Identity Culture

8/20/2019 Identity Culture

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Identity CultureAuthor(s): Bill BrownSource: American Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 164-184Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/490265 .

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2/22

dent i ty

u l t u r e

Bill Brown

Constituting

Americans.

Cultural

Anxiety

and

Narrative Form

By

Priscilla Wald

Duke

University

Press,

1995

Our

America.

Nativism,

Modernism,

and

Pluralism

By

WalterBenn

Michaels

Duke

University

Press,

1995

Perhaps every

one is in

pieces

inside them and

perhaps everyone

has not

completely

in

them their own

being

inside them.

Gertrude

Stein,

The

Making of

Americans

No

existing

conception of

Americannesscan

contain this

large

variety

of

transnations.

Arjun

Appadurai,

"Patriotismand

Its Futures"

The

question

that

opens

Frank

Chin's

Donald Duk

(1991)-

"Who

would believe

anyone

named Donald

Duk dances

like

Fred

Astaire?"-becomes a

question

about the

mass

mediation

of ethnic

and national

identity.

For

the

twelve-year-old

protago-

nist,

mass culture

provokes

an

embarrassing

problem

and it in-

spires

a

sublime

possibility.

On the

one

hand,

Donald

Duk

expe-

riences

the

homonymy

of

his

name as

the source of

ethnic

humiliation:

"'Only

the

Chinese are

stupid enough

to

name a kid

a

stupid

name like

Donald

Duk,'

Donald Duk

says

to

himself,"

forced

by neighborhood

bullies to

impersonate

the

Disney

char-

acter

(2).

On the

other,

with

his room

full of

posters

and

glossy

stills,

he

longs

to

become the

next

Fred

Astaire,

to be loved

by

America the

way

Astaire is still

loved,

to

be American

the

way

Astaire is

American.

The

novel

manages

this

bitterness

and

this

aspiration,

over

the

fifteen-day

course of

San

Francisco's

New Year

celebration,

by

establishing

a clear

trajectory

for

Donald

Duk's

acculturation

into his

Chinese

heritage:

from

dancing

like

Fred

Astaire to

run-

ning the dragon in the New Year'sparade, from American mass

culture to

Cantonese

popular

culture,

from

hating

Chinese to

hating

the

whites who

have

suppressed

the

history

of

the

Chinese

in

the

US.

Though

his

father

calls

Donald Duk

"the

very

last

American-born

Chinese-American

boy

to believe

you

have to


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3/22

American

Literary History

give up beingChinese o be anAmerican"42),thenovelmakes

it clear

that

being

Chinese

or

American,

or

being

Chinese-

American,

sn't

exactly

he

point.

Rather,

he text detailsthe

pro-

cess of

becoming

of

identification nd

disaffiliation),

he recon-

stitution

of an

identity

grounded

n

the

subject's

gency.

Although

the

plot provides

considerable

losural

pleasure

by tracking

how,

in

the

termsmade

especially

salient

by

Werner

Sollors,

Donald Duk consents to his descent

(how

he learns to

identify

with the culture

hat's

already

his),

this

pleasure

hardly

exhaustsChin'spoint. For Donald Duk's non-Chinesefriend

magically

hares he

recurring

ream

n which the

boys

discover

an untold

history

of Chinese

mmigrant

workers;

he friendand

his

parents-"all

family"-participate

in

the New Year festivi-

ties

(163).

Whilesuch

intimacy

extends amilial

dentity,

he Duk

family per

se remains

ess than

culturally

coherent:

during

the

New

Year,

one sister

spends

time

doing

her

"BetteMidler

doing

Lily

Tomlin

getting

revenge

on

Shirley

Temple"

166),

gleefully

lost

in

the world

of mass entertainment

nd the

dynamics

of

im-

personation

hat sustain

much of the novel.

All

told,

Chin nar-

rates the sort of

postethnic

perspective

that

emphasizes

how

group

ntegrity

can

emerge

rom a shared

history

of

oppression

(Hollinger

38).

He also

lavishly

describes he micro

ritualsthat

comprise

one

of America'sbest-loved

thnic

spectacles.

Yet even

as the

boy'spainstaking

nitiations

nto the

past

and the

present

converge,

other characters

asually

circulate

n and out of the

ethnic

frame.

But

the

1990s,

howevermarked

by

postnational

and

post-

ethnic

possibility,

by

the intellectual

nvestment

n

post-identity

politicsand the capitalinvestmentn the vertiginous ommodi-

fication

of

difference,

remains an era

wherein the

difficulty

of

identity

formation-above

all,

the

difficulty

of

experiencing

he

disjuncture

etween,

on the one

hand,

national

dentity,

and,

on

the

other,

identities

of

race,

ethnicity,gender,

and

sexuality-

vitalizes

American iction.

And Priscilla

Wald and Walter

Benn

Michaels

exemplify

how this

difficulty

ustains

the criticism

of

our

decade.

The field of

American

tudies,

once underwritten

y

the

question

of

just

what America

was and

is,

now

preoccupies

itself withthequestionofjustwho Americanswereand are.Our

America

s an

identity

culturedefinable

ot

by

an

identity

but

by

the

fixationon

identity.

In

Constituting

Americans,

Wald

ranges

from the

Narrative

of

the

Life of

Frederick

Douglass

(1845)

to Gertrude

Stein's

The

Making

of

Americans

(1925)

to show how

persistently

individual

authors

expose

the nation's

dominant

narrative-the

story

of We

the

People-as

a

story

that restricts

he

pronoun's

eferent o

the

OurAmerica is an

identity

culture

definable

not

by

an

identity

but

by

the

fixation

on

identity.

165




4/22

166

Identity

Culture

dominant national subject, thus leaving other stories of identity

formation untold. In Our

America,

Michaels

concentrates on

the

nativism of the 1920s

to track the

conceptual

shift that

enabled

the

racialization of the

"American,"

a transition

from the Pro-

gressive

ideology

of

assimilation

to

a

repudiation

of

the

melting

pot,

to a

pluralism

that essentialized

difference. Chin's

novel

might

be said to

illustrate Wald's thesis not

just

because

it

nar-

rates the task of

telling

a

story

that has

remained

suppressed by

official

national

histories,

but

also because it charts

how an indi-

vidual

projects

himself

"into the weft

of

a

collective narrative"

n

order

to achieve

identity

(Etienne

Balibar,

qtd.

in

Wald

4).

The

novel

might

be

said to confirm

Michaels's

contention

that cul-

tural

identity

"makes no

sense"

without "recourse

to racial

iden-

tity" (142)

in

the sense

that Donald

Duk

"returns" to a

culture

he's inherited

from

his

parents.

