Multiethnic Intellectual Traditions and Reinvention of America in Early Twentieth-Century Ethnic American Literature
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Date
2024-08-07
Authors
Jung, Junha
Journal Title
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
The interwar period was a time when the American community and the meaning of its membership were dismantled, contested, and demanded to be redefined through a series of events, such as the Great Depression, the Great Migration, the settler-colonial nation’s territorial expansion in the Midwest, and the related attempt to consolidate its border in the South. In the context of this dissertation, being American is less a legal-administrative matter of nationality. Rather, it is a set of epistemological conditions that are used to naturalize the boundary called American and to exclude others from it. By discussing the works of H. T. Tsiang, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Eastman, and Américo Paredes, this dissertation demonstrates how these multiethnic author-intellectuals commonly critiqued the liberal notion of the human defined in terms of the possession of scientific rationality. In response to the specific historical conditions their communities were facing, the four writers drew on their own ethnic intellectual traditions to reinvent the social scientific, legal, and political discourses through which Americanness is defined and imposed. Multiethnic literature formally renders multiethnic communities’ shared critique of the figure of the English-speaking, property-owning man as a model American while suggesting alternative ways of being American.