Preliminaries - Brief Article

After race and class, issues of religion--difference in belief, worship days and liturgical practices, prescribed and/or proscribed foods and medicines, moral attitudes--pose perhaps the most vexed questions in our struggle toward a multicultural society. For some groups in America, Orthodox Jews and some Native American communities, for example, religious beliefs and practices mark the most important defining line between Us and Them. For others, African Americans and Chinese-Americans for example, distinctive beliefs and practices, sacred and secular, continue to play important but largely unrecognized supporting roles in the drama of ethnic self-definition. These elements have been much attended to in the development of American ethnic studies, by anthropologists, religionists, and literary and cultural critics alike. They have lately made us more clearly aware of the tensions within ethnic communities over issues of authenticity, for example, in which matters of belief, myth, ritual and religion are front and center. Lately, they have also studied the rituals, legends and beliefs of the majority that contain and define the ethnic "other," making more complex and complete our understanding of the power of belief in defining self and others.

In this issue we take a snapshot, as it were, of where the MELUS community stands in the development of ideas about the representation of religion, legend, myth, ritual, conversion, and stereotype in imagining American ethnicities. In my view, we stand, as usual, at the front of the line.

Elizabeth West, in her essay "Reworking the Conversion Narrative: Race and Christianity in Our Nig," demonstrates how Harriet E. Wilson "manipulates well-known trappings of the conversion narrative" to tell a story about how race frustrates the heroine's "initiation into the community of earthly saints." West reads Wilson's narrative in the rich context of nineteenth century sentimental fiction and spiritual autobiography, but also against the writings of Jacobs, Douglass, Melville, and Twain.

"Sarah Winnemucca: {Post}Indian Princess and Voice of the Paiutes," by Andrew S. McClure, discusses the author's autobiographical text as a document that manipulates myths and stereotypes of the white reading public on the question of the Indians. McClure argues that Winnemucca "often made appeals to the romanticized, invented constructions of Indian identity, even as she dismantled these constructions in her work."

Ana Maria Carbonell, in her essay "From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros," makes connections among ancient Aztec myths, folk legends of modern Mexico, and the use of related ideas and figures in the work of Viramontes and Cisneros. she demonstrates how richly entangled "The Cariboo Cafe" and "Woman Hollering Creek" are with the transformation of the images of Mexican and other Latin American women from betrayer to defiant resister.

"The Claiming of Christ: Native American Post-colonial Discourses" by Irene S. Vernon is a study of attitudes toward religious conversion and its seemingly inevitable corollary, cultural denial and assimilation. Exploring texts from the early nineteenth century onward, Vernon traces the varied attitudes of Native writers like William Apess, Charles Eastman, and Vine Deloria, Jr. to their own involvement with Christian belief.

In her essay "What about the sweetheart?: The `Different Shape' of Anishinabe Two Sisters Stories in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tales of Burning Love" Karah Stokes shows how Erdrich's use of the mythic figures of contrasting sisters, Oshkikwe and Matchikwewis, gives shape to characters in several of her narratives. Her essay argues that the two sisters stories give a different shape to Erdrich's tales of women who, like the mythic rivals, both compete and co-operate with one another.

"Morrison's Beloved: Allegorically Othering "White" Christianity" by Peggy Ochoa studies the rich intertextual relationship between Morrison's novel and the biblical Song of Solomon. She argues that in the novel "Morrison revises the terms of [allegorical] interaction and the identities of those involved in a basic Biblical relationship, one shared by a powerful man and a marginalized woman." Her essay is richly suggestive of the depth of Morrison's creative processes.

Patricia L. Hamilton's essay, "Feng Shui, Astrology, and the Five Elements: Traditional Chinese Belief in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club," focuses on Tan's use of Chinese religious, philosophical and folkloric beliefs and practices to develop her characters. She shows how the lack of understanding of these traditional beliefs hinders the communication between immigrant mothers and their American daughters.

Our MELUS interview features Chaim Potok, who talks with Laura Chavkin. Potok, the author of The Chosen, I Am the Clay, and other novels, reveals his religious roots and discusses his private rituals of writing.

Theresa M. Kanoza's essay, "The Golden Carp and Moby-Dick: Rudolfo Anaya's Multi-Culturalism," explores the ways Anaya draws upon Aztec and Catholic icons and mythology. She connects his literary practices and spiritual themes to Melville's: "both novels tap into biblical and mythological archetypes as their main characters plumb the mysteries of creation." Far from making a simple-minded equation of whale and carp, the essay gets at the wide range of ideas about spirit, belief, legend, and mystery in both novels.