Yet "racial

identity"

in

the novel

is

experienced

not

biologically

but

visually,

within

what

Robyn

Wiegman

terms the "visual

economy"

that

funds

American rac-

ism

(21):

"Looking

Chinese is

driving

him

crazy " (2).

It's not

the

logic

of a

racializing

imagination,

but

the

practice

of

racism

that threatens

everyday

life.

Still,

this life is not immune to liter-

ary

criticism and

the

teaching

of

literature.

Donald Duk's

hero-

ically public

revision

of

history

takes

place

in

his

seventh

grade

classroom. At

another

time and

place

(Harvard,

at the

century's

turn),

Barrett

Wendell's

course

in

American

literature,

no

less

than William

James's

course in

philosophy,

inspired

Horace Kal-

len's

invention of the

term and the

concept

of

"cultural

plu-

ralism,"

meant to

characterize a

land of

immigrants

where

the

abstraction of

national

citizenship

would

require

no

sacrifice

of particularity (Higham, Send These 207; see Berlant; and see

Lowe,

ch.

1).

2

It

will

not be

easy

to

respond

to

Arjun

Appadurai's

exhorta-

tion to

stop thinking

of

the

US as

"a land of

immigrants"

and

to start

considering

the

US

just

"one

node

in

a

postnational

net-

work of diasporas" (173-77). This will not be easy in part be-

cause

globalization

now

appears

to

have been

a

condition of

the

new

theoretical

visibility

of

the nation

as such in

the

1980s,

just

as

the

collapse

of

the

Soviet

Union has

since

drawn

imperative

attention

to

the

emancipatory

and

destructive

aspects

of

ethno-

nationality.

Moreover,

US

nationality

itself,

however

much it

ap-

pears

in

the "form of

the

Transnation"-"alone in

having

orga-




5/22

American

Literary History

167

nized itself around a modern

political

ideology

in which

pluralism

s

central

to the conduct

of

democratic

ife"

(173)-

has

been

dependent

not

just

on

the

influx of

Europeans,

Afri-

cans, Asians,

and Latin

Americans,

but

also on

the

(perpetual)

displacement

of Native

Americans,

on the

subsequent

tatus of

Indiannationsas

internal olonialentitieswithinthe

US,

on one

people's

diasporic

condition

of

inhabiting

one

nation

while

affiliating

with another.Wald and

Michaels

clarify

this

story

of

double

dependence.

Wald

begins

her book with a

reading

of the

Marshall Court decision, in CherokeeNation v. the State of Geor-

gia (1831),

that

marked he

government's

ncapacity

o

legitimate

Indian efforts to

protect

themselves

rom white

encroachment;

she

concludes

by

showing

how Stein's

mmigrants

ong

for some

sign

of cultural

egitimacy.

Michaels

shows how the 1924

Immi-

gration

Act,

whichrestricted

European

mmigration

y

national-

ity,

found its

completion

in

the

Indian

Citizenship

Act,

which

made it

possible

to arrest

any gradual

making

of Americans:

by

simply granting

citizenship

to all

Indians born

in the

US,

the

government ouldpromotenational dentitynot as an "achieve-

ment" but as

a

"heritage,"

omethingyou

have,

not

something

you

can

become

(35).

Between he

two books we

move from the

Jeffersonian

deal

(discussed

by

Wald)

of racial

ntermixture nd

cultural

homogeneity

o a modern

dealization

of Native

Ameri-

can culture

expressed

by

Willa

Cather,

Zane

Grey,

and Edward

Sapir)

as the

only

authentic

culture.

Withinour

literaryhistory,

we

might say

these

stories

converge

n

William Faulkner's

irst

entry

in

his

appendix

to The Sound

and

the

Fury

(1929),

describ-

ingIkkemotubbe,

he

"dispossessed

American

King"

who

in

the

1830s had to

remove

himself and

his Chickasaw

people

from

what

remained

of his land

in

North

Mississippi.

Modernism

of

the

1920scan

hardly

do withoutthe

return,

however

phantasma-

tic,

of the Native

American

displaced

n

the

1830s,

and such a

return

assuaged

he

anxieties

provoked

by

the

wave

of

immigra-

tion,

1900-1920,

upon

which

Wald's

and Michaels's

houghts

converge.

That

convergence

highlights

their

neglect

of

Randolph

Bourne,

whose articles

on

"Trans-National

merica"

and "The

Jew and Trans-NationalAmerica,"published n 1916,still offer

"astounding"

nsights

(Sollors

184)

and seem to

stand, indeed,

as

the

prefiguration

f

"our"own

enlightenment-not

just

what

David

Hollinger

calls "the

most

significantpiece

of

writing by

multiculturalism's

ost illustrious

precursor

and

prophet"

94),

but

also a

foreshadowing

of the

transnational

magination

o

come. Bourne

wrote

out of

impatience

with the

way

assimilation,




6/22

168

Identity

Culture

resisted or achieved, had become an object of scorn (107), and

in

sympathetic response

to Kallen's

"Democracy

Versus the

Melting-Pot"

(1915),

itself

on

attack

on white

supremacist

no-

tions

of American national

identity.

Kallen

understood democ-

racy

as the

political

form that

could foster a

"federation"

of

diverse "nationalities"

within

one nation. For

Wald,

Kallen

exposes

the unexorcizable doubleness of

all

Americans,

by

ar-

guing

that

"a

hyphen

attaches,

in

things

of

the

spirit,

also

to

the

'pure' English

American"

(245).

For

Michaels,

Kallen's resis-

tance

to

the

project

of assimilation

exemplifies

how

"pluralism

..

essentialized

racism"

(64).

Bourne

(who

died at the

age

of

32

in

1919,

to

become the mourned-for radical of his

day)

troubled

Kallen's

dichotomy

by

arguing

that successful assimilation

simply

intensified

ethnic

identity:

"More

objectively

American,"

the

immigrants

"become

more and

more German or Scandina-

vian or Bohemian or Polish"

(108).

Whereas Woodrow Wilson

argued

that

"any

man who

car-

ries a

hyphen

about

him

carries a

dagger

that

he is

ready

to

plunge

into the vitals

of this

Republic"

(qtd.

in

Kennedy 87),

Bourne insisted that

only

"new

peoples,"

the "so-called

'hyphen-

ates,"'

could

preserve

the

country's vitality (109, 112).

He advo-

cated

"giv[ing] up

the

search

for

our native 'American'culture"

(115),

and he

repudiated

national

culture on

the

grounds

that

it

would

always

be

nationalist

culture-xenophobic, jingoistic.

