And”We” Are?: The Quest for the “Great American Novel”

Syreeta, over at the Bellweather State, concisely describes the dilemma:

In our conversations over the past weekend, we concluded that we’ve been losing control of the plural narrative of America in the public sphere for some time. The backlash manifested through Beck and his lot, some folks from the Tea Party, the Lost Cause folk, seem to be pushing for an America that erases my kindred and me. Some of us have grown exhausted from this constant siege of the right to claim what is and is not American. And while I’m aware that they share some inherent fear that their ‘losing’ America to an amorphous ‘other’, I refuse to submit to a singular, ‘true’ version of our origins. America is allowed to have her complicated and colorful stories of how she came to be, for all who call her home, regardless of how we got here. Somehow a foreshadowing of this crisis of existence in politics, culture and literature, Russel Banks raised this question in 2000, in a piece for Harpers, asking, ‘So what is our story, the one we all share, regardless of how we label ourselves on the left side of the hyphen? Do we even have a story?”

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Related:

Ask Racialicious: How to Read and Respond to Literature of Colour

Soul Full of Heat: Zane and the Trajectory of Black Women’s Literature

Literature of Colour: Where’s the (Real) Love?

Who’s Allowed to Tell the Tale? (And Which Tales Should They Tell?)

Oops, where’d we go? The disappearing black girls in Young Adult Literature

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