American Self Research Articles

The formation of American exceptional identities: A three-tier model of the “standard of civilization” in US foreign policy

The dominant structuralist/materialist schema in International Relations accords little importance to the domestic ideational base of the state in its concern to explain the pattern of foreign policy. In contrast, my article, following the tenets of unit-level constructivism, asks how American identity was formed, contested, and manifested through its interaction with two significant others — the European empires and the Native Americans — in the USA’s formative era in order to understand the origins of American liberal internationalism and popular imperialism. I argue that the US identity was constituted in two different ways: as a transformative state against the Westphalian system and as a civilizing force over “barbarian” natives. The two main US foreign policy orientations — the Jeffersonian tradition and the Jacksonian tradition — were produced by these ambivalent American selves. In this context, a hierarchical, tripartite model of the “standard of civilization” in the American security imaginary emerged at the turn of the 19th century: the USA at the top as a revolutionary vanguard in human history; European international society, which should be negotiated and reformed in America’s own image later, in the middle; and the “Rest” at the bottom, which need to be removed or assimilated.

Individualisms and their Discontents: The American Self Versus the French Institution

In France, a new discourse on psychological suffering has developed, one that concerns social malaise and focuses on the values and norms of autonomy. It can be summed up in the dual idea that 1) the individual is overburdened with responsibilities and 2) social ties are weakening to the point of creating a crisis in the sense of community and social obligation. To place this French malaise in perspective, a comparison with the United States is offered on two grounds: 1) whereas the autonomy ideal tends to unify Americans, it divides the French, 2) whereas reference to personality or ‘self’ is a familiar tradition in the United States, Americans find the concept of institution more problematic. The present article shows how problems of mental health, which concern moral and social misfortune as well as illness, have been key issues in a transformation of the Freudian theme of civilization and its discontents into a concern with the pathology of contemporary democratic societies of individualism.

Wisdom (un)heeded : Chinese mothers and American daughters in Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club"

One of the central themes in the writing of second generation Asian Americans is the search for self-definition and individual acceptance in American society. Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club" ( /989) is an attempt to synthesize Asían heritage with American aspirations as it presents a group portrait offour mother-daughter relationships that have to endure and bridge both a generational and cultural gap. Tan creates a contrast by separating the stories of the mothers and their daughters in arder to demonstrate now the mothers palaful experiences and their daughters' mother-dominated childhoods constantly acts upon the present, modifying world-view and cultural sensibility, to dramatize the panorama of a critica! transition in cultura! values. Ultimately, the novel is the articulation of the Asían American's struggle to como to terms with al! the elements of a Chinese background and the relationship with an American self: a struggle that culminates in affirmation.

Sunni-Muslim American Religious Development During Emerging Adulthood

Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in America, with approximately 6 to 7 million Muslims living in America within the past decade. However, there has been little psychological research conducted focusing on the development of the Muslim American self. This inquiry addresses that gap by focusing on how familial religious affiliation during childhood and the everyday environmental activity systems of emerging adulthood impact religious practice and the construction of the religious self among Sunni-Muslim American emerging adults ( N = 63, 18-29 years) via the development of diverse mediational strategies. Utilizing an applied cultural historical activity theory–based analysis, the authors found that participants’ religious development emerged as a diverse and dynamic process developing in relation to the interacting activity systems and sociorelational contexts of emerging adulthood.

Rites of Dissent: Literatures of Enthusiasm and the American Revolution

Rites of Dissent: Literatures of Enthusiasm and the American Revolution John Mac Kilgore (bio) In a recent television appearance on the Fox Business Network’s Follow the Money with Eric Bolling, conservative pundit Ann Coulter compared the slogans of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests to “mob” ideas in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and even Nazi Germany. “It [the protest rhetoric] all comes from the French Revolution,” said Coulter, and thus it represents the “molecular opposite of the beginning of this country, with the American Revolution” (“Coulter”). Coulter testifies to the endurance of a popular historical narrative that juxtaposes the conservative or prudent ideology of the American Revolution and the radical or excessive ideology of the French Revolution. Philosophers and historians, cultural critics and literary scholars, across a wide intellectual spectrum—from Hannah Arendt to Gordon Wood, Antonio Negri to Sacvan Bercovitch—have tended to agree with Coulter on the conservative roots of the American Revolution.1 However one understands its shaping, whether from the vantage point of republicanism or Puritanism, moneyed interests or Lockean liberalism, or some synthesis thereof, the American Revolution certainly was not a movement tending toward radical “mob” ideas, according to most commentators.2 Two arguments for a conservative American Revolution (and its aftermath) that have been influential on American literary scholarship are the Puritan thesis and the Anglicization thesis. Representative of the former is Sacvan Bercovitch’s classic 1975 text, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, which he recently republished. In his new introduction, Bercovitch continues to assert that the American Revolution was, for its ideologues, the political consummation of a sacred mission rooted in longstanding Puritan theories of America’s divine “federal identity” (89). As Bercovitch concisely puts it in Rites of Assent, “The sacred origin was the Puritan migration; [End Page 367] the telos was the Revolution” (38). The false parity between the strict logic of Puritanism and Revolutionary bourgeois society is irrelevant: what matters are “the forms and strategies of cultural continuity” that unify all American political—and literary—projects around the central myth of a “sacred teleology” embodied by the American self (Rites 30; Puritan 136). From Jonathan Edwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Paine to Nathaniel Hawthorne, the narrative of a special, cosmic American self survives through various historical and literary mutations, transforming all political dissent into new strains of cultural consensus about the American mission. When pressed as to the deeper point of this mission, Bercovitch tends to accent the conservative, capitalistic economic values of American liberalism: nationalist exceptionalism translates into “middle-class hegemony” in the making, and the “rhetoric of the millennium” into the “spiritual version of free enterprise” (American xiii; Rites 53).3 Recent eighteenth-century scholarship, however, tells a very different story than Bercovitch, but arguably one no less conservative in its understanding of the American Revolution. Edward Larkin has recently called it the “Anglicization thesis” of American independence (“Nation” 501). This thesis states that, in the cultural and economic fruition of the American colonies, an intensifying identification with and consumption of Englishness—a veritable Anglophilia—led to an eventual crisis: the colonies came to see themselves as central, rather than peripheral, actors in the empire, deserving of the same political rights, certainly, but also warring in defense of true Englishness so as to supplant the declining and corrupted British Empire.4 In Larkin’s view, the Revolutionary War was fought over the constitution of empire, not a desire for discrete and special American nationhood; in this sense, a move away from the Puritan migration back across the Atlantic so to speak, in a cultural continuity of Englishness, resulted paradoxically in a political collision over the distributive hierarchies of power within the British Empire. As Leonard Tennenhouse argues in The Importance of Feeling English (2007), Americans, especially in their literature from 1750 to 1850, saw Americanness as a distinctive culture of Englishness transplanted in North America, part and parcel of a British diaspora in which English-derived cultures forge their own unique version of the English heritage that they continue to adopt subsequent to political independence. This narrative arguably replaces American with English [End Page 368] rites of assent: Americans organize dissent in...