More

precisely,

he had

faith

in

the

political

work of the

state,

"a

coalition

of

people

for

the realization of common

social

ends,"

that

directly

opposed

the affective

work of

the

Nation,

the

"terri-

ble national

engine"

that

inspired

the sort of

"spiritual

and

patri-

otic cohesion" and "reactionaryenthusiasms" that had provoked

the war

in

Europe

(129,

125, 126,

116).

If, then,

Bourne seems

to

hover,

ghostlike,

as

an

exemplary

figure

for

imagining

some

alternative to

"constituting

Americans"

in

or for "our

America,"

what

remains

conspicuously

absent

from Bourne's

account are

the

figures

of

the Native American and the

African

American,

who

assume such

centrality

in

Wald's and Michaels's

work-the

very

figures

with

whom,

as Michaels

shows,

the Jewish

question

in

America was answered: for

Progressive

racism,

the

Jew,

be-

cause he wasn't black, could assimilate; for nativist racism, the

Jew couldn't assimilate

because he wasn't

Indian.

It is

as

though

the

"cosmopolitan enterprise"

of

transforming

America into

"a

trans-nationality"

(Bourne

121)

requires

the discursive

exclusion

of

both

identities,

and

it

is as

though

their inclusion

prevents

any

crack

in

the national

frame.




7/22

American

Literary

History

169

3

In

other

words,

the

narratability

f

the US

depends

on ex-

cluding

particular

dentities hat nonethelessremain

perpetually

present

as what

PriscillaWald calls

"the

uncanniness

of

non-

white

subjects"

as

she reads the "official tories"offered

by

the

Supreme

Court,

by

Lincolnand Woodrow

Wilson,

by

the

Young

Americans

of

the 1840s. These

provide

the context for

Wald's

analysis

of

the

anxiety

that

riddles

he

conceptualization

f

per-

sonhood whenunofficial toriesarerenderedegible.Shealigns

Douglass's

discomfortover the

prescribed

bolitionistnarrative

with the burden

suffered

by

HermanMelville'sPierreGlenden-

ning

and

HarrietWilson's

Frado,

figuresalready

scripted

as na-

tional(ized) subjects

while

facing

"the

difficulty

of

telling

the

story

of

exclusion"

108).

It is not

really

he burden

the

requisite

affliction)

of

self-authorship, hough,

but the

concept

of

"per-

sonhood" that facilitates Wald's transition

among

texts

in

a

hundred-year pan.

And

"personhood,"

ather han

reading

ike

a well-tracked eyword, eads ikeanunderspecified laceholder

for notions

ranging

from

possessive

ndividualism o

legal

citi-

zenship

to national

subjectivity

o

humanity;

hat

is,

the term's

instability,

n

the texts she reads and

in

her own

text,

compro-

mises its critical

efficacy.

Still,

by

reading

the CherokeeNation

and Dred

Scott

decisions

as "official tories"

where

"logical

n-

consistencies"

xpose

the

"instability"

f

personhood

23),

Wald

seems to

imply

that

stability

s the ethical

objective, ust

as she

seemsto

occlude,

n

the case

of the

Cherokee,

how

objectionable

"personhood"mightbe.

The returnof

popular

sovereignty

o

the Cherokeenation

in

1970,

which markeda

shift

in

its colonial

status,

was

under-

stood as

a

confirmation

f John Marshall's

escription

of sover-

eignty

in

Cherokee

Nation

(Strickland

and Strickland

130-31).

But

in

1831 that decision

hardly

conferred

overeignty;

ather,

t

mademanifest

he

liminality

and

political

railty

of

the Cherokee

nation that would

culminate

n

forced relocation

beyond

the

Mississippi,

he notoriousTrail

of

Tears

1838).

The Court'sde-

cision

not

to

adjudicate

n

CherokeeNation on the

grounds

hat

the nation was not a

foreignentity,

buta

sovereign et

domestic

and

dependent

nation,

was soon followed

by

its

clarifying

deci-

sion

in

Samuel

A. Worcesterv. the State

of Georgia (1832),

which

nullified

Georgia's

urisdiction

ver

Cherokee

erritory

nd

occa-

sioned

widespread

ndian celebration

Woodward

71).

But

the

decision did not arrest

the

state's

acts of

expropriation,

which




8/22

170

Identity

Culture

weresupportedby the Jacksonadministration,ven whilebeing

excoriated

by

the Court

(see

White

86).

A

dramatic

xample

of

Jacksonian

olicy,

of theconflictbetween he

executive

and

judi-

ciary

branches

f

government

Marshall,

erving

ince

1801,

was

the

justice

who clarified

he

power

of the

court),

and of the

con-

flict

between ederaland state

authority

hat would culminate

n

civil

war,

the

Cherokee

case has

been

the

subject

of

more

than

one

casebook that

facilitates ts

academic

centrality

n

US

his-

tory

(Perdue

nd

Green).

The

political

stakesof this drama

dissi-

patesomewhatwhen Waldexplains hat Marshall"didnot find

for

Cherokee

sovereignty" 23)

and that the Marshall Court

"confirm[ed]

he

jurisdictionalauthority

of

the

Georgia

state

court"

24).

Indeed,

her

analytical

erms

prompt

a more

compel-

ling redescription

f

the

case.

For

George Washington's overnment,

relations

with

the

Cherokee ribe stood as

a

test

case for

the new

nation's

ndian

policy,

and the

signal

achievement

f the

Cherokee ribe was its

rapid,painstaking,

nd

well

publicized

ffort

provoking

nterne-

cine conflictsof class and

culture)

o acculturate

economically,

politically,

and

culturally)

according

o the

"civilizing"

spira-

tions

proposedby

both

politicians

and missionaries.

ust

as

the

Venezuelan evolutionaries eemedto demonstrate

n

1811

that

the US national

constitution

could have

universal

efficacy

(B.

Anderson

192),

so too

in

1827

the Cherokee ribe

produced

a

national

constitution,

replicating

essential features of the

US

constitution,

and

provokingGeorgia's

ffort

to

assert state

law;

the creation

of

a

supreme

court,

a

bicameral

egislature,

and

a

bilingual

newspaper

urther

omprised

mimetic

response

o

the

modernnation and the enlightenment tate (W.Andersonxi).

As Wald

preciselyputs

it,

acculturationwent

wrong

because he

Cherokeeconstitutionwas

"a

bid

for

coexistencebetweencul-

tures

rather than

assimilation

of individuals"

35);

the

Jeffer-

sonian

ideal

of

assimilation ailed to

imagine

hat

the

most ac-

culturated individuals-the

interracial,

wealthy,

slave-owning

elite-would acculturate o the

point

of

declaring

ndependent

national status. In

other

words,

the Court

faced the absolute

disjuncture

between

competing

narratives

of

assimilation:one

in whichindividualsareraciallyandculturallyabsorbedby the

Anglo-American

population,

one

in

which

the Cherokee ribe

worksto

render tself similar o the

nation,

equal yet

separate.

