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Our America - Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Paperback, New Ed)
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Our America - Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Paperback, New Ed)
Series: Post-Contemporary Interventions
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Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of
cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier
commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that
the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism,
is actually a form of racism. "Our America" offers both a
provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism
and a sustained critique of the role of identity in
postmodernism.
"We have a great desire to be supremely American," Calvin Coolidge
wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart
of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural
movement that would in turn redefine America's cultural and
collective identity--ultimately along racial lines. A provocative
reinterpretation of American modernism, "Our America" also offers a
new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race,
identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism.
Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the
social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their
commitment to resolve the meaning of identity--linguistic,
national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act
of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of
the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized
national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as
Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an
object of pathos--something that can be lost or found, defended or
betrayed. "Our America "is both a history and a critique of this
invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of
the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the
Twenties. Michaels's sustained rereading of the texts of the
period--the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar--exposes
recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the
Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the
relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the
family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction
that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest,
sterility, and impotence.
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