upon one’s own life experience? Is there such a thing as ethnic literature?

“We have to define what ethnic means,” insisted Frances Negron-Muntaner, assistant professor of English and comparative literature and specializing in U.S. Latino literature and the Caribbean diaspora. “In the U.S., everyone who is considered ‘not white’ is considered ethnic. It’s labeled ethnic ... tied to a process as rendering a group as racialized.”

Wen Jin, an assistant professor of the same department, noted that “ethnic literature and minority literature will continue to have intellectual relevance as long as race remains an operative political and cultural category in the U.S. that plays an important, if not formative, role in individual experiences.”

The very fact that the term ethnic literature exists is a reflection of the way society focuses on ethnic groups more than the literature itself. In fact, according to Joseph Slaughter, associate professor of English and comparative literature, “the idea of ethnic literature is a historical construct ... within a moment for historical purposes.” Jin concurred, “Asian-American literature has its particular history and framework of references.”

Slaughter is quick to note, however, that the same can be said of all literature. When African authors first tried to get published in the European vernacular, their work was “supposedly so deeply based in African culture” that it couldn’t be read in the same way as the European works that “transcended” individual groups.

“We know that the universal is constructed,” he continued. “‘Our own’ literature is not universal. It has a context. It’s not speaking across time and space to all peoples everywhere.”

He concluded “what should happen and ultimately has happened is that recognizing that [African literature] as ethnic lets us see Chaucer as ethnic.” Authors come from some background that inevitably influences their writing, regardless of what that background is.

It would be incorrect to assume that background is unchanging for every ethnic group.

According to Negron-Muntaner, another thing to consider because of the ever-changing process is “there are hierarchies that apply.” In Negron-Muntaner’s area of expertise, this meant the ghetto-narrative, a story line particularly “appealing to mainstream, white readers” based on where we are today.

The same can be said for Asian-American literature, which, according to Wen Jin, “with the rise of Asian countries in global economy and politics ... will become increasingly recognized as being crucial to a multivalent understanding the American experience.” When this is contrasted with European literature “over centuries” used as an assimilating tool, “violent work ... mapping ethnicity onto nations,” which is also different from that published in the “1960s and ’70s ... from old colonies,” it becomes clear that ethnic literature’s definition and perception changes with the political, societal, and cultural climate of the times.

What does this mean for readers? Is literature specific to groups and experiences only for a particular section of the population at a given time? Negron-Muntaner suggests that ethnic literature is “more a way of reading” than anything else.

For whom is ethnic literature written? “I think ethnic literature is definitely not written for a particular ethnic group,” Jin said. “It might be ‘about’ experiences particular to a certain minority group, but it is not just intended for a narrowly confined audience, as is the case with any other literature.”

“Ethnic writers are no different from other writers in terms of why and how they write,” she continued. “They just tend to focus a bit more on the experience of segments of a society or nation that have been underrepresented in previous literature.”

In a culture that is so dependent on the merging of various ethnicities, it becomes crucial to see literature put forth by different ethnic groups as a sub-genre of our society, not some foreign civilization.

“Anyone who wants to study American literature should spend as much time on different sub-sets of ethnic literature as on the more traditional canon,” Jin said. “You cannot say anything about, for example, Don DeLillo’s portrayal of modern Beiruit in Mao II, without having also read Arab American writer Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War. ... And there are many more examples.”

So to answer whether there is such a thing as ethnic literature: yes. Ethnic literature exists. It can be found on any shelf in any section of any bookstore, the ethnicity inherent in every sentence on every page. If searching for it becomes difficult, try looking under the heading of “Universal Reading.” It should encompass everything from John Steinbeck to Amy Tan, all of it specific to certain experiences and able to be appreciated by all readers.