Race and Ethnicity in the Program Era

(Panel)


American/Diaspora

Hardeep Sidhu (Worcester State University)

One of the hallmarks of the Program Era of American fiction, Mark McGurl argues, is "high cultural pluralism"—an aesthetic formulation that "joins the high literary values of modernism with a fascination with the experience of cultural difference and the authenticity of the ethnic voice." To balance an impersonal emphasis on formal craftsmanship, MFA programs ask these students to plumb their personal experiences—which the dominant culture marks as ethnic—to populate their fiction.

But, as Junot Díaz argues in "MFA vs. POC," Creative Writing Programs themselves are simply "too white." Díaz narrates his alienating experience as a person of color in an MFA program, where the lack of diversity among faculty, students, and literary models perpetuated "the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism." Because of this lack of cultural self-awareness, Díaz says that his program's "theory of reality did not include my most fundamental experiences as a person of color—[it] did not in other words include me."

This panel considers how race and ethnicity intersect with the institutional forces and aesthetic values of Creative Writing in American fiction. Are MFA aesthetics raced? Is the "difference engine" of the Program Era needed to diversify contemporary fiction, or does it commodify the "ethnic voice"? How do authors use their formal training to investigate racial and ethnic identity? And how does this discussion affect our reading of Program Era fiction?
By recruiting minority writers and teaching them to "write what you know" and "find your voice," MFA programs have generated landmark works of fiction that perform and celebrate marginalized racial and ethnic identities. However, critics argue that the institution of Creative Writing and its aesthetic values are culturally specific and may fetishize racial and ethnic difference for white audiences. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words about authors or texts that exemplify the intersection of—or friction between—MFA aesthetics and race/ethnicity.