Camelia Elias American Studies

the emergence of pluralism  As movement away from the “single truth” associated with positivism occurred, room was made for the constructs of multiple realities and diversity

multiculturalism  began to be equivalent to diversity theory and provided a framework for examination of group membership and power relationships.

3 approaches Assimilationist You can join us You should join us To join us, you need to be like us Integrationist We can all live together on our world Come and join us - We will help you, “others”, come into the mainstream, but you do not have to be like us Incorporationist We will transform each other for the betterment of all.

interactions  Diversity consists of 3 interactive elements:  Description  Explanation  Legitimacy

description  The full range of human activity (what people do and do not do and how they do what they do) appearance, and experience.

explanation  Why people do what they do, appear as they appear, and experience what they experience.

legitimacy  Judgment  value assessments about the consistency of explanations for category description with criteria for membership.  Responses-actions  (both negative and positive) that are deemed appropriate by those rendering the value judgments.

ideas in motion  Movement away from embodied diversity to diversity of ideas  Post-positivism and post-modernism provide the scaffold to reframe thinking about human diversity.

group symmetry  does not naively posit that all groups have equal opportunity and access to resources.  an ideal that refers to the equal value and contribution of disparate groups, and their subsequent reciprocal positive transformation of multicultural environments.

inclusion  the relocation of diversity beyond the category of membership to the larger domain of diversity depth, or that of varied beliefs, ideas, and experiences that are part of human existence  the repositioning of diversity as the foundation for tolerance, transformation, and incorporation.

discursive strategies  the personal is political  the personal is personal  the personal is both political and personal  both ourselves and other people  both here and some place else.  identity is both socially constructed and individual.

Andrei Codrescu (1946)  Born in Sibiu, Romania on  emigrated to the US in 1966  became U.S. citizen in 1981  poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter; columnist on National Public Radio;  editor of Exquisite Corpse, an influential literary journalExquisite Corpse  MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.  Codrescu’s websitewebsite

translated knowledge  thematization of place  translation of places  vehicle: the geography of the imagination creates a cultural text.  “two set of eyes: the ones looking at the New World from the vantage point of the old, and the ones looking at the old from the vantage point of the new”.

dualisms  sacred/profane  birth/rebirth  forgetting/remembering  backwards vision/forward vision  nostalgia/creative imagination  abandonment/abundance  knowledge/information  translation/transmission

Charles Simic (1939)  born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia,  In 1953 he emigrated the United States.  His first poems were published in 1959  In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and spent time in Europe  Since 1973 professor of English at the University of New Hampshire  won numerous prizes, among them the Pulitzer

Simic and the American poets  Cameo Appearance Cameo Appearance  “At least since Emerson and Whitman, there's a cult of experience in American poetry. Our poets, when one comes right down to it, are always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth, they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily.”  "Poetry and Experience"

Rita Dove (1952)  born in Akron, Ohio  books of poetry include On the Bus with Rosa Parks,1999, and Thomas and Beulah (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry  served as Poet Laureate of the US (1993 to 1995)  Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia  Prose in a small space Prose in a small space