Identity Culture

Author(s): Bill Brown

Source: American Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 164-184
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/490265 .
Accessed: 05/11/2014 09:59
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American
Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Identity

Culture

Bill Brown

ConstitutingAmericans.
CulturalAnxiety and
NarrativeForm
By Priscilla Wald
Duke UniversityPress,
1995

Perhaps every one is in pieces inside them and perhaps everyone

has not completely in them their own being inside them.

Our America. Nativism,

Modernism,and
Pluralism
By WalterBenn
Michaels
Duke UniversityPress,
1995

No existing conception of Americannesscan contain this large

variety of transnations.

GertrudeStein, The Making of Americans

ArjunAppadurai,"Patriotismand Its Futures"

The question that opens Frank Chin'sDonald 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 protagonist, mass culture provokes an embarrassing problem and it inspires a sublime possibility. On the one hand, Donald Duk experiences 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 character (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 running the dragon in the New Year's parade, 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

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

American Literary History

165

give up being Chineseto be an American"(42), the novelmakes

it clear that being Chinese or American, or being Chinese-

American,isn'texactlythe point. Rather,the text detailsthe process of becoming(of identificationand disaffiliation),the reconstitutionof an identitygroundedin the subject'sagency.
Although the plot providesconsiderableclosuralpleasure
by trackinghow, in the termsmade especiallysalientby Werner
Sollors, Donald Duk consents to his descent (how he learnsto
identifywith the culturethat'salreadyhis), this pleasurehardly
exhausts Chin'spoint. For Donald Duk's non-Chinesefriend
magicallysharesthe recurringdreamin whichthe boys discover
an untold historyof Chineseimmigrantworkers;the friendand
his parents-"all family"-participate in the New Year festivities (163).Whilesuchintimacyextendsfamilialidentity,the Duk
family per se remainsless than culturallycoherent:during the
New Year,one sisterspendstime doing her "BetteMidlerdoing
Lily Tomlingetting revengeon ShirleyTemple"(166), gleefully
lost in the worldof mass entertainmentand the dynamicsof impersonationthat sustainmuch of the novel. All told, Chin narrates the sort of postethnic perspectivethat emphasizes how
groupintegritycan emergefrom a sharedhistory of oppression
(Hollinger38). He also lavishlydescribesthe micro ritualsthat
compriseone of America'sbest-lovedethnicspectacles.Yet even
as the boy'spainstakinginitiationsinto the past and the present
converge,other characterscasually circulatein and out of the
ethnicframe.
But the 1990s,howevermarkedby postnationaland postethnic possibility,by the intellectualinvestmentin post-identity
politics and the capitalinvestmentin the vertiginouscommodification of difference,remainsan era whereinthe difficultyof
identityformation-above all, the difficultyof experiencingthe
disjuncturebetween,on the one hand, nationalidentity,and, on
the other, identities of race, ethnicity,gender,and sexualityvitalizesAmericanfiction.And PriscillaWaldand WalterBenn
Michaelsexemplifyhow this difficultysustainsthe criticismof
our decade.The field of Americanstudies,once underwrittenby
the questionof just what Americawas and is, now preoccupies
itselfwith the questionof just who Americanswereand are.Our
Americais an identityculturedefinablenot by an identitybut by
the fixationon identity.
In ConstitutingAmericans, Wald ranges from the Narrative
the
Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) to Gertrude Stein's The
of
Making of Americans (1925) to show how persistently individual

authorsexposethe nation'sdominantnarrative-the storyof We

the People-as a storythat restrictsthe pronoun'sreferentto the

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Our America is an
identity culture definable
not by an identity but by
thefixation on identity.

