MELUS

The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) carries as its mission the expansion of the American literary canon via the promotion, analysis, and teaching of Latino/a, Native American, African American, Asian Pacific American, and white ethnic literature. This aim has largely remained constant since the society's formation in 1974. That same year, the society's journal, also named MELUS, was inaugurated in newsletter form. It is presently a peer-reviewed academic journal in residence at the University of Connecticut (Storrs); to date, the association has published 37 MELUS volumes.

The journal's founding editor-in-chief was Katharine D. Newman (who now occupies the status of MELUS editor emeritus). Subsequent editors include Joseph T. Skerrett, Veronica Makowsky, and Martha J. Cutter. From the outset, the quarterly has taken seriously the contributions of Asian American writers. Indeed, MELUS was among the first scholarly venues for analyses of Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far). Since 1987, MELUS (as a scholarly association) has sponsored an annual conference that features panels, workshops, and roundtables concentrated on multiple genres, themes, and aspects of multiethnic literature in the United States.

Both the society and journal, officially founded in 1974, directly reflect the multivalent legacies of the mid-century civil rights movements, wherein activists demanded political enfranchisement, social equality, and cultural representation. Such representational calls to action were captured in the journal's inaugural issue and reconfirmed in a 1989 MELUS article titled “MELUS Invented: The Rest is History,” authored by Katharine Newman. Both issue and essay reiterated the political connection between historical and literary movements. According to Newman, MELUS was born [Page 669]out of a frustration with the Modern Language Association (MLA), the primary academic organization for literary studies in the United States. In particular, MLA—with little exception—privileged work written by white male authors. Thus, there was no substantial venue afforded to academically evaluate and analyze women writers and writers of color.

Such frustration came to a head in 1972, during an MLA session on African American literature. Tellingly, this session took place in a hotel corridor the day before the start of the official conference. The overt marginalization of the session and its participants vis-à-vis place and space fomented a desire among those in attendance to change the literary establishment.

The following year, at the 1973 MLA conference in Chicago, 40 literary scholars gathered to discuss the past, present, and future of ethnic American literary scholarship. Known colloquially as Seminar 40, those in attendance agreed to organize panels, sessions, and meetings in order to challenge the largely white nature of both MLA and the dominant American literary canon. In summer 1973, MELUS remained a primarily informal though growing organization of almost 100 members.

On December 28, 1974, Newman—along with Brom Weber, J. Sounders Redding, Norman Holmes Pearson, and Robert E. Spiller (the chief editor of The Literary History of the United States, also known as LHUS)—led an MLA session centered specifically on multiethnic literature. In many ways a culmination of the previous year's literary scholar activism, this session marked the institutionalization of MELUS and multiethnic literature via the auspices of MLA. Soon after, the association established a Commission on Minorities, which enabled ethnic-specific meetings at the annual MLA convention.

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