William Boelhower and Alfred Hornung, eds.
Multiculturalism and the American Self
Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. Pp. 348. $88.00
Reviewed by Axel Knoenagel

The melting pot has for many decades served as the main symbol to describe the process of Americanization. The ideology that created this image demanded no less than the surrender of self-definition and memory from anyone entering the United States permanently. Campaigns against "hyphenated Americans" and deviations from the WASP norm have a long history into the recent past. Today the image no longer holds. But it has been a long process to get rid of it and to recognize the many signs that demonstrate how inappropriate it had always been.

Europeans have traditionally held different views toward cultural heritage and its preservation under difficult circumstances. Thus it comes as no surprise that European exchange programs for students and faculties made possible a series of conferences on multiculturalism in American culture. The present volume collects papers from these conferences, which are all based on the conviction that "the change in metaphors ... reflects a series of interlocked historical events and political activities and the continuous attempt on the part of cultural critics to advance models for the creation of a society in which the different cultures would coexist on the basis of shared human values" (vii).

The nineteen essays of Multiculturalism and the American Self discuss a wide variety of texts and topics that range from variations of the Pocahontas story via slave narratives and novels by Thomas Wolfe and Alice Walker to contemporary Chicano writing. Since multiculturalism is not confined to fiction, the literary essays are interspersed with contributions on social and intellectual history. What all these contributions-varied as they are-have in common is the basic assumption that, from the beginning, American culture has been a mosaic.

The discussion of John Neal's 1828 novel on the Salem witch trials, Rachel Dyer, demonstrates how strongly different cultural sources contributed to the text at that early time even without the author's direct statement. Heike Hartrath argues that "by introducing a protagonist who embodies multiculturalism ... Neal ... attempts to emphasize the advantages of biculturalism and advocates the idea that whites can profit from cultural encounters with the Indians" (97).

American multiculturalism is demonstrated even more obviously by the African-American contribution. This contribution took place not only directly but also indirectly through white American discussions of the issue. Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson is a prime example. Robert Sattelmeyer shows in his essay that the novel demonstrates how social stratification and racial oppression "were causally linked through history and genealogy to the origins of America ... through the institutional hypocrisy of a country created on the principles of freedom and equality and committed to the protection of slavery" (131).

The increasingly significant contribution to American culture by Latino artists is also thematized in Multiculturalism and the American Self. In particular, Astrid M. Fellner's essay "Re-presenting Chicana Selves" makes clear that contemporary American culture is formed by far more different forces than even the term "multiculturalism" makes evident at first glance: "Many competing ideologies or senses of identity beckon to Chicanas. The subjects in Chicana self-representation articulate their identities at the intersection of multiple and often contradictory subject positions" (271).

The traditional image of the melting pot as representation of the American identity has long been discarded in favor of images such as the salad bowl. Originally created to describe a social reality, this imagery has come to be used also to describe American culture and self-understanding. The essays collected in Multiculturalism and the American Self suggest that the melting pot is an inappropriate image. American culture has become so diverse that, as Öyunn Hestetun suggests, "it is no longer possible to speak about the American Self or American cultural identity in the singular form" (1-2).