166 IdentityCulture

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 Progressive 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 narrates the task of telling a story that has remained suppressed by
official national histories, but also because it charts how an individual projects himself "into the weft of a collective narrative"in
order to achieve identity (Etienne Balibar, qtd. in Wald 4). The
novel might be said to confirm Michaels's contention that cultural identity "makes no sense" without "recourse to racial identity" (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 racism (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 literary criticism and the teaching of literature. Donald Duk's heroically 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'scourse in philosophy, inspired Horace Kallen's invention of the term and the concept of "cultural pluralism," 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'sexhortation to stop thinking of the US as "a land of immigrants" and
to start considering the US just "one node in a postnational network of diasporas" (173-77). This will not be easy in part because 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 ethnonationality. Moreover, US nationality itself, however much it appears in the "form of the Transnation"-"alone in having orga-

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

American Literary History

nized itself around a modern political ideology in which

pluralismis central to the conduct of democraticlife" (173)has been dependentnot just on the influx of Europeans,Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans,but also on the (perpetual)
displacementof Native Americans,on the subsequentstatus of
Indiannationsas internalcolonialentitieswithinthe US, on one
people's diasporic condition of inhabiting one nation while
affiliatingwith another.Wald and Michaelsclarifythis story of
doubledependence.Waldbeginsher book with a readingof the
Marshall Court decision, in CherokeeNation v. the State of Geor-

gia (1831),thatmarkedthe government'sincapacityto legitimate

Indian effortsto protect themselvesfrom white encroachment;
she concludesby showinghow Stein'simmigrantslong for some
sign of culturallegitimacy.Michaelsshows how the 1924ImmigrationAct, whichrestrictedEuropeanimmigrationby nationality, found its completionin the Indian CitizenshipAct, which
made it possibleto arrestany gradualmakingof Americans:by
simply grantingcitizenshipto all Indians born in the US, the
governmentcould promotenationalidentitynot as an "achievement" but as a "heritage,"somethingyou have, not something
you can become(35). Betweenthe two books we move fromthe
Jeffersonianideal (discussedby Wald)of racialintermixtureand
culturalhomogeneityto a modernidealizationof Native American culture(expressedby Willa Cather,Zane Grey,and Edward
Sapir)as the only authenticculture.Withinour literaryhistory,
we might say these stories convergein WilliamFaulkner'sfirst
entry in his appendix to The Sound and the Fury (1929), describ-

ing Ikkemotubbe,the "dispossessedAmericanKing"who in the

1830s had to remove himself and his Chickasawpeople from
what remainedof his land in North Mississippi.Modernismof
the 1920scan hardlydo withoutthe return,howeverphantasmatic, of the Native Americandisplacedin the 1830s,and such a
returnassuagedthe anxietiesprovokedby the waveof immigration, 1900-1920, upon which Wald'sand Michaels'sthoughts
converge.
That convergencehighlights their neglect of Randolph
Bourne,whose articleson "Trans-NationalAmerica"and "The
Jew and Trans-NationalAmerica,"publishedin 1916, still offer
"astounding"insights (Sollors 184) and seem to stand, indeed,
as the prefigurationof "our"own enlightenment-not just what
David Hollingercalls "the most significantpiece of writingby
most illustriousprecursorand prophet"(94),
multiculturalism's
but also a foreshadowingof the transnationalimaginationto
come.Bournewroteout of impatiencewith the wayassimilation,

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

167

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 notions of American national identity. Kallen understood democracy 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 arguing that "a hyphen attaches, in things of the spirit, also to the
'pure' English American" (245). For Michaels, Kallen's resistance 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 Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish" (108).
Whereas Woodrow Wilson argued that "any man who carries 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 'hyphenates,"' could preserve the country's vitality (109, 112). He advocated "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 "terrible national engine" that inspired the sort of "spiritualand patriotic 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, because 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.