Though

Wald

emphasizes

how

the Marshall

Court"offered

torturedand even

inconsistent

narrative[s]

hat attested o con-

tradictions

...

of

personhood

itself"

(22),

though

she

seeks "to

explain

he

anxiety

manifested

n

these cases

through

an

analysis




9/22


10/22

172

Identity

Culture

Still, Michaels'shigh-

velocity

tour

of

the

racializing

imagination

has established a

profoundly

new

map of

modernism,

which...

provides

new

bearingsfor

relocating

writers in

relation to the most

frightening political

agendas

of

the

day.

and the Fury,Quentin's"desirenot only to commit incest but to

commit incest

by

saying

he

committed incest"

(3)

paradigmati-

cally preserves

familial

integrity (keeping things

all

in

the

fam-

ily)

with the material

potency

of

the word. Aside from

Ernest

Hemingway's

cult of

racial,

phenomenological,

and

linguistic

au-

thenticity,

even William Carlos Williams's

down-home

Ameri-

canist

materialism,

his

"poetics

of

embodiment,"

appears

"essen-

tially genetic"

as he

"produces

for

American

poetry

the

project

of American nativism: what

we are

(Americans),

is what we must

strive

to

be

(American)" (82-84).

Insofar as

Stein's nterest

in

the

being

of

writing

retards

her

effort to

represent

kinds

of

human

being-"[e]very

word

I

am ever

using

in

writing

has

for

me

very

existing being,"

she

declares,

in

the

midst

of

her effort

to

describe

the "the

being

in

Alfred Hersland"

(539)-and

insofar as this

effort

contracts toward

detailing

the

habits of

particular being,

her work

offers an irreducible

alternative,

not

just

an

antithesis,

to

the modernist

investment in

national and racial

identity,

in

the

literary

racialization

of

national

identity.

Kenneth Warren and Toni

Morrison,

Leslie

Fiedler and

Eric

Sundquist,

among

others,

have shown how fundamentalthe

racial and racist

imagination

is to American

literature. But

Mi-

chaels uses the

problematic

of

race

to

identify

a

newly

perceived

literary-historical

phenomenon,

"nativist

modernism."

His

basic

claim on

us

to

recognize

the

phenomenon

is irresistible.

Critics

of

modernism have been irritated

by

the contours

of

the

phe-

nomenon: some nativists

(Zane Grey,

Oliver La

Farge)

are

hardly

recognizable

as

modernists,

and some

modernists

(Wallace

Ste-

vens,

Gertrude

Stein)

are

nowhere

to

be seen

(see

Perloff,

Altieri).

Still, Michaels'shigh-velocity tour of the racializingimagination

has established

a

profoundly

new

map

of

modernism,

which,

among

its other

accomplishments, provides

new

bearings

for re-

locating

writers

in

relation to

the

most

frightening political

agendas

of the

day.

Our America

is

the

literary

history

of what

John

Higham

termed "the tribal twenties"

(ch. 10).

Provoked

by

the conver-

gence

of

depression

and

postwar immigration, by

strikes

and

the

red

scare,

by

Prohibition and

women's

suffrage,

a new

nativism

erupted in an anti-immigrant hysteriathat fueled both urban ri-

ots and exclusionist

politics

(Higham,

Strangers

264-99;

Rosenz-

weig

88).

Uninterested

as he is in the

historical determinants of

nativism,

or

in

its historical

ramifications,

Michaels nonetheless

makes

a

signal

contribution

to

this

ideological history.

For while

Higham

understood this

"new

nationalism" to have been

fueled

ideologically by

the

delayed

reception

of

Madison Grant's

pas-

sionate and

pseudoscientific plea

for

racial

purity,

The

Passing

of




11/22

American

Literary History

173

theGreatRace(1916),he also considered t anextensionof long-

standing

animosities

toward

Catholics,

Jews,

Japanese).

But

Mi-

chaels

tirelessly

ttends o the crucialshift betweena

Progressive

racism

hat was hierarchical nd assimilationist

in

the

sense

that

white

supremacism

nderwrote he

possibility

of

Americanizing

immigrants)

and

a

pluralist

racism

that was

antiassimilationist

(in

the sense of

denying

he

possibility

hat

people

can ever be-

come

what

they

aren't).

A

"commitment o

the

technologies

of

Americanization

s

preserved" nly

"on the

grounds

hat

people

must becomewhat they are"(122). And the questionof what

constitutesan

American

can be answered

n a new

way

because

the

question

of what constitutes

culture is answered

n a

new

way-it

is

the

expression

of race.

Whereas

MichaelNorth showed

how

racial

masquerade

e-

came a modernist

trategy

of

resuscitating

ultureand

language

(3-34),

and

whereasHouston Baker's

"blues

geography"

howed

how

an "Afro-American iscursive

modernism" tood outside

the

Anglo-American

modernist

purview

(17),

Michaels

assimi-

lates

the Harlem Renaissance

o the

point

where,

for

instance,

AlainLocke's

anthology,

TheNew

Negro(1925),

s no

longer

the

signal

document

of the Harlem

Renaissance,

ut

the

signal

docu-

ment of American

modernism

s such. And

Locke's

or Carl

Van

Vechten's,

Countee

Cullen's

or Melville Herskovits's

laim that

the American

Negro,

rather

han the

European

modernist,

must

make

use of

"primitive"

African

art,

of

Africa,

as

a cultural

re-

source,

appears

as an

exemplary

nsistence

that culturebe "an

expression

of racial

dentity"

113).

In

other

words,

he

minority

cultural

production

hat

has so often

supplied

iterary

riticswith

an Archimedean oint from whichto criticizedominantculture

reappears

here

at the center

of that

culture,

he clearest

expres-

sion

of an essentialist

ogic

rather

han

any challenge

o it. And

other

dentity

ormations

ppear

as

prophylaxes

gainstmiscege-

nation:

the "homosexual

family

and the

incestuous

family

emerge

as

technologies

or

preventing

alfbreeds"

49),

and "les-

bianism,

ike

impotence

tself,

figures

as a

technology

or

produc-

ing

purity"

96).

Still,

when

it

has

become

customary

o

fault the New His-

toricismof the 1980sfor its productionof a homogeneous"cul-

ture,"

not

the

least

impressive

spect

of Our

America s the

preci-

sion

with which

Michaelsdifferentiates

etween

one racismand

another,

attending

o

the

shift

in

the

work of

Lothrop

Stoddard,

for

instance,

rom

white

supremacism

o

cultural

pluralism-to

an

assertion

of

mere

yet

absolute

difference.

