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Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism.
“We have a great desire to be supremely American,” Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America’s cultural and collective identity—ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism.
Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity—linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos—something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels’s sustained rereading of the texts of the period—the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar—exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.
“We have a great desire to be supremely American,” Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America’s cultural and collective identity—ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism.
Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity—linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos—something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels’s sustained rereading of the texts of the period—the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar—exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 5, 2016
Too conflicted to give it anything else.
March 12, 2013
(8/10) I did a review of this for a class I'm in, so I thought I may as well post it here and show off some of my more academic (read: pretentious) writing. And hey, a Goodreads review with citations!
The relationship between racism and modernism is usually one that sits uncomfortably with scholars and critics. Frequently the anti-Semitism of Eliot or Pound, or the racism of Gaugin, is seen as an unfortunate product of their time, an unseemly blemish on an aesthetic mode that is at its core unrelated to questions of race. Walter Benn Michaels challenges that in Our America, using several canonical American modernist texts from the likes of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Cather as examples of a new racial ideology he calls modernist nativism. Under this model the early 20th century represented not a change in the intensity of racism but rather a crucial change in the way it operated and narrated itself.
At the core of modernist nativism, Michaels writes, is the substitution of questions of cultural difference for questions of racial inferiority, with both ultimately justifying the same system of racism. In it "identity becomes an ambition as well as a description" (Michaels 3). Michaels defines the underlying logic of nativism as pluralist -- that is, it does not oppose the existence of other cultures or suggest that they are inferior to (white, predominantly Anglo-Saxon male) American culture, but rather posits that all of these cultures should co-exist. Having established this theoretically universal and egalitarian position, nativism uses it to suggest that it is in fact white American culture that is under risk of being obliterated by waves of immigration and the pernicious influence of minorities. In asserting a pluralist worldview, Michaels argues that nativism attributes a unique culture to white Americans which is simultaneously essential to them and must be kept safe from dilution.
Michaels writes that "it was in terms of familial relations [...] that the new structures of identity were articulated" (6). Modernist novels prove a fertile resource for images of these familial relations. Michaels analyzes these novels as presenting the intermingling of nation-families through marriage and procreation as an incipient threat to American culture which could ultimately lead to a racially debased, dystopian future (the future seen in, for instance, Eliot's apocalyptic poetry). Often this threat to the purity of the family takes the form of an explicitly racialized character, such as Cather's Louie Marsellus and Hemingway's Robert Cohn, both Jews. Michaels goes further to suggests that even intermarriage with white families would lead to a dilution of the family's individual culture (thus suggesting the nation's wariness with provisionally white immigrants, recently limited by the Johsnon Act of 1924). Because of this, these novels develop alternatives through reproductive sexuality which allow the bloodline to remain pure, most notably incest, homosexuality, and celibacy.
This is perhaps the most intriguing of Michaels' ideas and one which seems at the same time paradoxical. The desire to preserve the nation and its culture, by this line of reasoning, leads to an obsession with purity that ensures the nation's failure to reproduce and, ultimately, its own doom. Michaels also presents an ideology in which racism leads to an approval of deviant sexuality, instead of our contemporary assumptions of it going hand in hand with heteronormativity. Of course, the fact that these queer or deviant relationships could for the most part only be expressed in literature through strong platonic bonds does bely Michaels' point -- if certain literary authors looked to it as a means of racial preservation, mainstream American culture still adamantly condemned it. But Michaels' larger point seems to be that the attempt to apply the same logics of incest and abstinence to the nation-state was just as paradoxical. Ultimately the effect of highlighting the queer aspects of nativism complicates any easy understanding of privilege and discrimination and challenges our understanding of the period's attitude towards racial and sexual minorities.
Michaels goes on to give examples of common tropes or concepts in which modernist nativism can be seen, such as miscegenation, "passing", or the appropriation of Aboriginal images, to more mixed results. His analysis of the Aboriginal in modernist literature, for instance, complicates the typical narrative of romanticization and exoticization by describing the roots of white desire to be like some fantastical truly-American Aboriginal. There are other times when Michaels' desire to complicate and contradict traditional ways of thinking about race leads to attacking genuinely progressive texts. For instance, he critiques Chesnutt and Hopkins' novels of interracial marriage and integration by accusing both of essentializing the mulatto as representing the spectral image of blackness, and as such dooming any attempt at integration before the start (60). But treating the mixed-race individual as black is only to acknowledge social reality, and if anything highlights the constructedness of race. This difficulty grappling with social construction will come back to haunt Michaels in his conclusion.
