In Europe's Image: The Need for American Multiculturalism

(Hardback)

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Dathorne's approach is basically literary and historical, but he has also developed his argument around politics, popular culture, language, and even landscape architecture. He looks at Europe as a mental construct of philosophies and politics that both the English and European Americans identified with Greece and Rome. Dathorne shows how much of what we think of as European heritage is actually of African and/or Islamic background. He shows the founders of the U.S. to be idealistic Athenian-type elites, unlikely to allow humanity to govern as a citizenship. The book discusses the literary history of the ex-colony of America with its own special lens, showing how again and again the makers of the American myth failed to come to terms with the multicultural realities.

Reviews

This study documents U.S. attachment to the image of European past and exhorts it to move toward a multicultural future. Many of the chapters contain fascinating case studies. Academic and general audiences.-Choice
"This study documents U.S. attachment to the image of European past and exhorts it to move toward a multicultural future. Many of the chapters contain fascinating case studies. Academic and general audiences."-Choice

Author Bio

O. R. DATHORNE is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky and Executive Director of the Association of Caribbean Studies. His latest publications include two seminal studies, Black Mind (1974) and Dark Ancestors (1981), a novel, Dele's Child (1986), a book of poems, Songs for a New World (1988) and most recently Imagining the World (Bergin & Garvey, 1994). Dr. Dathorne is also the editor of Journal of Caribbean Studies.