He shows how cer-

tain texts

published

n the

period,

because

they

understand

he

Jew

socially

and

economically

and not

racially,

ontinueto

rely




12/22

174

Identity

Culture

on the Progressiveproblematicof identity.Theodore Dreiser'sAn

American

Tragedy

1925)

and Sinclair

Lewis's Babbit

(1922)

thus

appear

outside

the field

of nativist

modernism,

for

the nativist

transposes

a discourse

of class into a discourse

of

race,

so

that,

for

instance,

the "niceness"

of

Daisy

in F

Scott

Fitzgerald's

The

Great

Gatsby

(1925)

seems to describe her whiteness

(25).

This is

barely

to

suggest

the

degree

to which

a

literary-historical prob-

lematic of

identity-the

task of thematic identification-fuels

Our America.

regional

modernism

(Robinson

Jeffers)

and inter-

nationalist nativism (Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster,

D. H.

Lawrence)

are

strenuously

and

cogently distinguished

from American nativist

modernism. To

express

"the

priority

of

identity

over

any

other

category

of

assessment,"

of

course,

is the

mode

of

formulating

"identitarian claims"

(6),

and

such

claims

necessarily comprise

the

taxonomic

strategy

no less than the ob-

ject

of

Michaels's

inquiry.

By

the end of the

book,

no reader

could know

why

or how this modernism

emerged,

nor whether

it had

any practical

effect. But no reader could not know what

American

nativist modernism is.

This

capacity

to differentiate texts is

completed by

a readi-

ness to

equate

others,

especially

those that from another

perspec-

tive

would seem

incongruous.

The bite of Michaels's

argument

often

depends

on a

logic

of

perverse

assimilation: "The Promised

Land,

like

[Thomas Dixon's]

Trilogy of

Reconstruction,

tells the

story

of a

people achieving

nationality

and

becoming

citizens,

and

Mary

Antin-with her hatred for the czar-is a

fitting

com-

patriot

of

[Dixon's]

Sam

Niccaroshinski,

with his hatred for the

African

empire"'

(25).

Though

one

might

object

to the

pleasure

principle that prompts Michaels to announce such a compatri-

otism

(as

though hating

the literal czar were

comparable

to hat-

ing

a

projected

African

empire),

the limitation of the

argument

is

that

being

"a

fitting

compatriot"

(a

fellow

countryman

if

not

a blood

relative)

stands

in

for

some

exposition

of how

formally

equivalent

arguments

work toward different

effects.

The

"formal-

ism" that once served New Historicism as a

technology

for

read-

ing disparate

texts as

part

of

one coherent culture

(Porter)

here

serves as a

technology

for

establishing

the

family

resemblance

between accounts of culture. And thus the work of steeringread-

ers

away

from

a

"New Modernism" that

simply gets "morality

at

the center

stage

and

keep[s]

it there"

while

ignoring

what writers

actually

cared

about

(Michaels,

"New

Modernism"

266)

often

results

in

getting immorality

(not

morally

coded)

at

the

center

stage

and

(no

less

ardently) keeping

it there. Others have

pointed

out

how

Kallen's

rejection

of assimilation

inadvertently

allied

him

with

his

"most

implacable

adversaries"

(Higham,

Send




13/22

American

Literary History

175

These 209); but Michaels more blithely uses Kallen's investment

in difference to

locate

him

"at the

cutting edge

of

nativism"

(65).

When

Michaels concludes "that

any

account

of

nativist

modernism would end

up making

American

literary

history

cen-

tral"

(142),

his commitment to the

problematic

of

literary-

historical

identity

seems to come

full

circle. For to

argue

that

any

account of modernnativism should centralize

literary history

would be

to

argue

for

what Michaels demonstrates

throughout

the

book,

where

the

work

of

figures

like Willa

Cather

(his

most

fascinating object of address) illuminates the logic of nativism

because we see that

logic

in

narrative

form,

a form that

estab-

lishes the

strange genealogies

that resolve the

anxiety

of

identity

expressed

by

a

Calvin

Coolidge

or a

Stoddard.

And

to

argue

that

any

account of modernism should centralize

nativism

would be

to

argue

for Michaels's most

impressive

claim about the conver-

gence

of

formal,

ontological,

and societal

agendas.

But he

argues

instead that

accounts of nativist

modernism should centralize

literary history,

a

point

which,

because he understands modern-

ism as

a

literary

aesthetic

movement

(2),

seems

to

dictate self-

evidence:

any

account of nativist modernism should centralize

nativist

modernism.

Accounts

of it

ought

to

take

it

into account.

5

Accounts of what literature

is

or

does

became

a somewhat

fashionable

question

for

philosophy

(for

Richard

Rorty

and

Martha

Nussbaum,

for

Jacques

Derrida and Gilles

Deleuze)

just

when it became a question that literary criticism stopped both-

ering

to ask.

Meanwhile,

increasingly

"we" read

texts

as

though

we shared

assumptions

about

what

they

are

and

how to read

them. Wald

and Michaels

share no

assumptions.

"Literature"

Deleuze

wrote,

"moves

in

the direction of the

ill-formed

or the

incomplete"

as it minoritizes a

major language

(225).

Minor

writing,

as

exemplified

not

just

by

Franz Kafka

but also

by

Melville,

becomes

a

"collective enunciation"

of "all

minor

peoples"

(228).

Though

Wald never makes such claims

for literature,she clearly reads with the hope that literaturewill

expose

the

contingency

of

dominant

culture and voice what re-

mains unsaid within it. Yet

she

hardly requires

that voice

to ef-

fect the

expose:

her

extensive treatment

of

legal

decisions and

political speeches fully

reveals

how

the

story

of We the

People

depends

on

suppressed

yet

symptomatically

evident contradic-

tions.

Indeed,

"Constituting

Americans,"

he

explains,

"attends

to

the

anxiety

evident

in the

language

of

legal, political,

and

social




14/22

176

Identity

Culture

debates concerning personhood and national identity" (7);

nonetheless,

she wishes to track the

"anxiety surrounding

the

conceptualization

of

personhood"

faced

by

those authors who

"sought

to

tell,

represent,

and

analyze

untold stories"

(4).

Anxi-

ety

gradually begins

to

feel like a

ubiquitous

psycho-linguistic

condition.

This

makes it somewhat difficult to locate "cultural

anxiety"

per

se,

and

more difficult to

understand its relation

to "narrative

form."

It is not

the

case, here,

that

narrative

form

manages

cul-

tural anxiety, but rather,as Pierre Macherey might put it, that

narrative

form

exposes

the

fissures

within

ideology.