Michaels' methodology is almost as interesting as his arguments. Critics generally describe him as a New Historicist, and his first monograph was published in a series entitled "The New Historicism" edited by Stephen Greenblatt (Thomas 19). However, Brook Thomas argues that Michaels' work also draws heavily on deconstruction, and quotes him as arguing that "the deconstructive interest in the problematic of materiality in signification is not intrinsically ahistorical" (20). We can see this unlikely fusion in Our America: the overall thrust of the work is to ground modernist texts in the historical race relations which surrounded them, including both intellectual movements and concrete laws like the above-mentioned Johnson act. However, most of the body of the text consists of close readings of novels, a distinctly un-materialist approach. In these readings Michaels focuses on contradictions and conflicts within texts, highlighting how they often contradict their ostensibly progressive morals -- a clear deconstructive move, although as mentioned above it often slides into simple contrarianism. Notably, Michaels refers to a wide array of novels and other primary texts, but almost no scholarship or secondary sources. In part this suggests the pathbreaking notion of his argument, but it also displays a methodology which attempts to express material history as contained within literary history, with nothing needed to demonstrate this but the texts themselves.
Ultimately Michaels' arguments about racism in the early 20th century have clear implications for our understanding of racism today. Michaels suggests that the rhetoric of nativism, with its focus on cultural pluralism instead of biological superiority, is the dominant ideology under liberal capitalism. This hints at a broader critique of liberal "identity politics" that would be more fully expanded in his later work.
To some extent this is accurate. Racist groups have eagerly embraced the narrative of a vanishing white culture under siege from hoards of immigrants, most clearly in panic about Arabic immigration to Europe creating a culturally-dominated "Eurabia". It certainly is significant that even the Ku Klux Klan began using the slogan "Difference Not Inferiority" (Michaels 65). But outside of the paranoid racial fantasies of the far right assimilation, not the fear of it, now seems to be the primary factor by which racism operates. Liberal capitalism openly galvanizes the "model immigrant" who does their best to be indistinguishable from middle-class white citizens. Of course, the underside of this is the unassimilated immigrant or minority as a threat, but Michaels fails to recognize the way in which liberalism offers racialized individuals both carrot and stick.
His prime example of how nativism has informed modern political discourse is the fetishization of "culture" as a trait inherent of racial minorities and the primary object which anti-racism must be mobilized to defend. Michaels takes a fiercely anti-essentialist position here, for example, discussing the history of white artists appropriating black musical forms, he writes that "The idea that whites who learn to sing like blacks are stealing black culture thus depends upon the racialist idea that cultural identity is a function of racial identity" (129). Here it would be helpful if Michaels would name and quote those he criticizes instead of just referring to an ethereal mass of opinion. While certainly some anti-racists have essentialized the culture of racial minorities, many critics who express the concerns that Michaels lambasts are aware of race and racial culture as a social construct. But they also acknowledge that social constructs are awfully real to those living through them -- race is created through culture, in ways similar to what Michaels describes for most of the book. Michaels lambasts progressives' embrace of a "no-drop rule" in which anyone seen as black assumes black racial status (131), but this practice highlights the constructed status of race instead of obscuring it. The only alternative would be a naive colourblindness that fails to acknowledge the ways in which race exists as a social, if not biological, fact. As Robyn Weigman writes in her review of the book, "What use is it to say that identity makes no sense without engaging how and why identity has been mobilized in the first place?" (433).
Nevertheless, Michaels' book is a valuable intervention that provides a deeper and more nuanced analyses of racism as a phenomenon than one often sees in treatments of America's past. His readings of canonical modernist texts are remarkably unconventional, and there's a daring newness in reading The Great Gatsby in relation to The Clansmen. Unfortunately, the connections to contemporary racial politics he attempts to draw towards the end of the book are underdeveloped and don't hold up to much scrutiny. But as an analysis of a critical historical period and its literature Our America is challenging and compelling.
