Capstone: Literature of Ethnic Minorities in America
Fall, 2009
We've moved to Ansari Business 212.
Isn't this the case? American literature is ethnic literature. If we insist on an ethnic genre that includes Asian, Latino, African American, Native American, and so on, what's left over will soon be
in fact a minority literature. It will be defined in the overarching presence of "ethnic literature" by the absence of any struggle over identity within a diverse culture.
S. Mila Sagen
Brief News
Barack Obama, a 47-year-old first-term senator from Illinois, shattered more than 200 years of history Tuesday night by winning election as the first African-American president of the United States. A crowd of nearly a quarter-million jammed Grant Park and the surrounding area in Chicago, where Obama addressed the nation for the first time as its president-elect at midnight ET. Hundreds of thousands more — Mayor Richard Daley said he would not be surprised if a million Chicagoans jammed the streets — watched on a large television screen outside the park.
USA Today 21 Nov.
Robyn Gioia doesn't look like a troublemaker. Far from it.
Gioia is a wife, mother and teacher, and her green eyes twinkle when she talks about her fifth-grade students at the Bolles School just north of here in Ponte Vedra.
But Gioia, 53, has written a children's book, and just the title is enough to peeve any Pilgrim: America's REAL First Thanksgiving.
"It was the publisher who put real in capital letters," she says, "but I think it's great."
What does REAL mean? Well, she's not talking turkey and cranberry sauce. She's talking a Spanish explorer who landed here on Sept. 8, 1565, and celebrated a feast of thanksgiving with Timucua Indians. They dined on bean soup.
If you do the math, it is 56 years before the Pilgrims sat down and shared a meal with natives at Plymouth Rock.
LA Times, 11 Nov. 07
Mehdi Bozorgmehr, the New York center's co-director and a UCLA graduate, said that Middle Eastern Americans have long been an "invisible community" in academia, in part because they are classified as white by the U.S. Census and other government agencies.
As a result, ethnic studies departments have not included them. Also, Title 6 federal funding, which supports international studies, bars universities from researching groups within the U.S., he said.
"What it means is that this population falls through the cracks," said Bozorgmehr, a Tehran native who helped establish the New York center in 2001 with a Ford Foundation grant.
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