SOURCE: Womack, Kenneth. “Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project: Ethical Criticism and Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring.” MELUS 26, no. 4 (winter 2001): 223-43.

In the following essay, Womack discusses the critical reaction to Japanese by Spring—particularly by university professors—noting that several critics failed to acknowledge Reed's attempts to “understand and embrace racial difference.”

Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment. (63)

—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

Although ethical criticism offers a valuable discourse for exploring concepts of community, goodness, and love and their centrality in the moral construction of literary works, it also provides us with a useful methodology for considering the function of these philosophical constructs in regard to the most fractious issues that confront the academy today, the especially divisive notions of culture and race. As Samuel Fleischacker perceptively...