Brian Flota

author of A Survey of Multicultural San Francisco Bay Literature, 1955-1979: Ishmael Reed, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin and the Beat Generation

November 4, 2015

This work examines how writers in the San Francisco Bay Area developed a multiculturalist American literature. This study counteracts popular narratives of multiculturalism's boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s by showing that a large group of culturally eclectic writers in the Bay Area were re-envisioning American identity many years earlier. The Beat Movement brought national attention to the Bay Area as a creative and political alternative to New York City, home of the most powerful publishing houses and arbiters of taste. Analyzing Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), the work of Ishmael Reed (1967-78), the early work of Jessica Hagedorn (1972-5), the Yardbird Reader (1972-6), the Third World Communications anthologies (1972-5), Frank Chin's plays (1972-4), Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976), and the influence of the Free Speech Movement, the Black Panther Party and the Third World Strikes, this study illustrates the historical, subversive exchange of cultural and political ideas generated from the Bay Area during this period.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2010-honorees/brian-flota

Last Updated: 8 December 2015