a: the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time; examples - popular culture, Southern culture
b: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization; example - a corporate culture
c: the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic
d: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations
Abhi Sharma from India, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
A short film production about Multiculturalism. Created to celebrate unity & harmony amongst the numerous ethnicities represented at Homebush Boys High for Multicultural day. Filmed in Sydney, NSW, Australia.
The opening page, this page, of this guide offers definitions of culture and multiculturalism. It is followed by one that presents several specialized search engines that are useful in locating information on different cultures, depending on the interests of the user. Autobiographies and Memoirs are discussed briefly on the third page. Examples of each of these genres, by African-American authors, are listed on this page. A brief discussion of multicultural literature and stereotypes are the focus of the fourth page. Randomly chosen titles of multicultural works of fiction accompany these discussions as well as two YouTube videos.
The remaining pages of this guide offer the user brief lists of selected works of fiction from several different geographic areas of the world as well as a variety of societal and ethnic groupings. It is our hope that users will choose to read books that will enrich their worldview. In the interests of space, only a few societies and geographic areas have been included here. Also, for the most part, only the titles and authors of books are listed. Users are encouraged to use a site like Amazon.com for descriptions of these books. In some cases, links are given to websites that provide descriptions of the books on selected pages.
The lists of fiction titles from various cultures provided here are not intended to be comprehensive in any way. Rather, these lists are meant to be starting points in your quest to discover worlds beyond the known and the familiar. Well-known European and American authors and works that are considered to be "classics" are not, in general, included here.
Multiculturalism seeks the inclusion of the views and contributions of diverse members of society while maintaining respect for their differences and withholding the demand for their assimilation into the dominant culture.
The purpose of this guide is to serve as a research aid for locating information on various cultures and the literature, both contemporary and traditional, of those cultures. The implicit invitation to the users of this guide is that they use these tools, particularly the works of fiction suggested here, to explore particular cultures that are of interest to them on a journey to greater global awareness.
