Ron Scapp
Ethnic studies is the direct result of political activism. This is important on a number of levels, including what one might consider an ethnic studies approach to literary theory. Unlike many other disciplines (and literary approaches, even some “Marxist” literary perspectives) that eschew explicit political identification and/or motivation, ethnic studies was born out of such identification and motivation, and has embraced both, unapologetically. While many disciplines and fields of study have historically and understandably emerged from and/or developed out of the interests of scholars and academics who are in teaching and administrative positions, ethnic studies was, a demand, if you will, made by a coalition of students in California at a particularly volatile moment in the Civil Rights Movement, and for the United States as a whole. In 1968 a group of students at San Francisco State University went on strike (the longest student strike in US history) to protest the curriculum they were being offered and the type of courses they were not able to take. The group was made up of students from the Black Student Union, the Latin American Student Organization, the Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor,1 El Renacimiento, a Mexican American student association, among others who formed the Third World Liberation Front.
The founding of the Department of Ethnic Studies, then the School of Ethnic Studies, and finally the College of Ethnic Studies (the only such college) at San Francisco State were all the direct result of the political efforts made by the students of the Third World Liberation Front. Within a year of the student strike at San Francisco State, the Third World Liberation Front at the University of California at Berkeley organized another student strike (the second longest student strike in US history) making similar demands to those of their fellow students and demonstrators (which included some honorable and courageous faculty and staff members) at San Francisco State. There too the results were substantial: the creation of an ethnic studies curriculum, and eventually the establishment of an important Department of Ethnic Studies, with a highly regarded doctoral program. These two significant originators and contributors to the birth and development of ethnic studies remain important to understanding the status of the field today, in and out of the academy, and to understanding the nature of ethnic studies’ contribution to literary theory and the struggles over literatures.
As noted, an important difference between ethnic studies and most, if not quite all, academic disciplines is the fact that ethnic studies was directly the result of student‐led protests and demands, and was explicitly linked to a student‐led movement, the Third World Liberation Front. Of course, numerous faculty and administrators supported and made important (and timely) contributions to the movement to transform the curriculum and to address student concerns, but the fact that the challenge to the curriculum and the modification and transformation came from students who saw themselves within the context of an of even larger (global) political movement makes ethnic studies politically charged in an unique way. From the beginning, ethnic studies was intended to acknowledge, address, and overcome a historical narrative regarding the United States and all its people, as well as the many other people around the world who have been described and identified in ways that promote a white, patriarchal, capitalist agenda while undermining, devaluing, and even eradicating in many cases, those who are not on the winning side of that narrative. So, in many ways, ethnic studies, once it had secured a place within the academy, intrinsically and immediately threatened the mythology of “impartiality” and “objectivity” of educational institutions from kindergarten to graduate school. And, ethnic studies today remains a meaningful and significant provocation for reconsidering and criticizing the narrative of America that has ignored or otherwise devalued the significance and role of non‐whites in US history (and literature). Thus, ethnic studies has been and remains both a disruptive2 and corrective influence with respect to the traditional ways of understanding and describing history and the lives of those who typically get cast and recast into roles and positions that are inferior to and demonized in relation to white Europeans, especially in comparison to the value and contributions of white men since the birth of our nation.
Ethnic studies is not the only discipline to consider, analyze, and address the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, “deviant” modalities of being, and power within the context of the history and legacy of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. But, unlike many other disciplines and fields of study (anthropology, sociology, psychology, and some literary studies among them), ethnic studies, from its very start, has taken as a given the simultaneously inherently and intrinsically problematic but also culturally rich dynamics of the very intersectionality at work in our society, our education system, and at work in the various individual disciplines. And, it should be noted that the very notion and use of the term intersectionality presents us with both the complicated and complex history of ethnic studies, as well as the deployment of “intersectionality” itself.