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

AmericanLiteraryHistory 169

3
In other words,the narratabilityof the US dependson excludingparticularidentitiesthat nonethelessremainperpetually
present as what PriscillaWald calls "the uncanninessof nonwhite subjects"as she reads the "officialstories"offeredby the
SupremeCourt,by Lincolnand WoodrowWilson,by the Young
Americansof the 1840s. These providethe context for Wald's
analysisof the anxietythat riddlesthe conceptualizationof personhood when unofficialstories are renderedlegible.She aligns
Douglass'sdiscomfortover the prescribedabolitionistnarrative
with the burdensufferedby HermanMelville'sPierreGlendenning and HarrietWilson'sFrado,figuresalreadyscriptedas national(ized) subjects while facing "the difficultyof telling the
storyof exclusion"(108).It is not reallythe burden(the requisite
affliction)of self-authorship,though, but the concept of "personhood" that facilitates Wald's transition among texts in a
hundred-yearspan. And "personhood,"ratherthan readinglike
a well-trackedkeyword,readslike an underspecifiedplaceholder
for notions rangingfrom possessiveindividualismto legal citizenship to national subjectivityto humanity;that is, the term's
instability,in the texts she reads and in her own text, compromises its critical efficacy.Still, by readingthe CherokeeNation
and Dred Scott decisions as "officialstories"where"logicalinconsistencies"exposethe "instability"of personhood(23), Wald
seems to imply that stabilityis the ethical objective,just as she
seemsto occlude,in the case of the Cherokee,how objectionable
"personhood"mightbe.
The returnof popular sovereigntyto the Cherokeenation
in 1970, which markeda shift in its colonial status,was understood as a confirmationof JohnMarshall'sdescriptionof sovereignty in CherokeeNation (Stricklandand Strickland130-31).
But in 1831that decisionhardlyconferredsovereignty;rather,it
mademanifestthe liminalityand politicalfrailtyof the Cherokee
nation that would culminatein forced relocation beyond the
Mississippi,the notoriousTrailof Tears(1838).The Court'sdecision not to adjudicatein CherokeeNationon the groundsthat
the nationwas not a foreignentity,but a sovereignyet domestic
and dependentnation, was soon followedby its clarifyingdecision in Samuel A. Worcesterv. the State of Georgia(1832), which

nullifiedGeorgia'sjurisdictionoverCherokeeterritoryand occasioned widespreadIndiancelebration(Woodward171). But the

decision did not arrestthe state'sacts of expropriation,which

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

170

Identity Culture

weresupportedby the Jacksonadministration,even while being

excoriatedby the Court (see White 86). A dramaticexampleof
Jacksonianpolicy,of the conflictbetweenthe executiveandjudiciarybranchesof government(Marshall,servingsince 1801,was
thejusticewho clarifiedthe powerof the court),and of the conflict betweenfederaland state authoritythat wouldculminatein
civil war,the Cherokeecase has been the subjectof more than
one casebook that facilitatesits academiccentralityin US history (Perdueand Green).The politicalstakesof this dramadissipate somewhatwhen Waldexplainsthat Marshall"didnot find
for Cherokeesovereignty"(23) and that the Marshall Court
"confirm[ed]the jurisdictionalauthority of the Georgia state
court"(24). Indeed,her analyticaltermsprompta morecompelling redescriptionof the case.
For George Washington'sgovernment,relationswith the
Cherokeetribe stood as a test case for the new nation'sIndian
policy,and the signal achievementof the Cherokeetribewas its
rapid,painstaking,and well publicizedeffort(provokinginternecine conflictsof class and culture)to acculturate(economically,
politically,and culturally)accordingto the "civilizing"aspirations proposedby both politiciansand missionaries.Just as the
Venezuelanrevolutionariesseemedto demonstratein 1811 that
the US national constitutioncould have universalefficacy(B.
Anderson 192), so too in 1827 the Cherokeetribe produceda
national constitution, replicatingessential features of the US
constitution,and provokingGeorgia'seffortto assert state law;
the creationof a supremecourt, a bicamerallegislature,and a
bilingualnewspaperfurthercompriseda mimeticresponseto the
modern nation and the enlightenmentstate (W. Andersonxi).
As Waldpreciselyputs it, acculturationwent wrongbecausethe
Cherokeeconstitutionwas "a bid for coexistencebetweencultures ratherthan assimilationof individuals"(35); the Jeffersonian ideal of assimilationfailed to imaginethat the most acculturatedindividuals-the interracial,wealthy, slave-owning
elite-would acculturateto the point of declaringindependent
national status. In other words, the Court faced the absolute
disjuncturebetween competing narrativesof assimilation:one
in which individualsare raciallyand culturallyabsorbedby the
Anglo-Americanpopulation,one in which the Cherokeetribe
worksto renderitself similarto the nation,equalyet separate.
ThoughWaldemphasizeshow the MarshallCourt"offered
torturedand even inconsistentnarrative[s]that attestedto contradictions ... of personhood itself" (22), though she seeks "to

explainthe anxietymanifestedin thesecases throughan analysis

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

American Literary History

of the uncanninessof humanbeingsexcludedfrompersonhood"

