Which America Is Ours? Martí’s “Truth” and the Foundations of “American Literature”

Abstract

According to many critics of affirmative action and curricular reform, minorities have made overwhelming gains in higher education and completely taken over English departments. 1 The reconfigured canon, as demonstrated by the new “American literature” anthologies, surely demonstrates for these critics that inequality and discrimination are things of the past and that we should get back to just reading texts as texts rather than continuing to politicize education. Such criticisms of teaching “American literature” politically from a critical, multicultural perspective rely on a false and inaccurate assessment of the current state of U.S. universities, something of which the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reminded me. In an article on affirmative action, the Chronicle notes that, “[t] aken together, African-American, Hispanic, and American Indian scholars represent only 8% of the full-time faculty nationwide. And while 5% of professors are African American, about half of them work at historically black institutions. The proportion of black faculty members at predominantly white universities— 2.3%—is virtually the same as it was 20 years ago” (Wilson, A10). Given that “Hispanics” make up 12.5% of the total U.S. population and that blacks are 12.3%, our representation on university faculties is appallingly low (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 3). 2 Furthermore, although there were 61,000 “Hispanics” with doctoral degrees in the United States in 2000 (Newburger and Curry, 25), 3 there were well over 350,000 “Hispanics” incarcerated in the United States. 4 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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