Intersectionality is the study of the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of identity (and identities) and the various systems of oppression that inform, control, and determine much, if not all, of how individuals and communities are described, treated, and interact. Intersectionality asserts that many categories such as race, class, gender, ability as well as ethnicity, all overlap and interact in many ways, at different times and to varying degrees. Intersectionality emerged from a feminist sociological stance regarding the complexities of identity and systems of oppression and domination, and asserts the need to consider the many levels and ways in which social and cultural identity (identities) are connected, formed, and sustained specifically with regard to oppression and domination. Since the mid‐1990s, ethnic studies has focused on using intersectionality to acknowledge, confront and address the history and legacy of the singular “master” narrative that has been so responsible for establishing and maintaining social and cultural identity. Many other fields of study, on the other hand, have historically—and sadly in some cases continue even today—tolerated, accepted and even advanced a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist agenda.3 Ethnic studies is an academic discipline, by definition, working (struggling) to acknowledge and address the complicated and violent history of racism inside (and outside) educational institutions at all levels, and throughout the world. As such, it occupies a fairly unique place within the academy, and as a field of study more broadly.
One might be tempted to ask about the distinction between “ethnic studies” as such and other fields of study such as African American studies, Chicano studies, Native American studies, Asian American studies, and the fields of queer studies or women’s studies. The short answer is that each of these fields of studies specifically and rightly considers things from within the context of their focus. And, while that focus can and often does extend beyond the specific ethnic, racial, gendered, and sexual group in question, ethnic studies is by definition “extended beyond” and includes all possibilities and modalities of “otherness” and “difference.” Each of these “other studies” also has an approach to literary criticism and theory, some of them are discussed in this book. What is important to emphasize here is that all of these “other studies,” including ethnic studies, are relatively “new studies” compared to the many well‐established academic disciplines, and their relationship to them and to each other is still evolving.
My focus here is to attempt to tease out what an ethnic studies approach to literature (and therefore to literary theory and criticism) might be. While one can readily point to and identify a psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, and even an Afrocentric approach to reading literature (and history), an ethnic studies approach might strike some as less easily identifiable or distinguishable (from the other approaches). And, I would say that it is less so, for historical, academic and literary reasons. Ethnic studies, after all, is not only a relatively new field of study and an officially acknowledged discipline within the academy; it also has been under various states of scrutiny and ongoing assaults since its inception (Scapp 2010). While this is true for other fields of study and newly established academic disciplines, departments and programs (such as women’s studies, queer studies and the numerous “studies” that have emerged over the past half century), as mentioned in the introductory section, ethnic studies arose directly out of student protests and strikes, and not from the (important, and sometimes biased) work and interests of faculty, independent scholars, and administrators.
Of course, the academic establishment and maintenance of ethnic studies courses, programs, and departments required faculty and administrative “buy‐in” and participation, but all of this came about as a result of a systematic and explicit critique of the existing “strategic apparatus,” as Michel Foucault might frame it, that determines how we describe ourselves and others and what is permissible and punishable within such an apparatus. As Foucault put it:
I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the “apparatus” which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific.
(Foucault 1980: 197)
In a very important move, ethnic studies disrupted the existing apparatus, in a number of ways, and at various levels of discursive and non‐discursive interactions, and in such a manner as to prove directly threatening (to both the academic and larger social apparatus) even after its “acceptance” within the academy. Consequently, ethnic studies has evolved and advanced differently (otherwise) from most disciplines and fields of study. Its relationship to both well‐established and even other newer fields of study and disciplines is a relationship that is as yet to be fully determined, perhaps other than as a relationship that continues to demand reconsidering, rethinking, and redressing the historically established and enforced norms regarding the identity and status of non‐white European peoples and cultures. In some real sense then, ethnic studies is first and foremost about struggle on multiple fronts: those involved with social, political, and cultural change, and those involved with the advancement of social justice. It is such struggles that inform, direct and propel an ethnic studies approach to just about anything, including literature.
As noted, ethnic studies is not alone in (demanding) our reading otherwise. Certainly, women’s studies, African American studies, Latina/o studies, queer studies and the numerous “other” studies challenge the status quo of patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, homophobia, and so on, both inside and outside the academy. but ethnic studies, because of its origin and evolution out of direct student political engagement and protest, has a different history and trajectory within the academy compared to the “other” studies that emerged since the mid‐1960s. Just as it would be hard to consider women studies without the acknowledgment and critique of patriarchy, African American studies without the acknowledgment and critique of white supremacy, or queer studies without the acknowledgment and critique of homophobia, it is difficult to appreciate or understand ethnic studies without the acknowledgment and critique of the political power structure and intersectionality of all those forces, ideologies, and modalities of identity and oppression considered by all the other disciplines. From its start, ethnic studies was predicated upon coalitions, solidarities, and the type of multiplicities and eccentricities that many other (more sectarian?) disciplines have avoided, ignored, and failed to achieve or to accept. So, for ethnic studies multiplicities and pluralities are the givens, however problematical or promising: race becomes races; ethnicity, ethnicities; sexuality, sexualities; gender, genders; class, classes; and literature becomes literatures. But what does that multiplization4 and pluralization exactly mean?