(39), much of the power of the Cherokeeconstitutionand the
two cases, in theircapacityto registerthe Indiancase, continues
to residein the Cherokeeresistanceto (Lockean)personhoodto being transformedinto merelyindividuatedpropertyowners,
ratherthanparticipantsin communalownership(Perdue59, 64).
And the inconsistencieswithin Marshall'sown eloquentnarratives of Indian oppressioncertainlypale beside the irresolvable
conflictbetweencompetingnarratives:the conflictbetweenJefferson'snarrativeof assimilationand Jackson'snarrativeof eradication, and the conflictbetweenthe narrativethe Court understood itself as stabilizingand the eventsperpetratedby Georgia.
Wald'sown story thus suffersfrom insisting on, without
clarifying,the politicalpotency of "personhood,"but it is worth
the denouement,whereStein'sstoryof how Americansaremade
now readsand feels like the culminationof a centuryof literary
and political history.No longer the internationalmodernistor
feminist, Stein appearshere as the Americanist'sAmericanist,
challengingthe dynamicsof identityand identificationthat underwriteour culturalhistories.Not just the oaths of allegiance,
but also narrativesof allegiancelike MaryAntin'sThePromised
Land(1912) become the context for trackinghow Stein irritates
the Jamesiandistinctionbetween"having"and "being,"how she
refusesto understandthe consciousnessof self as a consciousness of owning,and how her "fracturednarrative"(236)provides
fresh access to the story of German-Jewishimmigration.And if
it seemsunlikely(giventhat no one who actuallyreadsThe Making of Americansreally expends much energy reading for the
plot) that Stein'sreaders"confronttheirlongingfor the sentence,
for completionand comprehension,and ideally see their complicity as desiring subjectsin constructingplots" (297), it certainlyis the case that Steinteachesus how inseparablenarrative
and identity are ... precisely by abandoning narrative form as

she concocts some otherchronicleof a family's"progress."

4

GertrudeStein does not appearin OurAmerica,although

the making of Americans(as a family), and its relationto the
remakingof the word,is foremostamongthe dynamicsMichaels
describes.Modernismrepudiates"arbitraryor conventionalrelations"(1) betweenwordand referent,familialidentityand culturalidentity,nation and race, to the point where,in TheSound

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

171

No longer the
internationalmodernist
orfeminist, Stein appears
here as the Americanist's
Americanist, challenging
the dynamics of identity
and identificationthat
underwriteour cultural
histories.

172

Still, Michaels'shighvelocity tour of the

racializing imagination
has establisheda
profoundlynew map of
modernism, which...
provides new bearingsfor
relocating writers in
relation to the most
frightening political
agendas of the day.

Identity Culture

and the Fury, Quentin's "desire not only to commit incest but to
commit incest by saying he committed incest" (3) paradigmatically preserves familial integrity (keeping things all in the family) with the material potency of the word. Aside from Ernest
Hemingway's cult of racial, phenomenological, and linguistic authenticity, even William Carlos Williams's down-home Americanist materialism, his "poetics of embodiment," appears "essentially 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'sinterest 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 fundamental the
racial and racist imagination is to American literature. But Michaels 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 phenomenon: some nativists (Zane Grey, Oliver La Farge) are hardly
recognizable as modernists, and some modernists (Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein) are nowhere to be seen (see Perloff, Altieri).
Still, Michaels's high-velocity tour of the racializing imagination
has established a profoundly new map of modernism, which,
among its other accomplishments, provides new bearings for relocating 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 convergence 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 hysteria that fueled both urban riots and exclusionist politics (Higham, Strangers264-99; Rosenzweig 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 passionate and pseudoscientific plea for racial purity, The Passing of

