The document discusses the history and definitions of multiculturalism and cultural studies in America. It notes that cultural studies draws from fields like Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial studies. The text specifically examines American multiculturalism, which arose from civil rights movements in the 1960s. It also discusses African American literature, which began with slave narratives and has gained widespread recognition since the 1970s, as well as Native American oral traditions and contemporary literature written in English.

1. American
Multiculturalism
Presented by –Hinaba
Sarvaiya

2. • Paper Name:- Culture Studies
• Roll Number:- 09
• Submitted by Department of English, MKBU.
• Email id:- hinabasarvaiya1711@gmail.com

3. WHAT IS “CUITURAL STUDIES”?
• The word “culture” itself is so difficult to pin down, “cultural studies” is
hard to define.
• 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” (ix).
• Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960s, cultural studies is composed of
elements of Marxism, poststructuralism and postmodernism, feminism,
gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film
theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies, and
postcolonial studies: those fields that concentrate on social and cultural
forces that either create communit or cause division and alienation.

4. TYPES OF CUTTURAL STUDIE:-
1.British Cultural Multiculturalism
2.New Historicism
3.American Multiculturalism
4.Postmodernism and Popular Culture.
5.Postcolonial Studies
• Definition of Multiculturalism:-
• According to American Heritage® Dictionary of the English
Language
“Relating a several cultures or relating to a social or educational
theory that encourages interest in many cultures within a society
rather than in only a mainstream culture”

5. American Multiculturalism:-
• In 1965 the Watts race riots drew worldwide attention. The Civil Rights Act
had passed in1964, and the backlash was well under way in 1965: murders
and other atrocities attended the civil rights march from Selma to
Montgomery. President Lyndon fohnson signed the Voting Rights Act.
• Americans will be puzzled by race distinctions from the past since children
of multiracial backgrounds may be the norm rather than the exception.
• And given the huge influx of Mexican Americans into the United States over
the last fifty years/ immigration paterns indicate that by the year 2050
Anglo-Americans will no longer be the majority, nor English necessarily the
most widely spoken language.

6. • Henry Louis Gates, fr., uses the word”race,, only in quotation marks, for
it “pretends to be an objective term of classificaion,” but it is a
“dangerous trope . . . Of ultimate, irreducible difference between
cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems
which-more often than not also have fundamentally opposed economic
interests.”
• “Race”is still a critical feature of American life, full of contradictions and
ambiguities; it is at once the greatest source of social conflict and the
richest source of cultural development in America.
• American Multicultural Studies: Diversity of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and
Sexuality provides an interdisciplinary view of multicultural studies in
the United States, addressing a wide range of topics that continue to
define and shape this area of study.

7. African American literature:-
• African American literature, body of literature written by Americans
of African descent.
• Beginning in the pre-Revolutionary War period, African American
writers have engaged in a creative, if often contentious, dialogue with
American letters.
• The result is a literature rich in expressive subtlety and social insight,
offering illuminating assessments of American identities and history.
• Although since 1970 African American writers, led by Toni Morrison,
have earned widespread critical acclaim, this literature has been
recognized internationally as well as nationally since its inception in
the late 18th century.

8. • Ellison urged black writers to trust their own experiences and definitions
of reality. He also upheld folklore as a source of creativity; it was what
“black people hadbefore they knew there was such a thing as art” (Ellison
173).
• Slave Narrative, In the wake of the bloody Nat Turner rebellion in
Southampton country, Virginia, in 1831, an increasingly fervent antislavery
movement in the United States.
• The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written
by Himself (1845) gained the most attention, establishing Frederick
Douglass as the leading African American man of letters of his time.
• By predicating his struggle for freedom on his solitary pursuit of literacy,
education, and independence, Douglass portrayed himself as a self-made
man, which appealed strongly to middle-class white Americans.

9. Prose, Drama, and Poetry:-
• Through the slave narrative, African Americans entered the world of prose
and dramatic literature.
• In 1853 William Wells Brown, an internationally known fugitive slave
narrator, authored the first Black American novel, Clotel; or, The President’s
Daughter.
• It tells the tragic story of the beautiful light-skinned African American
daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress; Clotel dies trying to
save her own daughter from slavery.
• Five years later Brown also published the first African American play, The
Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, based on scenes and themes familiar to
readers of fugitive slave narratives.
• In 1859 the first African American women’s fiction appeared: “The Two
Offers,” a short story by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper dealing with middle-
class women whose race is not specified.

10. American Indian Literatures:-
• In predominantly oral cultures, storytelling passes on religious beliefs,
moral values, political codes, and practical lessons of everyday life. For
American lndians, stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of
silencing by Euro-Americans.
• The term lndian a misnomer and stereotype-as in “cowboys and Indians” or
“Indian giver”-that helped whites wrest the continent away from
indigenous peoples.
• And yet “American Indian” is often preferred by Indians over “Native
American,” as demonstrated in the names of such organizations as the
American Indian Movement or the Association for the Study of American
Indian Literatures as Alan R. Velie notes (3).

11. • The best names to use would be those of the hundreds of tribes, with
an awareness of their differing languages, beliefs, and customs,
confusingly lumped together as “Indian.”
• Just as most Europeans identify themselves as French or Dutch or
Basque rather than “European,” so too American Indian identities are
tribal.
• Two types of Indian literature have evolved as fields of study.
• Tradional Indian Literatures
• Mainstream Indian Literatures
• Traditional Indian literature includes tales, songs, and oratory that have
existed on the North American continent for centuries, composed in
tribal languages and performed for tribal audiences.
• Mainstream Indian literature refers to works written by Indians in
English in the traditional genre of fiction, poetry, and autobiography.

12. • Yet it was not until the 1960s that the American reading public at
large became aware of works by American Indian writers,
especially after the publication of Kiowa writer M. Scott
Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), which won the Pulitzer
Prize, and his memoir, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969),
beginning a renaissance of Indian fiction and poetry.
Thank you

13. References:-
• American Multiculturalism.” American Heritage® Dictionary of the
English Language, Fifth Edition. 2011. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company 6 Oct. 2022
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/American+Multiculturalism
• Andrews, William L.. "African American literature". Encyclopedia
Britannica, 18 Aug. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/art/African-
American-literature. Accessed 7 October 2022.
• Guerin, Wilfred L. “Cultural Studies .” A Handbook of Critical
Approaches to Literature, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011,
pp. 275–305.