One of the ways in which ethnic studies challenges long‐standing beliefs and positions and complicates and pluralizes things is by virtue of acknowledging and engaging the very complicated and pluralized histories, and the social and cultural contexts that have unfolded and continue to unfold, and then get told and retold, typically from a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist singular perspective, or some variant of it and its legacy. Everything ethnic studies considers, analyzes and advocates is, by definition, “pluralized.” There is no “one” ethnicity, especially when we are liberated from the mythology, if not the politics and legacy, of white supremacism (in all of its virulent manifestations). Ethnic studies challenges the notion that a singular fixed position, perspective or explanation is nearly all as accurate, correct or useful5 for understanding the full range of complexities and intersectionalities of race, gender, class, ability, power, or any modality of existence. Plurality and multiplicity are vehicles and opportunities for exploring, explaining, and expanding the singular master6 narrative that has been established and maintained to promote and enforce white male supremacy. Because of such a focus and commitment, ethnic studies has encountered and endured an ongoing assault on its legitimacy and credibility. Fortunately, owing to this very focus and commitment to plurality and intersectionality, ethnic studies has emerged as a theoretically innovative and ethically driven field of study. I would like to claim that one important contribution that ethnics studies has made specifically with regard to literature (literary theory and criticism) is “reading otherwise,” that is, reading the plurality, multiplization and intersectionality that allow us to engage in the “struggles over literatures.”
Ethnic studies enhances, complicates and extends our reading of literatures (fiction, poetry, history, and many forms of writing and documentation). It does this through a systematic, if multifarious, manner. By employing (and deploying) the notions of plurality, multiplization and intersectionality to character development, narrative strategies, perspective/point of view, voice and so on, an ethnic studies approach to literature helps to flesh out some of these issues and makes us more aware of the various ways in which ethnicity operates and works both thematically and contextually as a signifier, and in the process challenging hand‐me‐down images, impressions and associations that “ethnic characters” typically evoke in readers, and also challenge the very invisibility of “whiteness” and white supremacy as constructs at work across different literatures.
Myra Mendible notes this in an unpublished lecture7 highlighting that for generations readers of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre discussed the novel without ever considering how colonial discourses worked to inscribe and fix as the Other the creole woman who is locked up by the novel’s “hero”: Bertha Mason’s ethnicity was treated as “incidental.” And yet, it was a critical, if unacknowledged, signifier in the narrative (especially as shorthand for irrationality, excess, and otherness). The traditional readings consequently also ignored the relational nature of ethnicity the creole’s madness works in contradistinction to the white English heroine’s much more “sensible,” “measured,” and “rational” sensibility. An ethnic studies approach would give voice to the silenced madwoman and remind the reader that it is through her relationship with “her other,” the stoic, English male protagonist, Rochester, that she is in fact “ethnicized.” Thus an ethnic studies approach gives us the tools that are critical within literary theory/criticism, within the fields of literatures and the various disciplines, helping us even to see canonical works “otherwise” (see also Mendible 2014).
In the 1970s or 1980s, the evocation of “the other” would send us off in various psychoanalytic, feminist, deconstructive, and even Marxist directions. So reading “otherwise” would be reading in one or more of these methods, and the “other” in question would be rendered this or that, depending on the path we chose. But in 2017 many well‐known literary theorists were tempted to ask: why all the theoretical fuss over literature—that is, why read this way or otherwise? Backing away from theory for different reasons and to varying degrees of distance, critics such as Stanley Fish, Harold Bloom, and Terry Eagleton have all expressed their frustration with the way in which theory can detract from, distort, or mislead us in our reading of literature pure and simple (Eagleton 2003; Bloom 2000; Fish 1999). Of course, since the impact of the “theoretical moment” was as significant as it was, there can no longer be a call for a naive readings of anything that is to be understood as “pure and simple.” Yet the backlash to theory, including from some of the pioneers in literary theory, seems to hint at the possibility of reading just that way, that is, unencumbered and not laden with the unnecessary baggage that comes with theory, or more strongly put, that for them is theory.
