Among these essays on Ethnic Literature and Cultural Nationalism are some informative, provocative, and stimulating contributions toward an understanding of ethnic literature in America. We can learn from Harris's analysis of the history of Yardbird Reader how the definition of American art has proved shackling to writers-both in its monocultural emanation which denies poly-ethnic tendencies and in its antithetical counterpart of cultural nationalism, which imposes standards confining as the European ones. Good writers are rarely committed to a homogeneous culture, white or black-and, we might add, ChineseAmerican, Chicano, American Indian, Puerto Rican, Asian-American, or American Jewish. It is thus the task of the literary critic as a culture critic to help us understand the dynamic nature of national and subcultural definitions of literature, even though proponents of nationalist movements naturally try to present their concerns as eternal, static, and ahistorical. This requires as a first step a thorough and comprehensive reading of the various ethnic literatures from fiction to manifesto and an incorporation of literary histories and critical works where they exist. Here the essays by Rayson, Martin, Hunter, and Alurista (esp. his novel section) prove useful and informative. A next step is the truly poly-ethnic and comparative focus, here suggested by Dwyer. In order to avoid the fallacy of defining literature in terms of accompanying manifestos only, one constantly has to be alert to cross-cultural influences and poly-ethnic dialogues as they exist in the United States. The importance of the cultural rhetoric which accompanied the Black Power movement cannot be overestimated as a source of influence on writers of all American ethnic groups and even on the emergence of the kind of criticism presented at these panels and published in MELUS. This is, again, why Harris's discussion of the Yardbird group is so central to the literature, even of ethnic groups which, according to Ruppert at least, had little direct or media exposure to the Black movements of the 1960s.