For Ma-

cherey,

however,

such

a

claim would be restricted

to

narrative

fiction,

while

for

Wald the

non-narrative discourses

she cites

(speeches,

decisions,

private correspondence)

assume narrative

form.

Law

may

be

"centrally

concerned with

naming

and defin-

ing,"

but Wald

is

concerned with the

"inconsistent

narrative"

provided

in decisions like

Cherokee

Nation

and

Dred

Scott

(35,

22).

Whereas

narrative

form thus seems no less

ubiquitous

than

anxiety,

narrative

inconsistency-the

sort

of

"textual

disjunc-

tions" that

expose

Douglass

as "a narrator

compelled

to tell a

story

different

from

the

story

he wishes

to

tell"

(74)-seems

to

return,

in

a modernist

moment,

as

the

signal

formal

accomplish-

ment

for

representing

the conflicts of

US

personhood.

W.

E.

B.

Du Bois's

"exuberant

aesthetic of

uncertainty" (236),

challenging

narrative

conventions,

appears

as the

revisionary

mode

of

recon-

stituting,

with exuberance rather

than

anxiety,

the national col-

lective. Wald never

quite

tells a

story

about how

literature,

or

modernism,

reworks

the

narrative

uncertainty

that sustains dom-

inant ideology into a rhetorical resource for proposing some al-

ternative

to

US

culture

as

usual.

If

we can

say

that Wald's

project

depends

on

transforming

all

arguments

into

narratives,

then we

might say

that Michaels's

project depends

on

transforming

all narratives into

arguments,

where

the idea of

inconsistency,

textual

excess,

or

uncertainty

makes no

sense,

where

prose

as

purple

as Zane

Grey's

or as ex-

perimental

as Faulkner's is

reducible

to

a

logic

of

identity,

and

where

"minor

writing"

is

unimaginable.

To

understand

The

Sound and the Fury as a "defense of the family,"and not as a

representation

of such

a

defense,

is the

precondition

for

arguing

that "its

strategies

and its

goals

are,

in

fact,

typical

of American

writing

in

the '20s"

(6-7).

And for the novel to

typify

the

strategy

of

preserving

the

family,

each section of

the

novel,

despite

the

novel's

radical

heterogeneity,

must

typify

the whole. The

argu-

ment

about Faulkner seems

to

depend

on

an

aesthetic ascribed

to Cather-her sense that Death

Comesfor

the

Archbishop

1926)




15/22

American

Literary History

177

would be easy to excerpt and anthologize: "Because no part of

the

narrative was

subordinate

to

any

other

part

of

the

narrative,

every

part

was

equally

a

part

of the whole.

But because

every

part

was

equally

a

part

of

the

whole,

any

part

could be used as

a whole"

(50).

The

logic

of

substitution that

preserves

textual

self-identity

(as

opposed

to

incongruity, inconsistency,

fracture,

slippage)

does not

quite

return us to the

"Against

Theory"

posi-

tion that "what a text means and what

its author intends it to

mean are

identical,"

that

"linguistic meaning

is

always

identical

to expressed intention" (Knapp and Michaels 13, 21). Rather,a

character'sdesires are

understood

as the

novel's

desires,

a charac-

ter's insistence as the novel's insistence: "The

Sound

and the

Fury

repeatedly

insists that what

people

and

things

do

or

mean

is

a

function of

what

they

are"

(1).

And

yet

some texts are

granted

the

privilege,

we

might

say,

of

disjuncture.

Within

a discursive

map

defined

by

the

mutual

exclusivity

of Americanness and the

melting pot,

Jean Toomer's

faith

in

a

new,

unracialized

American,

his

objective

of a

"spiri-

tual fusion

analogous

to the fact

of

racial

intermingling" (qtd.

in

Michaels

61),

makes him seem

unlocatable,

as does his own re-

fusal

to

be identified

as

a

Negro.

But

Michaels's

reading

of

Cane

(1923)

discovers

not a

"critique

of racial

difference,"

but

the

"de-

finitive defeat of

the

melting pot," seemingly

on

the condition

that

Toomer is identifiable as

a

nativist

(62,

64).

"Nativism

gener-

alizes the

hostility

to

miscegenation

.... Hence

[?],

f the

fantasy

of

miscegenation

dominates

Cane,"

t

seems "not

merely

difficult

to attain but

impossible,"

and "the desired

analogy

between

'ra-

cial

intermingling'

and

'spiritual

fusion'

will

more often

appear

as an oxymoron" (61). Here, then, there is a strong sense that the

book

means what it doesn't

say,

or

often means what the author

didn't

intend: his

poems

"belie the

'harmony'

with

which

the var-

ious racial strands were

supposed

to

mingle

in

Toomer's

new

American"

(62).

This "thematic

dissonance,"

as Wald

would

call

it,

makes the author a

stranger

in his own

work

(1).

Though

Michaels is

well known for

refusing

to disarticulate

literature and

culture,

at

the close of Our

America,

literature,

far

from

being just

a

part

of

culture,

enjoys

the

privilege

of

granting

us access to culture-of being the part of culture through which

culture

is transmitted:

"Whether

or

not the

privileged position

of

literature as

the carrier of cultural

heritage

is

enviable,

it

is

real"

(141).

Whereas

"culture"

proved

"more

effective than

in-

cest,

impotence,

and

homosexuality

as

a

way

of

reconceptualiz-

ing

and

thereby

preserving

the essential

contours of

racial

iden-

tity"

because it

appeared

to overcome

"the

embarrassments of

blood"

(13),

Michaels

ends,

in what must be a

singularly

self-




16/22

178

Identity

Culture

conscious moment, by figuring literature(the carrierof cultural

heritage)

as

a kind of blood.

6

Which is

really

to

say

that

culture,

however

inheritable,

must be inheritable

by

other

means than

blood-indeed,

inherit-

able

by

culture. Yet inherited

culture,

wherever Michaels seems

to find it in OurAmerica,appears perpetually anchored in race.

This is the basis for Michaels's

attack not

just

on cultural

plural-

ism,

but on culturalism as

such,

as "we"

have

inherited it

from

the 1920s. "The modern

concept

of culture is

not,

in

other

words,

a

critique

of

racism;

it is

a form

of racism.

And,

in

fact,

as

skepti-

cism about

the

biology

of race has

increased,

it has become-at

least

among

intellectuals-the dominant

form

of

racism"

(129).

Since his

program

essay

for OurAmerica

appeared

in

the "Identi-

ties" issue

of Critical

Inquiry,

his

argument

has been the

subject

of

vehement

and

eloquent

attack

(see Glass),

not

least

because

so

many

critics

deploy

"culture" within another

conceptual

tra-

jectory

(from

Raymond

Williams and E. P.