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

American Literary History

the GreatRace(1916),he also consideredit an extensionof longstandinganimosities(towardCatholics,Jews,Japanese).But Michaelstirelesslyattendsto the crucialshift betweena Progressive
racismthatwas hierarchicaland assimilationist(in the sensethat
white supremacismunderwrotethe possibilityof Americanizing
immigrants)and a pluralistracism that was antiassimilationist
(in the sense of denyingthe possibilitythat people can ever become what they aren't).A "commitmentto the technologiesof
Americanizationis preserved"only "on the groundsthat people
must become what they are" (122). And the question of what
constitutesan Americancan be answeredin a new way because
the question of what constitutesculture is answeredin a new
way-it is the expressionof race.
WhereasMichaelNorth showedhow racialmasqueradebecame a moderniststrategyof resuscitatingcultureand language
(3-34), and whereasHouston Baker's"bluesgeography"showed
how an "Afro-Americandiscursivemodernism"stood outside
the Anglo-Americanmodernistpurview(17), Michaelsassimilates the HarlemRenaissanceto the point where,for instance,
Alain Locke'santhology,TheNewNegro(1925),is no longerthe
signaldocumentof the HarlemRenaissance,but the signaldocument of Americanmodernismas such.And Locke'sor CarlVan
Vechten's,Countee Cullen'sor Melville Herskovits'sclaim that
the AmericanNegro, ratherthan the Europeanmodernist,must
make use of "primitive"Africanart, of Africa, as a culturalresource, appearsas an exemplaryinsistencethat culturebe "an
expressionof racialidentity"(113). In otherwords,the minority
culturalproductionthathas so often suppliedliterarycriticswith
an Archimedeanpoint fromwhichto criticizedominantculture
reappearshere at the center of that culture,the clearestexpression of an essentialistlogic ratherthan any challengeto it. And
otheridentityformationsappearas prophylaxesagainstmiscegenation: the "homosexual family and the incestuous family
emergeas technologiesfor preventinghalfbreeds"(49), and "lesbianism,likeimpotenceitself,figuresas a technologyfor producing purity"(96).
Still, when it has becomecustomaryto fault the New Historicismof the 1980sfor its productionof a homogeneous"culture,"not the least impressiveaspectof OurAmericais the precision with whichMichaelsdifferentiatesbetweenone racismand
another,attendingto the shift in the workof LothropStoddard,
for instance,from white supremacismto culturalpluralism-to
an assertionof mereyet absolutedifference.He shows how certain texts publishedin the period, becausethey understandthe
Jew socially and economicallyand not racially,continueto rely

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

173

174 IdentityCulture

on the Progressiveproblematic of 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 problematic of identity-the task of thematic identification-fuels
Our America. regional modernism (Robinson Jeffers) and internationalist 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 object 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 readiness to equate others, especially those that from another perspective 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 compatriot 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 compatriotism (as though hating the literal czar were comparable to hating 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 "formalism" that once served New Historicism as a technology for reading 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 steering readers 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

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

American Literary History

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 central" (142), his commitment to the problematic of literaryhistorical 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 establishes 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 convergence 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 modernism as a literary aesthetic movement (2), seems to dictate selfevidence: 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 bothering 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 literature will
expose the contingency of dominant culture and voice what remains unsaid within it. Yet she hardly requires that voice to effect 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 contradictions. Indeed, "ConstitutingAmericans,"she explains, "attends to
the anxiety evident in the language of legal, political, and social

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

175

176 IdentityCulture

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). Anxiety gradually begins to feel like a ubiquitous psycho-linguistic
condition.
This makes it somewhat difficult to locate "culturalanxiety"
per se, and more difficult to understand its relation to "narrative
form." It is not the case, here, that narrative form manages cultural anxiety, but rather, as Pierre Macherey might put it, that
narrative form exposes the fissures within ideology. For Macherey, 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 defining," but Wald is concerned with the "inconsistent narrative"
provided in decisions like CherokeeNation and Dred Scott (35,
22). Whereas narrative form thus seems no less ubiquitous than
anxiety, narrative inconsistency-the sort of "textual disjunctions" 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 accomplishment for representing the conflicts of US personhood. W. E. B.
Du Bois's "exuberantaesthetic of uncertainty" (236), challenging
narrativeconventions, appears as the revisionary mode of reconstituting, with exuberance rather than anxiety, the national collective. Wald never quite tells a story about how literature, or
modernism, reworks the narrativeuncertainty that sustains dominant ideology into a rhetorical resource for proposing some alternative 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 experimental 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 argument about Faulkner seems to depend on an aesthetic ascribed
to Cather-her sense that Death Comesfor the Archbishop(1926)

