At 1992 MLA Convention, keynote event of Presidential Forum addressed theme of Multiculturalism. The Task of Literary Representation in Twenty-First Century. The dominant tenor and majoritarian consensus of humanists on culture wars over canon revision and curricular diversification can be gauged from speech by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who argues for a pluralist philosophy (Isaiah Berlin is invoked as its chief prophet) where identities are always in dialogue, monads somehow linked by a hidden telephone switchboard. After a token acknowledgment of leftist critiques of late-capitalist reformism, Gates settles for a jazzy style of compromise in which individual subjects are, like everything else, sites of contest and negotiation, self-fashioning and refashioning (Culture Wars 11). Sara Suleri of Yale University concurs, endorsing this refurbished liberalism as a view that captures enlightened dynamic that is soul of America (17). I comment on Gates's pluralist legitimation later. Meanwhile, in The Chronicle of Higher Education(1) and journals like Academe, is often celebrated as manna or talisman reconciling competing claims of an assimilationist common culture, a slippery American self in a continual process of construction, and others occupying margins, ruptures, lacunae. Alice Kessler-Harris, director of women's studies at Rutgers University, is at pains to reassure neoconservative critics like Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, and Diane Ravitch that far from undermining search for unity, identity, and purpose, enterprise has potential to strengthen (B7). Skeptics like William Chace, president of Wesleyan University, while conceding that harbors salutary impulses for change, contends that it will not provide the basic tools of all genuine education: analysis, retention of materials, clear exposition, and intellectual seriousness. For him, the real pedagogical mission is to bring into association apparently dissimilar, to reveal commonality of all forms of discourse and taxonomy, all systems of mental discrimination (23)--a Platonic drive for all-encompassing integral One. At best, might represent a wish fulfillment for a freewheeling social order founded on principle of unity in multiplicity, E pluribus unum. Policy conferences, seminars and workshops in teachers's conventions, publishers's marketing sessions, and curricula of schools now all target diversity, multicultural literacy, etc., where once suppressed voices are allowed chance to be heard. Without invoking postmodern slogan of heterogeneity and differance, one Asian American artist even claims that pluralism is genuine American way and that multiculturalism means affirmative action (O'Brien and Little 126). What's background to this epochal trend and its attendant controversies? Despite claims to contrary, national imperative to include courses on cultural diversity (non-Western material) into general education core curriculum in many colleges and universities springs from a conjunctural crisis. Multiculturalism may be conceived as latest reincarnation of assimilationist drive to pacify unruly subaltern groups. It can be interpreted as a strategic response to deterioration of social fabric of country in decade after early seventies when progressive policies and institutional reforms gained by civil rights struggles of sixties were severely eroded or wiped out. One stark index of crisis is 1987 statistic of gap between poor and rich, largest in forty years: poorest fifth of all families received only 4.6 percent of national family income while top fifth's share was 43.7 percent (Parent) 81; Mantsios). More Americans are ill-housed, poorly educated, and without health care than ever before. …