完整综述版-文学理论之民族研究理论（英语）EthnicStudies..doc

Ethnic Studies Ethnic Studies, the theoretical study of race and cultural pluralism, began in the US with the work of African American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. African American studies has revealed the theoretical richness of African American literature and philosophy and shown how contemporary European theories of lan- guage, TEXTUALITY, gender, and SUBJECTIVITY can be used to critique discourses of race and racial difference. African American studies is by no means alone in furthering these aims. Chicano/a studies has, at least since the 1960s, been building an impressive canon of theoretical works, and Native American studies has more recently started to explore the links between native literary and cultural practices and mainstream Anglo-European theory. In Britain, some of these same developments can be discerned, especially from the 1970s, in part as a response to the presence in the UK of formerly colonized peoples. Speaking from an African American perspective, W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903 articulated succinctly the central issue: “The problem of the twen- tieth century is the problem of the color-line” (16). For Du Bois, race and the difference that it marks have a profound effect on the social develop- ment of individuals. For if race is a problem, so too is the individual whose race differs from that of the dominant group. “It is a peculiar sensation,” Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folk, “this double-con- sciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (8–9). Quintessential expressions of this syn- drome in literature are Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, nove