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

American Literary History

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" position 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 character'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 "spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling" (qtd. in
Michaels 61), makes him seem unlocatable, as does his own refusal to be identified as a Negro. But Michaels's reading of Cane
(1923) discovers not a "critique of racial difference,"but the "definitive defeat of the melting pot," seemingly on the condition
that Toomer is identifiable as a nativist (62, 64). "Nativism generalizes the hostility to miscegenation .... Hence [?],if the fantasy
of miscegenation dominates Cane,"it seems "not merely difficult
to attain but impossible," and "the desired analogy between 'racial 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 various 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 incest, impotence, and homosexuality as a way of reconceptualizing and thereby preserving the essential contours of racial identity" because it appeared to overcome "the embarrassments of
blood" (13), Michaels ends, in what must be a singularly self-

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

177

178 IdentityCulture

conscious moment, by figuring literature (the carrier of 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, inheritable by culture. Yet inherited culture, wherever Michaels seems
to find it in Our America, appears perpetually anchored in race.
This is the basis for Michaels's attack not just on cultural pluralism, 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 skepticism 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 "Identities" issue of Critical Inquiry,this argument has been the subject
of vehement and eloquent attack (see Glass), not least because
so many critics deploy "culture"within another conceptual trajectory (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 Michaels's inquiry would be the way "cultural identity" always appears as an end rather than a means. When he argues that "accounts of cultural identity that do any work require a racial
component" (128), the only work that such identity is really supposed 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 confusing essay (the talk he gave at the Second Congress of Black Artists 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 assertion of an independent and vibrant culture being a psychoaffective condition of freedom. Insisting on the timeliness of developing instead a sense of specifically national culture, Fanon
nowhere mentions just what an anthropologist would addresstribal 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

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

AmericanLiteraryHistory 179

Conservationof the Races" (1897) introduces a comparable

sense of strategyand temporalitythat clarifiesthe use value of
racializedcultureand overcomesthe pluralist/assimilationist
and
dichotomies
Send
These
(see Higham,
separatist/integrationist
211-12). Developingculturalpridein one'srace is the condition
not for successfullyassimilatingbut for activelycontributingto
a unifiedCulture.
Yet even if, in the voluminousdiscourseMichaelssurveys,
it only "makessense to think of yourself as deprivedof your
cultureor as tryingto get back in touch with your cultureor as
turningyourback on yourculture"if you alreadyknowwho (or,
rather,what) you are (a Jew, a Negro, an Indian), then this
doesn'tquite mean that for "culturalidentityto become a project, it must turn to race" (16). I could-as a lapsed Catholic,
nativeOhioan, or Nuer of the Upper Nile-talk of abandoning
my cultureor reengagingit without committingmyself to any
racializingontology. Michaels'sexamplessimply have a legacy
of racial thinkingbehind them, makingit all but impossibleto
see the verycircularitythatmakesculturemakesense:it is transmittedculturally.
On a Boasian wave, Americananthropologyof the 1920s
tried to float that circularityeven while, as Michaels shows, it
often came to groundin familiarracializingterritory,with "the
anticipationof cultureby race:to be a Navajo you have to do
Navajothings,but you can'treallycount as doing Navajothings
unlessyou alreadyare a Navajo"(125). Thus Herskovitsunderstood cultureas "learnedbehavior,"havingnothing to do with
biology,but when he called on the Negro to "reabsorbAfricanisms"he madean implicitlybiologicalargument:"Thethingsthe
African Negro used to do count as the AmericanNegro'spast
only because both the African and the Americanare 'the Negro"' (125, 127). In the case of Sapir,though, who as a linguist
addressedthe question of culturewithout a specificallyethnographicagenda,the matterand mannerare somewhatmoreconfusing and arrestingthan Michaels would have us believe. In
"Culture,Genuineand Spurious"(1924),whichMichaelsagresssively integrateswith La Farge'sLaughingBoy (1929), Sapir
franklyabandonsthe ethnographicunderstandingof culturefor
somethingcloser to ArnoldianCulture,which the Indians are
losing and which white Americanshave neverhad, althoughhe
speculatesthat Americais "belatedlybeginning"to show some
signs of culture(322). Sapiris not reallycommittedto the "survival of cultures"(Michaels 120), for he eschews any pluralist
position to understand"whatkind of a good thing cultureis"