The relationship between racism and modernism is usually one that sits uncomfortably with scholars and critics. Frequently the anti-Semitism of Eliot or Pound, or the racism of Gaugin, is seen as an unfortunate product of their time, an unseemly blemish on an aesthetic mode that is at its core unrelated to questions of race. Walter Benn Michaels challenges that in Our America, using several canonical American modernist texts from the likes of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Cather as examples of a new racial ideology he calls modernist nativism. Under this model the early 20th century represented not a change in the intensity of racism but rather a crucial change in the way it operated and narrated itself.
At the core of modernist nativism, Michaels writes, is the substitution of questions of cultural difference for questions of racial inferiority, with both ultimately justifying the same system of racism. In it "identity becomes an ambition as well as a description" (Michaels 3). Michaels defines the underlying logic of nativism as pluralist -- that is, it does not oppose the existence of other cultures or suggest that they are inferior to (white, predominantly Anglo-Saxon male) American culture, but rather posits that all of these cultures should co-exist. Having established this theoretically universal and egalitarian position, nativism uses it to suggest that it is in fact white American culture that is under risk of being obliterated by waves of immigration and the pernicious influence of minorities. In asserting a pluralist worldview, Michaels argues that nativism attributes a unique culture to white Americans which is simultaneously essential to them and must be kept safe from dilution.
Michaels writes that "it was in terms of familial relations [...] that the new structures of identity were articulated" (6). Modernist novels prove a fertile resource for images of these familial relations. Michaels analyzes these novels as presenting the intermingling of nation-families through marriage and procreation as an incipient threat to American culture which could ultimately lead to a racially debased, dystopian future (the future seen in, for instance, Eliot's apocalyptic poetry). Often this threat to the purity of the family takes the form of an explicitly racialized character, such as Cather's Louie Marsellus and Hemingway's Robert Cohn, both Jews. Michaels goes further to suggests that even intermarriage with white families would lead to a dilution of the family's individual culture (thus suggesting the nation's wariness with provisionally white immigrants, recently limited by the Johsnon Act of 1924). Because of this, these novels develop alternatives through reproductive sexuality which allow the bloodline to remain pure, most notably incest, homosexuality, and celibacy.
This is perhaps the most intriguing of Michaels' ideas and one which seems at the same time paradoxical. The desire to preserve the nation and its culture, by this line of reasoning, leads to an obsession with purity that ensures the nation's failure to reproduce and, ultimately, its own doom. Michaels also presents an ideology in which racism leads to an approval of deviant sexuality, instead of our contemporary assumptions of it going hand in hand with heteronormativity. Of course, the fact that these queer or deviant relationships could for the most part only be expressed in literature through strong platonic bonds does bely Michaels' point -- if certain literary authors looked to it as a means of racial preservation, mainstream American culture still adamantly condemned it. But Michaels' larger point seems to be that the attempt to apply the same logics of incest and abstinence to the nation-state was just as paradoxical. Ultimately the effect of highlighting the queer aspects of nativism complicates any easy understanding of privilege and discrimination and challenges our understanding of the period's attitude towards racial and sexual minorities.
Michaels goes on to give examples of common tropes or concepts in which modernist nativism can be seen, such as miscegenation, "passing", or the appropriation of Aboriginal images, to more mixed results. His analysis of the Aboriginal in modernist literature, for instance, complicates the typical narrative of romanticization and exoticization by describing the roots of white desire to be like some fantastical truly-American Aboriginal. There are other times when Michaels' desire to complicate and contradict traditional ways of thinking about race leads to attacking genuinely progressive texts. For instance, he critiques Chesnutt and Hopkins' novels of interracial marriage and integration by accusing both of essentializing the mulatto as representing the spectral image of blackness, and as such dooming any attempt at integration before the start (60). But treating the mixed-race individual as black is only to acknowledge social reality, and if anything highlights the constructedness of race. This difficulty grappling with social construction will come back to haunt Michaels in his conclusion.
