The HarperCollins Literary Mosaic Series, Ishmael Reed, General Editor
Native American Literature, A Brief Introduction and Anthology, edited by Gerald Vizenor (1995)
Hispanic American Literature, A Brief Introduction and Anthology, edited by Nicolas Kanellos (1995)
Asian American Literature, A Brief Introduction and Anthology, edited by Shawn Wong (1996)
African American Literature, A Brief Introduction and Anthology, edited by Al Young (1996)
Each of the four volumes includes its editor’s own Introduction and their selections of Poetry, Fiction, Drama, and Autobiography, Memoir and Nonfiction Essays
From Ishmael Reed’s Foreword, that appears in all four volumes:
“I abandoned the use of textbooks early in my teaching career and developed my own ‘reader.’ I was frustrated with textbooks in which the preponderance of prose and poetry was written by people of similar backgrounds and sensibilities—the white-settler-surrounded-by-infidels-and-savages theme common to Euro-American literature. In these textbooks we seldom got information about how the Native Americans or the Africans felt. Female and minority writers were left out. There was slack inclusion of contemporary writers, and little space devoted to the popular American culture of our century. These textbooks seemed slavishly worshipful of the past, such that every mediocre line by a past ‘great’ was treated with reverence while the present was ignored….
“Things have improved over the years, especially with the outbreak of textbooks labeled ‘multicultural,’ a term that has become a football in the struggle between the politically correct of the left and the right. However, even the new and improved multicultural texts appear to have added African American, Native American, Hispanic American, and Asian American writers as an afterthought. The same writers and the same—often unrepresentative—works show up again and again.
“The HarperCollins Literary Mosaic Series was created as an antidote to this version of multiculturalism whose fallibility becomes evident when talented writers, well-known and respected in their communities, are ignored. The HarperCollins Literary Mosaic Series includes not only those writers who have made it into the canon but also writers undeservedly neglected in today’s crop of texts.”
The HarperCollins Literary Mosaic Series was created as an antidote to this version of multiculturalism whose fallibility becomes evident when talented writers, well-known and respected in their communities, are ignored. The HarperCollins Literary Mosaic Series includes not only those writers who have made it into the canon but also writers undeservedly neglected in today’s crop of texts.”
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