Ever since the founders drafted "We the People," "we" have been at
pains to work out the contradictions in their formulation, to fix
in words precisely what it means to be American. Constituting
Americans rethinks the way that certain writers of the
mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to this
project; in doing so, it revises the traditional narrative of U.S.
literary history, restoring an essential chapter to the story of an
emerging American cultural identity. In diverse ways, very
different writers-including Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville,
Harriet Wilson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein-participated
in the construction and dissemination of an American identity, but
none was entirely at ease in the culture they all helped to define.
Evident in their work is a haunting sense of their telling someone
else's story, a discomfort that Priscilla Wald reads in the context
of legal and political debates about citizenship and personhood
that marked the emergence of the United States as a nation and a
world power. From early-nineteenth-century Supreme Court cases to
turn-of-the-century Jim Crow and immigration legislation, from the
political speeches of Abraham Lincoln to the historical work of
Woodrow Wilson, nation-builders addressed the legal, political, and
historical paradoxes of American identity. Against the backdrop of
their efforts, Wald shows how works such as Douglass's
autobiographical narratives, Melville's Pierre, Wilson's Our Nig,
Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folks, and Stein's The Making of
Americans responded, through formal innovations, to the aggressive
demands for literary participation in the building of that nation.
The conversation that emerges among these literary works challenges
the definitions and genres that largely determine not only what
works are read, but also how they are read in classrooms in the
United States today. Offering insight into the relationship of
storytelling to national identity, Constituting Americans will
compel the attention of those with an interest in American
literature, American studies, and cultural studies.
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