MELUS and MELUS: From the Beginning

Abstract

In the beginning was Katharine Newman. Now, of course, the MELUS project is a product of the historical moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s: specifically, the opening to race and ethnicity as elements of American scholarly discourse that was precipitated by the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement, the feminist movement, and other cultural currents. It is related to all these important American cultural developments and to more popular elements of public discourse as varied as “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” T-shirts, reparations for the Japanese American internment, and the even now ongoing debates about forbidden words and offensive sports team mascots. But even the broadest movements of social and intellectual change must have some drivers, movers, and shakers. Katharine Newman was one of those people. Teaching at West Chester State College, southwest of Philadelphia, when racial integration brought more African American students to campus, she realized these students had little or no knowledge of the literary achievements of their ancestors. As she revised her courses to include more African American writing, she realized that alienation from the products of one’s ethnic community was a condition shared by most of her students, both those of color and those of the assimilated white majority. She began to see a need for changes to the curriculum that would bring students closer to their ethnic past.