Introduction: The Liberal Multicultural Paradox and Aesthetics of Internal Distantiation

Abstract

Since the civil rights and other new social movements of the mid-to late twentieth century, modes of US citizenship1 have shifted to incorporate a politicized understanding of social identities. From this shift emerged what has come to be known as a politics of multicultur-alism. Though in academia there has been a push to move “beyond” the logic of multicultural identity politics—to global, cosmopolitan, or postnational readings—our everyday understandings of American citizenship remain steeped in a nationally oriented politics of identity.2 This politics follows a logic of difference in sameness. It is simultaneously multiculturalist and liberal individualist, as these ideologies have been defined by the social and political history of the United States. Reconstituting Americans makes the case that we should stay with the questions raised by multiculturalism, that such questions were never adequately answered, and that shifting the framework away from the national does not so much answer outstanding questions and paradoxes as it allows us to cover over them in the push to escape their irritating persistence in every aspect of US cultural and political life. This book looks at literary representations of post-new social movement US citizenship that reveal to their readers the inherent contradictions of a liberal multicultural ideology that celebrates the value of “difference” and “recognition” while simultaneously limiting the ways in which persons marked as socially “different” can be represented and addressed as citizens.3