Michaels' methodology is almost as interesting as his arguments. Critics generally describe him as a New Historicist, and his first monograph was published in a series entitled "The New Historicism" edited by Stephen Greenblatt (Thomas 19). However, Brook Thomas argues that Michaels' work also draws heavily on deconstruction, and quotes him as arguing that "the deconstructive interest in the problematic of materiality in signification is not intrinsically ahistorical" (20). We can see this unlikely fusion in Our America: the overall thrust of the work is to ground modernist texts in the historical race relations which surrounded them, including both intellectual movements and concrete laws like the above-mentioned Johnson act. However, most of the body of the text consists of close readings of novels, a distinctly un-materialist approach. In these readings Michaels focuses on contradictions and conflicts within texts, highlighting how they often contradict their ostensibly progressive morals -- a clear deconstructive move, although as mentioned above it often slides into simple contrarianism. Notably, Michaels refers to a wide array of novels and other primary texts, but almost no scholarship or secondary sources. In part this suggests the pathbreaking notion of his argument, but it also displays a methodology which attempts to express material history as contained within literary history, with nothing needed to demonstrate this but the texts themselves.
Ultimately Michaels' arguments about racism in the early 20th century have clear implications for our understanding of racism today. Michaels suggests that the rhetoric of nativism, with its focus on cultural pluralism instead of biological superiority, is the dominant ideology under liberal capitalism. This hints at a broader critique of liberal "identity politics" that would be more fully expanded in his later work.
To some extent this is accurate. Racist groups have eagerly embraced the narrative of a vanishing white culture under siege from hoards of immigrants, most clearly in panic about Arabic immigration to Europe creating a culturally-dominated "Eurabia". It certainly is significant that even the Ku Klux Klan began using the slogan "Difference Not Inferiority" (Michaels 65). But outside of the paranoid racial fantasies of the far right assimilation, not the fear of it, now seems to be the primary factor by which racism operates. Liberal capitalism openly galvanizes the "model immigrant" who does their best to be indistinguishable from middle-class white citizens. Of course, the underside of this is the unassimilated immigrant or minority as a threat, but Michaels fails to recognize the way in which liberalism offers racialized individuals both carrot and stick.
His prime example of how nativism has informed modern political discourse is the fetishization of "culture" as a trait inherent of racial minorities and the primary object which anti-racism must be mobilized to defend. Michaels takes a fiercely anti-essentialist position here, for example, discussing the history of white artists appropriating black musical forms, he writes that "The idea that whites who learn to sing like blacks are stealing black culture thus depends upon the racialist idea that cultural identity is a function of racial identity" (129). Here it would be helpful if Michaels would name and quote those he criticizes instead of just referring to an ethereal mass of opinion. While certainly some anti-racists have essentialized the culture of racial minorities, many critics who express the concerns that Michaels lambasts are aware of race and racial culture as a social construct. But they also acknowledge that social constructs are awfully real to those living through them -- race is created through culture, in ways similar to what Michaels describes for most of the book. Michaels lambasts progressives' embrace of a "no-drop rule" in which anyone seen as black assumes black racial status (131), but this practice highlights the constructed status of race instead of obscuring it. The only alternative would be a naive colourblindness that fails to acknowledge the ways in which race exists as a social, if not biological, fact. As Robyn Weigman writes in her review of the book, "What use is it to say that identity makes no sense without engaging how and why identity has been mobilized in the first place?" (433).
Nevertheless, Michaels' book is a valuable intervention that provides a deeper and more nuanced analyses of racism as a phenomenon than one often sees in treatments of America's past. His readings of canonical modernist texts are remarkably unconventional, and there's a daring newness in reading The Great Gatsby in relation to The Clansmen. Unfortunately, the connections to contemporary racial politics he attempts to draw towards the end of the book are underdeveloped and don't hold up to much scrutiny. But as an analysis of a critical historical period and its literature Our America is challenging and compelling.
January 30, 2012
An important book in American literary studies, but a frustrating book. WBM paints his argument in broad strokes, reducing texts to a singular point and dismissing complexity at every turn. I'm glad I've read it, but hope not to have to read it in its entirety again.
Want to read
August 10, 2011Very #rare and #controversial.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews