The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions

by David Palumbo-Liu (Editor)

Who determines what ethnic literature gets included in the standard educational canon? How does this decision making occur? The Ethnic Canon questions the current process, arguing that texts are added to the canon only after an operation that attempts to resolve and neutralize historical and political contradictions and differences. The Ethnic Canon offers a wide variety of critical viewpoints and speaks to the history and practice of canon formation within specific ethnic literatures. The texts examined include Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Américo Paredes's Between Two Worlds, Richard Rodriquez's Days of Obligation, and David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, along with the novels of Amy Tan.

Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

Reviews

[Ke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wished I read all the referenced texts as to understand the book fully. Maybe selfishly, I found the article on Amy Tan to be the most interesting. I think it is even useful for the understanding of contemporary Asian American literature of Lisa See.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colleen Lye's essay

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This edited collection is really useful in thinking about the debates that swirl around identity based literatures and how canonization might merely reproduce a system of hierarchy it was trying to resist against. I obviously focused on the essays by Lisa Lowe, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Colleen Lye, and E. San Juan, Jr., but there are a lot of big names in here.

[jacky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the section titled "The Politics of Carnival and Heteroglossia in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Raply Ellison's Invisible Man." This was for my American Ethnic Literature class in college were I wrote about the later work.