Theorizing Cultural Difference: A Critique of the "Ethnicity School"

Abstract

Moments of intense political, social and cultural ferment sometimes give rise to liberating new paradigms for discussing and assessing literary practice. During and after those moments, the terrain of what constitutes literature, and the related matter of what constitutes appropriate critical tools, become nothing less than battlegrounds that bear complex relations to conflicts elsewhere in the society. Moreover, contestations of critical practice also involve the promotion and reflection of creative practice in fiction, poetry, drama, and in new and hybrid forms. While these creative practices most often ratify the associated critical tenets, they may outdistance those tenets as well. One such fertile moment, the Great Depression of the 1930s, helped to overthrow previously dominant critical tendencies such as the New Humanism; it also helped to drive forward at least two paradigms that in turn have shaped our perception of cultural practice in the U.S. ever since. The first of these, the Marxist socio-cultural approach, extended in theoretical and creative writing the terrain of literature to that of the workplace; immigrant life (especially Jewish, Irish and Italian); plebian and poor rural existence; issues of gender and of gender and race;1 and, in some exceptional moments as in the work of Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright to folk and Afro-American culture. The other approach was that of the formalist school, later known as the New Critics, which responded to the social crisis by redoubling efforts to promote a cultural theory favoring elite Modernist poetry's structural dynamism and technical features.2 I point to this example from the 1930s to call attention to the burden of this essay, which is to make a sharp distinction between two alternative tendencies in critical methodology that came into being thirty years later at another moment of historico-cultural crisis. For it was under the impact of the socio-cultural crisis of the 1960s and 1970s that the Ethnicity School, on the one hand, and what I call the proponents of