Thompson

to

Stuart

Hall and

Dick

Hebdidge)

wherein the

problems

and

possibilities

of

its

deployment

are,

in a

word,

different

(see

Steedman).

From

the

point

of view of cultural

studies,

one limit

to

Mi-

chaels's

inquiry

would

be the

way

"cultural

identity"

always ap-

pears

as an end rather than a means. When he

argues

that "ac-

counts of cultural

identity

that do

any

work

require

a

racial

component"

(128),

the

only

work

that such

identity

is

really sup-

posed to do is to intensify identity. But cultural identity became

interesting

because

of the

political

work it could

accomplish

and

has

accomplished.

In Frantz

Fanon's

most

productively

confus-

ing essay

(the

talk he

gave

at the Second

Congress

of

Black Art-

ists and

Writers

in

1959),

"On National

Culture,"

he

recognizes

that

in

response

to

the colonialist "racialization of

thought"

(212),

the

colonized must

begin by

promoting

"neither

Angolan

nor .

.

.

Nigerian"

culture,

but

"Negro"

culture

(211-12),

the as-

sertion of an

independent

and

vibrant culture

being

a

psycho-

affective condition of freedom. Insisting on the timeliness of de-

veloping

instead a sense of

specifically

national

culture,

Fanon

nowhere mentions

just

what an

anthropologist

would address-

tribal culture-because

it

could

only muddy

the nationalist

cause. But

the

point

is

clearly

that

thinking racially

can

work

to

resist,

to

enact,

or to

ignore oppression,

and

these differences

make

a difference.

In

the

American

field,

Du Bois's

essay

on

"The




17/22

American

LiteraryHistory

179

Conservationof the Races"

(1897)

introducesa

comparable

sense of

strategy

and

temporality

hat clarifies he

use value of

racialized

ultureand overcomes

he

pluralist/assimilationist

nd

separatist/integrationist

ichotomies

(see

Higham,

Send These

211-12).

Developing

cultural

pride

n

one's race is the condition

not

for

successfullyassimilating

but for

activelycontributing

o

a unifiedCulture.

Yet

even

if,

in the

voluminousdiscourseMichaels

surveys,

it

only

"makessense to think of

yourself

as

deprived

of

your

cultureor as tryingto get backin touch withyourcultureor as

turningyour

back on

your

culture"

f

you already

know who

(or,

rather,

what)

you

are

(a

Jew,

a

Negro,

an

Indian),

then

this

doesn't

quite

mean that

for

"cultural

dentity

to become a

proj-

ect,

it must turn to

race"

(16).

I

could-as a

lapsed

Catholic,

native

Ohioan,

or Nuer

of

the

Upper

Nile-talk of

abandoning

my

culture or

reengaging

t without

committingmyself

to

any

racializingontology.

Michaels's

examplessimply

have a

legacy

of

racial

thinking

behind

them,

making

it all but

impossible

o

see thevery circularityhat makesculturemakesense: t is trans-

mitted

culturally.

On a Boasian

wave,

American

anthropology

of the 1920s

tried

to

float that

circularity

even

while,

as Michaels

shows,

it

often came to

ground

n familiar

racializing

erritory,

with "the

anticipation

of culture

by

race: to be

a

Navajo

you

have to

do

Navajo things,

but

you

can't

really

count as

doing

Navajo things

unless

you already

are

a

Navajo"

125).

Thus Herskovits

under-

stood culture

as "learned

behavior,"

aving nothing

to do with

biology,

but

when

he called

on

the

Negro

to

"reabsorb

African-

isms"he

made an

implicitly

biological

argument:

The

hings

he

African

Negro

used to do count as

the

American

Negro's

past

only

because

both the African and the Americanare 'the Ne-

gro"' (125,

127).

In the case of

Sapir,

hough,

who as a

linguist

addressed

he

question

of

culturewithout

a

specifically

ethno-

graphicagenda,

he matterand

mannerare

somewhat

more con-

fusing

and

arresting

han Michaels would have us believe.

In

"Culture,

Genuineand

Spurious"

1924),

which

Michaels

agress-

sively

integrates

with La

Farge's

Laughing

Boy

(1929), Sapir

franklyabandons he ethnographic nderstandingf culture or

something

closer

to

Arnoldian

Culture,

which the Indians

are

losing

and which white Americanshave

never

had,

although

he

speculates

hat America

s

"belatedly

beginning"

o show some

signs

of

culture

322).

Sapir

s

not

really

committed

o

the "sur-

vival of cultures"

Michaels 120),

for

he

eschews

any pluralist

position

to understand"what

kind

of

a

good thing

culture

s"




18/22

180

Identity

Culture

(308), which is the kind of thing we associate with "great cul-

tures"

(315),

Periclean culture

or

Elizabethan

culture,

which

are

not racial

or

national,

as

Sapir

emphasizes,

but

metropolitan:

the

culture

of

Athens,

the culture

of London.

Reading

the

essay

as a

whole

makes it hard to see

how

Sapir's

claim that cultural iden-

tity

is inherited

"by

means

of

the more

or

less

consciously

imita-

tive

processes

summarized

by

the

terms

'tradition' and 'social

inheritance"'

(309;

qtd.

in

Michaels

121)

can be transformed

into

the

idea,

appropriate

enough

for

La

Farge,

that culture

is "an-

chorable in race" (121). For Sapir,the idea of culture being "re-

ducible

to certain

inherent

hereditary

traits

of a

biological

and

psychological

nature"

simply

didn't "bear

very

serious examina-

tion"

(311).

To

summarize

that

Sapir

was an

anthropologist

"committed

to the

centrality

of race"

(121)

is

to

simplify

and sensationalize

his work at the cost

of

eliding

his

remaining difficulty

when it

came to

thinking

between race and

culture,

made most evident

in the course

of

lectures on

"The

Psychology

of Culture" that

he

gave

at

the

University

of

Chicago

in

the late 1920s

and

at Yale

in the

early

1930s. The

concept

of "race"made no sense to

Sapir,

and his

point

was

generally

the

opposite

of the one made

by

Michaels-namely,

that

when

people

say

"race"

they

really

mean

"culture" since race

amounts

at most

to

an

"emotional,"

not

a

"biological," homogeneity

that is "determined

by

environment."

In his effort to describe

"the

vanity"

of the

"attempts

to under-

stand culture as a

biological

concept"

as

"a racial

expression"

(65),

he

explained

that culture

can't

be "the

immediate

expres-

sion"

of "race" because it is a function of

"history"

(71).

