Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
Ethnic Studies is a pretty vast field, bringing together loads of different cultural, social, and racial perspectives. But there are still some big themes that pop up again and again. Given that Ethnic Studies was born out of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, issues of justice, power, and inequality are pretty central to the field.
While Ethnic Studies is interdisciplinary, one of its underlying goals is to highlight the experiences and perspectives of marginalized ethnic groups as a way of challenging the emphasis on white American culture, history, and identity that dominates in educational institutions. It's for this reason that the four big subfields of Ethnic Studies are Native American, African American, Latino/a and Asian American Studies: historically, these four groups have been the most consistently marginalized.
Ethnic Studies has some big themes it's tackling, like race and racism. Ethnic Studies is all about looking at how minority groups are disempowered in the U.S.—but it's also all about looking at how these minority groups fight back.
Ethnic Studies also asks the questions: What does it mean to belong to two or more cultures, or to live in between two or more cultures? How can you "belong" to mainstream American culture while maintaining hold of the cultures and languages of your parents and grandparents? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this in-betweenness for groups such as Chicano/as or Asian Americans? What is culture in the first place?
Ethnic Studies really got going because university students from ethnic minority backgrounds felt that their education didn't take their perspectives or experiences into account. They felt that their histories were excluded from the history textbooks they were assigned to read, that their literatures weren't included in the reading lists.
So it's no surprise that Ethnic Studies scholars are really into asking how knowledge is produced, and by whom, and for what reasons. These scholars like to argue that knowledge is rarely neutral: it always reflects a particular point of view—and usually that's the point of view of mainstream white America.
Ethnic Studies theorists also like to show American culture and identity has been shaped partly by the fact that United States is and has been a colonial power. If you want to know how American colonialism (against Native Americans and in Mexico, for instance) has shaped American history and identity, Ethnic Studies has some answers for you.
Ethnic Studies can also tell you a lot about how the oppression of minority groups in the United States is similar to and different from the oppression of minority groups in other parts of the world who have been subject to European colonialism.
When it comes to literature, Ethnic Studies focuses on the literatures of specific ethnic groups and looks at the way that writers from these groups deal with issues of ethnic identity, race and culture. And at another level, literary theorists in Ethnic Studies also examine how white American writers deal with issues of ethnicity, race, and inequality in their work.