All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures.

Abstract

All My Relatives challenges the prevailing notion that the work of all American writers reflects a sense of determined individualism. Highlighting works by Frank Chin, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, N. Scott Momaday, Tomas Rivera, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman, Bonnie TuSmith shows that a first language of community exists within the cultures of ethnic Americans and is evident in their literary texts. TuSmith suggests that the proper understanding of these texts demands that we dismiss an interpretive frame borrowed from European-American literature. All My Relatives provides a new way of reading popular works such as The Woman Warrior, The Joy Luck Club, The Color Purple and John Edgar Wideman's Sent for You Yesterday. TuSmith's study will appeal to general readers as well as students and scholars of American culture, ethnic studies, and American literature. An original contribution to the field. TuSmith's willingness to step over invisible boundaries and to draw parallels between the cultural contexts of several ethnic groups at once is refreshing and important. --Amy Ling, University of Wisconsin, Madison Ambitious and timely a significant work that Americanists will want to read. TuSmith does an excellent job of clarifying the meaning and significance of the term ethnicity in relation to American literature.--Ramon Saldivar, Stanford University . TuSmith establishes the importance of traditional (usually oral) modes of expression to ethnic texts that are both relational and accessible [S]hould become a standard point of reference in the emerging field of comparative American literature.--Choice Bonnie TuSmith is Assistant Professor of English, Bowling Green State University.