This consideration of the relationship of, connection to, and impact of ethnic studies on literature (and vice versa) is offered, in part, as a kind of rejoinder to those asserting that reading can be “pure and simple,” or are longing for the days when it was still possible. (Warning: it was never so.) For ethnic studies the theoretical position of reading otherwise, that is of reading the pluralities and intersectionalities that run throughout the landscapes and textures of our nation, is, in fact, a very “practical,” and methodologically necessary, matter for helping us read the many texts of our nation. In some real and important ways, then, theory is still very much at play (in the sense evoked by Derrida 1980), even if theory is less fashionable and trendy among literature professors today than during the 1970s, 1980s, or early 1990s. So, this may in fact be a good moment to reflect on the history and future of reading otherwise, and explore the relationship between ethnic studies and the ongoing struggles over literatures.8
Some, as I have suggested, may argue that reading itself needed a post‐theoretical adjustment (a break), as it were, to help bring us back to literature as literature, and away from literature as a mere platform for the linguistic pyrotechnics that marked so many scholarly articles and books from the 1970s and 1980s, and away from some of the difficult and painful issues raised by new ways of reading. Yet despite this, perhaps even because of this resistance, this move away from theory and tough questions, ethnic studies remains committed to and engaged with theory, generally and with respect to literature, even if it is the case that there are examples of pseudo‐theoretical/tongue twisting/obscurantist publications that can readily be identified and dismissed for a number of reasons.
I suspect that many such publications may be more the result of overly enthusiastic scholars feeling liberated to speculate and speak their minds in ways previously not encouraged, and even frowned upon, rather than a deliberate attempt to write in ways intended to baffle or otherwise confuse readers, although that too has occurred. And, it is worth noting that some have specifically criticized “theorizing” itself for its Western European and, therefore, colonial and white history and bias. Barbara Christian’s article, “The Race For Theory” (1987) rightly challenges those professors and critics at that time who silenced, devalued, or otherwise ignored the Black writers and Black voices they were talking about because they were so very caught up in “theory.” Christian’s critique includes theorists like Fish and Bloom who were, at the time, very much embracing Western thinkers from Freud to Derrida, and who subsequently turned hostile toward theory themselves in their journey toward what I would argue is an even more white and Western European‐oriented stance toward the reading of literature.
Despite Christian’s important critique, she became head of the doctoral program in Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley from 1986 to 1989, during a particularly theoretically productive time for Berkeley and ethnic studies. But it is also worth noting that bell hooks, an important African American feminist cultural critic has specifically argued that the connection between “theory” and “practice” is a given (see hooks 1984; 1989).
Too many questions remain, too many ideological positions remain fixed, and the mythical singular (master) narrative of our nation still needs to be challenged and expanded. A question then arises, how do we proceed and what do we make of reading theory and criticism (of reading otherwise)? As Roland Barthes asked:
How can we read criticism? Only one way: since I am here a second‐degree reader, I must shift my position: instead of agreeing to be the confidant of this critical pleasure—a sure way to miss it—I can make myself its voyeur: I observe clandestinely the pleasure of others, I enter perversion; the commentary then becomes in my eyes a text, a fiction, a fissured envelope. The writer’s perversity (his pleasure in writing is without function), the doubled, the trebled, the infinite perversity of the critic and of his reader.
(Barthes 1975: 17)
Thus in reading and writing criticism we engage in a kind of “perversity,” according to Barthes, a perversity that allows us to experience “the pleasure of the text” and to transgress well‐established boundaries and previously adhered‐to limits (moral, political, and aesthetic).
Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of considering ethnic studies and literary theory is recognizing that from its inception ethnic studies was intended to transgress well‐established boundaries and to liberate those engaged with it from the strictures of previous limits, especially those regarding the history and status of non‐white and non‐European Americans. In this sense ethnic studies is inherently and intrinsically a “perversion” of the well‐established and (too often) violently imposed white‐supremacist narratives that have directed and guided the United States and other nations, however problematically and deleteriously.9 In short, ethnic studies is, and has been, an act of resistance to and a rejection of the fictions Americans have been forced to accept as the only legitimate history, and as the only appropriate literature that define who we are and might become.10
So, in this sense, the phrase “struggles over literatures” is helpful in understanding something fundamental about what we might consider an “ethnic studies approach” to reading (otherwise). This is so because ethnic studies is predicated upon the pluralities, multiplicities, and intersectionalities that form the landscape, textures, and dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and interplay of status, dignity, and power. To some degree then, ethnic studies explores, exposes, and expands that very landscape, texture, and dynamic and employs an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach and strategy. “Reading otherwise” in this sense integrates the understanding of “the other” that can be encountered in a wide range of work and thinkers, from Edward Said to Deleuze and Guattari, and from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to Donaldo Macedo, who are not considered ethnic studies scholars per se. But, reading otherwise also integrates an understanding of “the other” that emanates from the work of writers and thinkers such as bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, among many others who write criticism, novels, poetry, plays and fiction, and creative non‐fiction.
For readers familiar with these different thinkers, critics and writers, the emphasis promoted by the ethnic studies approach integrates and connects wide‐ranging perspectives on the notion of “the Other,” along with the concepts of marginality, minority status, race and ethnicity. But, for those unfamiliar, the reference to these other theorists and writers may need to be a bit more fully discussed. All of these have in one way or another specifically addressed the complex and complicated theme of “otherness,” with respect to race and ethnicity—and in some cases have done so differently at different times, as Toni Morrison has both in her fiction and non‐fiction. For my purposes, I need to gesture towards Edward W. Said’s groundbreaking book Orientalism (1978); the innovative study by French philosopher and psychoanalyst, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s important essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak”; and Henry Louis Gates’s influential book, The Signifying Monkey. All these works explore a variety of approaches to the issue of “otherness.” Ethnic studies incorporates the broad landscape of their ideas, themes, and concepts, and freely employs all these perspectives. So what has characterized ethnic studies throughout its history is the establishing of coalitions, alliances, solidarities, and pluralities, and as a result an ethnic studies approach to literature has been somewhat more difficult to single out from the multitude of literary theories that ethnic studies integrates and employs. In short, the very approach and strategy engaged by ethnic studies have rendered it necessary to embrace the pluralities, multiplicities, and intersectionalities that are ethnic studies.
I would like to suggest that ethnic studies is unique in its engagement with, and acceptance of, the profound importance of the pluralities, multiplicities, and intersectionalities at work in the world at large, at work within different literatures, and at work within itself. This, in part, both explains and allows for ethnic studies to simultaneously be its own field of study and discipline but also to continue to be connected to and engaged with Chicano studies, African American studies, Asian American studies, queer studies, women’s studies, Native American studies, Latino/a studies and a multitude of “other” fields of study and disciplines, each justifiably claiming its own theoretical foundation, approach, and literature. But what I want to emphasize here, perhaps, more explicitly than ever before is how ethnic studies initiates and sustains a theoretical and practical possibility for solidarity, coalition, and cohesiveness between and among all the many other fields of study in a way that I believe would not be possible without a specifically multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field such as ethnic studies itself. And, it is worth noting that the difference between “multidisciplinary” and “interdisciplinary” is important, given the point I am highlighting here about ethnic studies, namely that it is both.
It is true that there are other fields of study that are both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, but I would argue that none is as founded upon such a wide range of disciplines or is as interdisciplinary as ethnic studies. Today, ethnic studies has scholars, advocates, and educators working in such diverse fields as health, sociology, geography, history, linguistics, philosophy, just to name a few, and because of the theoretical and practical commitment to and understanding of plurality, multiplicity, and intersectionality, ethnic studies researchers, scholars, educators, and advocates work from an interdisciplinary perspective, almost by definition. Owing to the scope of subjects and issues that ethnic studies considers and analyses, an ethnic studies approach to works of literature, or to literary theory and criticism generally, will be both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, embracing, acknowledging, and addressing the pluralities, multiplicities, and intersectionalities of the text considered and the realities at work. Such an approach is still developing, slowed in part by the evolution of ethnic studies out of social science, and its inflection by other disciplines such as African American studies, Native American Studies and so on. But over the past few years, more scholars have engaged a genuinely ethnic studies approach to literature and literary theory.
