Among contemporary American writers, Ishmael Reed is the major theorist and proponent of late 20th-century and early 21st-century multiculturalism in the United States of America. Since the early nineteenth century, A...Among contemporary American writers, Ishmael Reed is the major theorist and proponent of late 20th-century and early 21st-century multiculturalism in the United States of America. Since the early nineteenth century, America has embraced political myths of "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" to minimize recognition of its multiethnic and multicultural identity. Reed has effectively challenged the validity of those myths. He has consistently worked, by way of his provocative essays, anthologies, and fiction, to maximize acknowledgement of the interactive presence of multiculturalism in the literary and social evolution of America. This essay quite briefly addresses what might be designate Reed's "combative conversation" with his nation. It argues that Reed's anthologies——19 Necromancers From Now: An Anthology of Original American Writing for the 1970s(1970), Calafia; The California Poetry(1979), Multi America: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace(1997), From Totem to Hip-Hip: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002(2003), and Pow Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience--Short Fiction from Then to Now(2009)——provide subject matter as well as evidence for the endless debate regarding theory and praxis of multiculturalism in global contexts.展开更多
文摘Among contemporary American writers, Ishmael Reed is the major theorist and proponent of late 20th-century and early 21st-century multiculturalism in the United States of America. Since the early nineteenth century, America has embraced political myths of "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" to minimize recognition of its multiethnic and multicultural identity. Reed has effectively challenged the validity of those myths. He has consistently worked, by way of his provocative essays, anthologies, and fiction, to maximize acknowledgement of the interactive presence of multiculturalism in the literary and social evolution of America. This essay quite briefly addresses what might be designate Reed's "combative conversation" with his nation. It argues that Reed's anthologies——19 Necromancers From Now: An Anthology of Original American Writing for the 1970s(1970), Calafia; The California Poetry(1979), Multi America: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace(1997), From Totem to Hip-Hip: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002(2003), and Pow Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience--Short Fiction from Then to Now(2009)——provide subject matter as well as evidence for the endless debate regarding theory and praxis of multiculturalism in global contexts.