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

180

Identity Culture

(308), which is the kind of thing we associate with "great cultures" (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 identity is inherited "by means of the more or less consciously imitative 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 "anchorable in race" (121). For Sapir, the idea of culture being "reducible to certain inherent hereditary traits of a biological and
psychological nature" simply didn't "bear very serious examination" (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 understand culture as a biological concept" as "a racial expression"
(65), he explained that culture can't be "the immediate expression" of "race" because it is a function of "history" (71). Or,
should one capitulate to other people's use of the term: a heterogeneous group living under like conditions will become more homogenous, 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 historical product of culture. Thus Thorstein Veblen, in a Mendelian
effort to understand the dolichocephalic blond, a "mutant of the
Mediterranean type," pointed to the "profound cultural change"
that must have destabilized the parent stock (461).
If, in some account of recent events you use the word "fortuitous,' 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,

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

American Literary History

that I must have some faith in God that you yourselfdo not.
Though I can imagineSapirexpressingthis kind of frustration
with Michaelsover the concept of race-since Michaelsalways
seemsto knowwhenpeople meanrace,evenwhenthey don'tuse
the word,whereasSapiralwaysseemsto know that people never
mean raceno matterhow much they use the word-he did momentarilythink within the paradigmhe taught against.When it
came to Native Americanshe admittedthat temperamentmay
in fact be racial as opposed to culturaland explainedthat "I
believethere is somethingto the 'stolidity'of the AmericanIndian-that the Indian has a basically different emotional
makeupthan the white man" (71). If, in "Culture,Genuineand
Spurious,"only Indiansseem to have genuineculture,in his lectures only Indiansappearto be a genuinerace.It's not so much
that Indiansare a race with a culture;it's that they definefor us
whateverwe could productivelymean by "race"and "culture"
(as black or white Americansabsolutelycould not). The assimilation of the Indianwas not a story of a vanishingrace, but the
vanishingof race,no less the vanishingof culture.And whatgenuine culture seemed to be vanishinginto, of course, was mass
culture.
7
"I was doing what the cinemawas doing,"GertrudeStein
explainedof her portraits,meaningthat she producedsequential
imagesthat coheredas a singleimage:"I was makinga continuous successionof the statementof what that person was until I
had not manythingsbut one thing"(qtd. in Wald273). But what
the cinemawas doing, with the developmentof continuityediting, was workingto integrateimagesinto the narratologicalcoherencethat Stein had long since abandoned.At the same time,
the cinema became the culturalinstitution that held out new
Americanizingpossibilities,integratingimmigrantsinto the "one
thing"of Americanculture(Rosenzweig191-228;Hansen 101114; Peiss 30-33). This was the culturevitiated by the likes of
Kallen, Sapir,and Bourne.For Bourne,"the Americanculture
of the cheapnewspaper,the 'movies,'the popularsong, the ubiquitous automobile"threatensnot just Culturebut also cultures
(113).Whenhe continuesto arguethatthe "downwardundertow
of our civilization"drawsits force from "slovenlytowns,our vapid movingpictures,our popularnovels"(114), it beginsto feel
like the commitmentto ethnic identity operates at times as a

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

181

182 IdentityCulture

screen controversy for the commitment against mass cultureor 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 theater) nor the medium by which one might lose it are taken seriously. And thus, among its other accomplishments, Cather's The
Professor'sHouse (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, airplanes, 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 identity 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 cinematic mode. In the afterward to the 1994 printing of his Strangers in the Land (1955), Higham meditates on the unprecedented
longevity of his book, the result, he claims, not of the "invulnerability" of the analysis, but of the fact that no "cultural history of
ethnic and race relations" has yet to appear, and thus no "persuasive 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.

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

American Literary History

WorksCited
Altieri, Charles. "Whose America Is
Our America: On Walter Benn Michaels's Characterization of Modernity in America." Modernism/Modernity 3.3 (1996): 107-13.