A good example of such work is an article by Lorna L. Perez, a reading of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street that employs the issues and themes of plurality, multiplicity and intersectionality that I have been noting as essential to an ethnic studies approach to literature (Perez 2012). In her article Perez notes that while other critics who have understood “the house” in the title of the work as the singular house of significance and meaning, she instead emphasizes and explores the multitude of houses that play an important role throughout Cisnero’s novel. Beyond the house on Mango Street from which the narrator of the novel, Esperanza Cordero, longs to free herself, and beyond the house away from Mango Street that she one day wishes to inhabit there are “myriad other houses that dot the textual landscape; houses that are marginal, invisible, and filled with teeming and forgotten life. These are houses that are spaces of shame and loss, structured around patriarchal domesticity, and marginalized by racist, classist hegemony” (2012: 53). Perez’s focus on the importance of the multiplicity of houses is a perfect example of an ethnic studies approach. But Perez also employs both an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach that I have argued here is also part and parcel to an ethnic studies approach to “reading otherwise.” Perez does this, in part, by utilizing the work and themes of the English professor and cultural critic Homi Bhabha (specifically his notion of the “unhomely”) and that of the late French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (specifically his notion of “felicitous space”). In so doing, Perez expands and extends previous critiques of “the house” and offers us a more thoughtful and rich understanding of the mythology of the American Dream as scrutinized through a feminist lens. As Perez notes:
At the center of this consideration is the loaded and metaphorically rich association of house with American identity, and more particularly the story of upward mobility that is most commonly referenced through iconic representations of the post‐World War II American Dream. While it may be tempting to read Esperanza’s longing for a house of her own as a gesture towards the immigrant‐makes‐good narrative that is associated with the American Dream, I will contend that the meaning of the house in this novel is, at best, an ambivalent one. The text is populated with multiple houses—some real and some imagined—that, when taken in conjunction with one another, provide a stark critique of gender, domesticity, and ultimately national inclusion. The House on Mango Street does not reaffirm the comforting ethos of the American Dream, rather it uses its most profound symbol—the house—to reveal its unstable and violent foundations.
(Perez 2012: 53)
In this nicely crafted and argued paragraph Perez successfully articulates and demonstrates what I have suggested is “reading otherwise” and offers an ethnic studies’ reading of a work of literature. In such a reading Perez employs and deploys multiple disciplines and the complex and complicated themes that ethnic studies is always at work considering and reconsidering, including national identity, belonging, class, gender, and the American Dream itself. Her work in general is at the vanguard of ethnic studies literary theory, as part of an ever‐growing group of “ethnic studies” literary critics.
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison (1992) offers us readings of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century novels and unmasks the racial subtext that informs literature typically not considered “ethnic,” including works by Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway. At the beginning of her meditation on the issues Morrison tells us that she wants to
put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature … draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World—without the mandate for conquest.
(Morrison 1992: 3)
I believe that ethnic studies offers us just such a strategy and tools, the ability and opportunity for reading otherwise; and reading otherwise, in turn, offers us the ability and opportunity to liberate various literatures from the historical, cultural, political strictures that have presented them in only a singular manner, framed and limited by the master narrative of white supremacy, the legacy of slavery and the troubled and pained consequences of colonialism. In doing so, reading otherwise liberates us, as well as the texts we encounter in the process. An ethnic studies approach to literature and literary theory then is an approach that from the start is a political reading, a challenge to the historically embedded ways in which we see and are told how to see the world we inhabit. As a result, it is demanding of the texts it considers and of their readers and critics.
Nothing is above reassessment and re‐evaluation within the context of reading otherwise, including our own values, status, and claims to knowledge. Ethnic studies is therefore a very dynamic and powerful field of study and when utilized in the context considering literature it provides an engaging and useful strategy for rethinking many of the givens about literature. By integrating and incorporating so completely both a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective and highlighting themes and notions such as plurality, multiplicity, and intersectionality, an ethnic studies approach to literature simultaneously requires and liberates us to engage in reading otherwise, a process that also liberates us to engage in thinking otherwise, and even the possibility of living otherwise.