Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project: Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring

Abstract

Although ethical criticism offers a valuable discourse for exploring concepts of community, goodness, and love and their centrality in the moral construction of literary works, it also provides us with a useful methodology for considering the function of these philosophical constructs in regard to the most fractious issues that confront the academy today, the especially divisive notions of culture and race. As Samuel Fleischacker perceptively observes in The Ethics of Culture (1994), “Writers on culture usually show little understanding of what makes an argument or decision ethical, while writers on ethics have rarely done much serious thinking about culture” (ix). Because issues associated with racial prejudice and cultural division continue to plague our postsecondary institutions, they merit particular attention in any study of contemporary academic fiction.