Teaching American Ethnic Literatures has been a labor of love by two teach-
ers of American literature who wanted to learn more about the literature
they teach and to expand the range of works they assign. In editing these
nineteen essays, we have learned more about teaching ethnic literature than
we ever expected, and we only hope that other teachers will get as much out
of reading the volume as we have gotten out of compiling it. In this intro-
duction, we spell out our assumptions about ethnic literature and teach-
ing, starting with some suggestions about using the book itself.

Teaching American Ethnic Literatures has emerged from the recent wave
of interest in ethnic literature and could easily be used in the many courses
in multiethnic literature that are being created today on college campuses
across this country. But the collection could also be adopted in other classes,
particularly in genre courses and in surveys of American literature.

Ethnic American literature, by the way it breaks traditional boundaries,
often leads us to new insights about literary genres--about autobiography,
for example. Ethnic autobiography pushes the form to its limits and reveals
how it is made and what its components are. If a teacher were to center a
course on the five autobiographies studied here--Black Elk Speaks, Carlos Bulosan's
America Is in the Heart, Maxine Hong Kingston Woman War-
rior, Richard Rodriguez Hunger of Memory, and Richard Wright Black
Boy, along with the analyses by Thomas Couser, E. San Juan, Jr., Shirley
Lim, Antonio Márquez, and Yoshinobu Hakutani--students would learn
much about the range and possibilities of the genre. For ethnic autobiogra-
phy is autobiography at its least mediated, the stories of American writers
engaged in the simultaneous process of assimilation and resistance.

Likewise for fiction. A course on the American short story could use the

-3-