Or,

should one capitulate to other people's use of the term: a hetero-

geneous group

living

under like conditions will become more ho-

mogenous,

and from

the

"intermixing

of

two

or

more

'races'

will

evolve another 'race"'

(67).

The

anthropological imagination,

even

when

unhampered by

anxieties about

using

"race"

as a

term,

could

rely

on

just

such

temporality

to

the

same

effect,

wherein what comes to be classed as "race" was

in

fact

a histori-

cal

product

of culture. Thus Thorstein

Veblen,

in a

Mendelian

effort

to

understand the

dolichocephalic

blond,

a "mutant of the

Mediterraneantype," pointed to the "profoundculturalchange"

that must have destabilized

the

parent

stock

(461).

If,

in

some account of recent events

you

use the word "for-

tuitous,'

and

I

tell

you

that

in fact

you

mean

God;

if

you

then

tell me that

you

have

no

faith in the

concept

of

God,

that the

concept

of God

simply

makes no

sense,

yet

I

persist

in

declaring

that

you

do

indeed mean

God; then,

finally, you

will

say, only,




19/22

American

Literary History

181

that I must have some faith in God that

you

yourself

do not.

Though

I

can

imagineSapir

expressing

his

kind

of frustration

with

Michaelsover

the

concept

of

race-since Michaels

always

seems

to

know when

people

mean

race,

evenwhen

they

don'tuse

the

word,

whereas

Sapir

always

seemsto

know that

people

never

mean race

no

matterhow much

they

use the

word-he did

mo-

mentarily

hink within the

paradigm

he

taught

against.

When

it

came to Native Americanshe admittedthat

temperament

may

in

fact be racial

as

opposed

to cultural and

explained

that

"I

believethere is something o the 'stolidity'of the AmericanIn-

dian-that

the

Indian has

a

basically

different emotional

makeup

han the white man"

(71).

If,

in

"Culture,

Genuineand

Spurious,"

nly

Indians

seem to

have

genuine

culture,

n

his lec-

tures

only

Indians

appear

o be a

genuine

race. It's not

so

much

that

Indiansare

a

race

with a

culture;

t's that

they

definefor us

whatever

we

could

productively

mean

by

"race"and "culture"

(as

black or white Americans

absolutely

ould

not).

The

assimi-

lation of the Indianwas

not

a

story

of

a

vanishing

race,

but

the

vanishingof race,no lessthevanishingof culture.And whatgen-

uine culture seemed to be

vanishing

nto,

of

course,

was

mass

culture.

7

"I was

doing

what

the cinema was

doing,"

GertrudeStein

explained

of her

portraits,

meaning

hat she

produced

equential

images

that coheredas a

single mage:

"I

was

making

a

continu-

ous

succession

of the statement

of

what that

person

was until

I

had not

many

things

but one

thing"

qtd.

in Wald

273).

But what

the cinema

was

doing,

with

the

development

of

continuity

edit-

ing,

was

working

o

integrate

mages

nto the

narratological

o-

herence

hat

Stein had

long

since

abandoned.

At

the same

time,

the cinema became the cultural

institution that

held

out new

Americanizing ossibilities,

ntegratingmmigrants

nto

the

"one

thing"

of Americanculture

Rosenzweig

191-228;

Hansen 101-

114;

Peiss

30-33).

This

was the culturevitiated

by

the

likes of

Kallen,Sapir,and Bourne. For Bourne,"the Americanculture

of the

cheapnewspaper,

he

'movies,'

he

popular

song,

the

ubiq-

uitous automobile" hreatens

not

just

Culturebut also cultures

(113).

Whenhe continues

o

argue

hat the "downward ndertow

of

our civilization"draws ts force

from

"slovenly

owns,

our

va-

pid

moving

pictures,

our

popular

novels"

114),

it

begins

to feel

like

the

commitment o

ethnic

identity operates

at times

as a




20/22

182

Identity

Culture

screen controversy for the commitment against mass culture-

or indeed

as the

technology

for

identifying

mass culture. Neither

the

popular

media

by

which one

might preserve

cultural

identity

(most

obviously

the

thriving

Italian, German,

and Yiddish

the-

ater)

nor the medium

by

which one

might

lose

it are taken

seri-

ously.

And

thus,

among

its other

accomplishments,

Cather's

The

Professor's

House

(1925), describing

an

academic's

agoraphobic

attachment

to his

study, provides

a

figure

for

appreciating

how

isolated

from

contemporary

culture

the

pluralist

and nativist

longed

to

be. For

just

when

Coolidge

and

Cather

promoted

an

understanding

of American

identity

as a function of inherited

culture

(Michaels 37),

"mongrel

Manhattan" celebrated

the

"post-colonial

phase"

of

America,

its

cultural

independence

from

Europe,

by collaboratively

celebrating

its "black-and-white

heritage"

in

the new world of entertainment

(Douglas

6).

Modernism's investment

in the

Native American

should be

understood,

then,

not

just

as a disavowal of the

skyscrapers,

air-

planes,

radios,

and blues that marked the

exhilarating emergence

of

modernity,

but

also as an effort to foreclose the new

dynamics

of

identity

formation. Warner Brothers's The Jazz

Singer (1927)

had

its own ideas about our

America,

the

land where blackface

serves

to Americanize the son of

an

immigrant

Jew,

where

the

Jew

gets

to be American

not

by being

white but

by appearing

black

(Rogin

73-120).

Such

audacity

makes it clear how

mass

culture,

far

from

homogenizing

America,

reconfigures

its iden-

tity

culture.

It's

hardly surprising,

then,

that Donald

Duk's

dream

of a

counterhistory-the very

dream that releases

him

from his mass-mediated

longing-is

described

by

Chin

as a cine-

matic mode. In the afterward to the 1994 printing of his Strang-

ers

in the Land

(1955),

Higham

meditates on the

unprecedented

longevity

of his

book,

the

result,

he

claims,

not of

the "invulnera-

bility"

of

the

analysis,

but of the fact that no "cultural

history

of

ethnic and

race relations" has

yet

to

appear,

and thus no

"per-

suasive

theory

of how ethnic identities have

been

constructed,

preserved,

altered,

and abandoned"

(343).

The

degree

to

which

that

history

included

the

experience

of mass

culture

is the

degree

to

which we need to

step

outside the

professor's

house

in

search

of the theory Higham imagines. Meanwhile, whoever studies

American culture enacts

a definition of

culture,

the

very efficacy

of

which,

to invoke

Mary

Antin,

will

depend

on not

having

to

remember

too much

(see

Wald

250).

A

separate

task, then,

will

be to determine

just

how our

study

of culture becomes a

part

of

the American

culture we

study.




21/22

American

Literary History

183

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