Fanon, Frantz. "On National Culture." The Wretched of the Earth.

Trans. Constance Farrington. New
York: Grove, 1963. 206-48.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Originand

Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. New
York: Verso, 1991.

Glass, Loren. "The End of Culture:

Reviewing Walter Benn Michaels's
Our America. Nativism, Modernism,
and Pluralism." Modern Language
Studies 26 (1997): 1-17.

Anderson, William L. "Introduction."

Cherokee Removal. Before and After.
Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991. vii-xvi.

Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon:

Spectatorshipin American Silent Film.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

Appadurai, Arjun. "Patriotism and

Its Futures." 1993. Modernity at
Large: CulturalDimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 1996. 158-77.

Higham, John. Send These to Me:

Immigrants in Urban America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism

and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1987.
Berlant, Lauren. "National Brands/
National Body: Imitation of Life."The
Phantom Public Sphere. Ed. Bruce
Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 173-208
Bourne, Randolph. Warand the Intellectuals. Collected Essays, 1915-1919.
Ed. Carl Resek. New York: Harper,
1964.
Chin, Frank. Donald Duk. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1991.

. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 18601925. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP,
1994.
Hollinger, David A. Postethnic America. Beyond Multiculturalism. New
York: Basic, 1995.
Kennedy, David M. Over Here: The
First World War and American Society. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
Knapp, Steven, and Walter Benn
Michaels. "Against Theory." Against
Theory: Literary Studies and the
New Pragmatism. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.
11-30.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Literatureand Life."

Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael
A. Greco. Critical Inquiry 23 (1997):
225-30.

Lowe, Lisa. ImmigrantActs. On Asian

American Cultural Politics. Durham:
Duke UP, 1996.

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty.

Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New
York: Noonday, 1995.

Michaels, Walter Benn. "The New

Modernism." English Literary History
59 (1992): 257-67.

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

183

184

Identity Culture

North, Michael. The Dialect of

Modernism. Race, Language, and
Twentieth-Century Literature. New
York: Oxford UP, 1994.

. The Psychology of Culture:A

Course of Lectures. Ed. Judith T. Irvine. Berlin. Mouton de Gruyter,
1994.

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements:

Working Womenand Leisure in Turnof-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1986.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity:

Consentand Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Steedman, Carolyn. "Culture, CulPerdue, Theda. "The Conflict Within: tural Studies, and the Historians."
Cherokees and Removal." Cherokee Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence
Removal. Before and After. Ed. Wil- Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula
liam L. Anderson. Athens: U of Treichler. New York: Routledge,
1992. 613-22.
Georgia P, 1991. 55-74.
Perdue, Theda, and Michael D.
Green, eds. The CherokeeRemoval: A
Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford, 1995.
Perloff, Marjorie. "Modernism without the Modernists: A Response to
Walter Benn Michaels." Modernism
and Modernity 3.3 (1996): 99-105.
Porter, Carolyn. "History and Literature: After the New Historicism."
New Literary History 21 (1990):
253-72.
Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White
Noise. JewishImmigrantsin the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley:U of California P, 1996.
Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for
What We Will. Workersand Leisure in
the Industrial City, 1890-1925. New
York: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Sapir, Edward. "Culture, Genuine
and Spurious." 1924. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language,
Cultureand Personality.Ed. David G.
Mandelbaum. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. 309-31.

Stein, Gertrude. The Making of

Americans. 1925. Normal: Dalkey Archive, 1995.
Strickland, Rennard, and William M.
Strickland. "Beyond the Trail of
Tears: One Hundred Fifty Years of
Cherokee Survival." Cherokee Removal: Before and After. Ed. William
L. Anderson. Athens: U of Georgia P,
1991. 112-38.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. 1919.
New Brunswick: Transaction, 1990.
White, Richard. "It's YourMisfortune
and None of My Own".A New History
of the American West. Norman: U of
Oklahoma P, 1991.
Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies. Theorizing Race and Gender.
Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Woodward, Grace Steele. The Cherokees. Norman: U of Oklahoma P,
1963.

This content downloaded from 194.117.2.100 on Wed, 5 Nov 2014 09:59:38 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions