Ethics and ethnicity in the Literature of the United States

Ethics can be defined as the relationship to the other, the obligatory response to an other that precedes any specific norm of moral conduct, a primordial ethical relationship that is the basis of any particular ethical or moral code. When this other is particularised as the ethnic other, how is this conception of ethics affected in its very articulation? Does ethnicity as a concept have an ethical character? Is there an ethics of ethnicity? On the contrary, is ethics ethnic, and does the ethnic nuance of ethics in any way narrow the scope of ethical action? In a culture such as the United States, founded on an individualistic ethic of paradoxically universalising status that is constantly challenged by the very constrictions imposed on the ethnic uniqueness of its many others, such questions seem especially pertinent. The essays in this volume implicitly demonstrate that these questions have no definitive answers since they are terms whose conceptual domain concerns the singular and the different, the stubbornly non-generalisable singularities of the other. The diverse literature of the United States provides us with the ideal textual terrain for this conjunction of the ethical and the ethnic. As the trans-historical overview of these essays demonstrates, this contestation is intrinsic to literature itself given its explicitness of otherness and, at the same time, its participation in the domestication of that otherness. The literature of the United States, with its historically determined demands for discursive plurality and its totalising and transcendental generalisations, becomes a corpus where the articulation of this double movement stands out. The conjunction of the ethical with the ethnic avoids the closedness of ethical openness since an ethnic approach questions the temptation of ethics towards abstraction while the ethical impulse keeps us alert to the universalising and stereotypical constitution of ethnic identities.