Author discusses race in American literature and culture

Whether or not you’ve taken a class with Professor Eric Sundquist in the English department, tonight at the Hammer even the most uninformed American literature fans might just learn a thing or two. Today at 7 p.m., the Hammer Museum will host a conversation with UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature, Eric Sundquist, and Charles Johnson, an English professor from the University of Washington. The Daily Bruin’s Leela Subramaniam spoke with Sundquist, the author of eight books and a highly renown scholar in American literature. He recently published “King’s Dream” (2008), unleashing the repercussions and implications drawn from Martin Luther King Jr.’s momentous “I have a dream” speech. Much of Sundquist’s work concerns the representation of race in American culture and literature, and its correlation to the nation’s political and social development. Both Sundquist and Johnson are interested in the complications and insights that arise from race in literary texts, and both have written books on Martin Luther King.

Daily Bruin: What are you looking forward to talking about on Thursday with Professor Johnson?

Eric Sundquist: Well, I’m sure we’ll talk about his fiction. He’s one of the leading fiction writers in the United States right now … known for his really inventive and historical novels. … He seems to go really deeply into a history of a particular period and recreate its language and its characters with great attention to the sounds, to the moment.

DB: You also wrote a book on Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech” called “King’s Dream.” How would you say your book differs from Professor Johnson’s book?

ES: My book on King is an analysis of the speech, an attempt to return that same speech to its historical moment and recreate the political and cultural context in which it was given. Try to imagine what a well-informed audience in 1963 would have been hearing when they heard King give that speech. … My book was an attempt to recreate the historical circumstances of the speech and its origins in faith and equality in the United States. … So, we’re doing very different things, but we’re both interested in King’s philosophy and the way he used nonviolence in order to achieve victory in the Civil Rights Movement.

DB: What are some things you find interesting or problematic about the construct of race as it relates to American literature?

ES: That’s a big question. … I suppose one thing that I’ve been interested in as a literary scholar is to find a way to investigate the topic of race without dividing American literature into white literature on one hand and black literature on the other. I tend to see American literature itself as kind of cross-pollination of many different languages and traditions and that all of those go together to make up American literature. … I think my interest in King came from the fact that we think of King as someone who imagined African American life as not separate from mainstream of American life, but that it was something integral to everything that we can know about the American dream, American politics, American prosperity. … I suppose Barack Obama’s election in some ways is a realization of that idea that America is a nation defined from a much different perspective than the more traditional sense.

DB: For UCLA students attending the Hammer conversation, what do you hope they’ll take from it?

ES: I hope they will think in different ways, certainly (adopt) a greater appreciation for the literature genre of fiction. … I hope they’ll take away a new sense where the nation stands in political terms so they can resist conversations about race and equality.

DB: What inspired you to write “Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature”?

ES: I said that the tendency was to treat white authors and black authors separately. … My focus of the book was to locate black and white authors who were writing at the same time about similar issues and see what they had to say to one another.

DB: What were you inspired by when you read Johnson?

ES: His willingness to go outside of predictable ways of telling a story and his willingness to explore other influences on not just African American but American life. … (He) shows a very different way of looking at questions of identity, questions of nationality.

DB: Any advice for students interested in race in American literature or similar subjects that you have studied?

ES: Read a lot and read widely. Try and discover writers who write outside of the tradition that you might be familiar with. So if you’re familiar with the African American tradition, read writers coming from a different point of view. Try to get as many perspectives, and hear as many different points as possible.

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