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Walking Blues - Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis (Paperback)
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Walking Blues - Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis (Paperback)
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Who or what is an American? Many scholars have recently argued that
in a country of such vast cultural and ethnic diversity as the
United States it is not useful or even possible to talk of a single
national identity. Are people right to suggest that the very idea
of Americanness is merely a myth designed to obscure the divisions
among us? This is the central question addressed by Tim Parrish in
this imaginative interdisciplinary study. Working in the tradition
of the blues, an art form based on the adaptation of cultural past
to present, Parrish seeks to show what happens when we think of
American identity not as some transcendental entity or essence, but
as an ongoing process. At the core of his analysis is an
appreciation of the rich legacy of pragmatism, a distinctly
American frame of mind that sees truth as an act rather than an
object, as a matter of doing rather than being. While the
philosophical roots of pragmatism can be found in the writings of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, William and Henry James, and Horace Kallen,
the same intellectual approach informs the work of writers such as
Ralph Ellison, Mary Antin, and Philip Roth as well as creative
artists such as Son House, Elvis Presley, and James Brown. What all
of these figures share, according to Parrish, is a recognition of
the intrinsic connection between thought and action that has
allowed Americans to define who they are through what they do.
Walking Blues accounts for our cultural diversity without either
insisting that we are all the same or denying that we have anything
in common. Far from glossing over difference, Parrish shows how our
American social, racial, and ethnic conflicts often mark the
starting point for the various acts of creation through which we
make--and remake--ourselves as Americans.
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