“What mighty transformations!”: Disfigurement and Self-Improvement in Emma May Buckingham's <em>A Self-Made Woman</em>

"What mighty transformations!":Disfigurement and Self-Improvement in Emma May Buckingham's A Self-Made Woman Jaime Osterman Alves In Emma May Buckingham's little-known 1873 novel, A Self-Made Woman; or, Mary Idyl's Trials and Triumphs, a young girl embarks on a program of self-construction common to legions of nineteenth-century American males and familiar to readers inundated, by late century, with textual examples from the popular self-improvement genre.1 As Buckingham notes in her novel's preface, "We often hear the remark:—'He is a self-made man;' but the term is rarely applied to a woman" (9). Historians of self-culture tend to corroborate this view: Daniel Walker Howe's Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln suggests that the nineteenth century witnessed a profusion of texts purporting to teach white American males how to access and fulfill their individual potential, to nurture and grow the perfection God had planted in each of them like a seed, "to make oneself better—mentally, morally, and physically—[and] use one's abilities to proper advantage" (123). Yet as Sylvia D. Hoffert's work on midcentury female self-making sums it up, "the most socially acceptable way" for a woman to improve her station "was to marry well"; men alone were "glorified" for the "pluck and luck [that] brought them economic success and the personal autonomy, social influence, and political power that accompanied it" (35). Nina Baym's study of woman's fiction also bears this out: Although large numbers of nineteenth-century women's novels tell about a young female who "win[s] her own way in the world," a young woman's "'own way' . . . seldom involves more than domestic comfort, a social network, and a companionable husband" (ix). Nevertheless, Buckingham's novel appropriates the self-improvement genre for a female protagonist and is dedicated to female readers who may be "struggling up towards a higher moral and intellectual life," presenting a rare tale of female self-culture and self-construction (9). Athough [End Page 101] Mary begins the novel in despair, "disowned" by her father for pursuing an education and thereby impoverished (29), over the course of nearly a quarter century (from the 1850s to the 1870s) she shapes her own destiny and becomes a wildly popular novelist, wealthy colliery owner, Civil War nurse, proprietor of a school for orphaned children, and happily married mother of two. If Buckingham's novel is striking for the agency and self-realization it affords a female character and female readers, it is additionally remarkable for the fact that its protagonist also begins her narrative as a "sickly, puny" ten-year-old, "dwarfed [and] deformed" in face and limb by a bout of scarlet fever she endured before the novel's start (17, 9).2 Despite the censure of her father, doctors' warnings against brain work for sickly girls, and her own poor health and constant pain, Mary educates herself with scavenged books, becomes a teacher and governess for several young children, and saves her earnings to fund both her own formal education and a set of radical, brutal elective surgeries that lengthen her contracted limbs and correct the facial features distorted by her illness. In keeping with the novel's emphasis on total self-improvement, Mary's inner development—the cultivation of her mind and heart—is reflected in her outward physical transformation: By the end of the novel, she is described as a "noble-hearted" intellectual who is also physically lovely and even "perfect" (342). In this essay I trace the function of Mary's disfigurement in Buckingham's novel to question its centrality to the project of her self-making and to interrogate the meaning of its gradual, somewhat troubling "eradicat[ion]" (9). I am intrigued, on the one hand, by the work of disability studies scholars Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, who argue that disabled figures in literature have long functioned not as representations of real people with real bodies but as "narrative prosthesis," "a metaphoric signifier," and "a crutch on which literary narratives lean for their representative power, disruptive potential, and social critique" (Mitchell 16, 17). Assuming this is...

“Too Little to Count as Looking”: Blackness and the Formation of the White Feminine in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples

LAURA J. SCHROCK University of Mississippi “Too Little to Count as Looking”: Blackness and the Formation of the White Feminine in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples ALMOST WITHOUT EXCEPTION, EUDORA WELTY’S NOVELS AND SHORT stories focus on the struggles of white characters, typically female, in search of selfhood. For this reason, critics tend to explore the appearance of black characters in the fiction, if at all, as instances of Welty’s penchant for “doubling,” an emphasis which often comes at the expense of the significance of the role of a specifically black double.1 Perhaps this tendency helps account for the absence of any sustained treatment of the appearances of black characters in the story cycle The Golden Apples and the fact that crucial black actors and witnesses in these narratives easily escape notice.2 But if these stories dramatize white self-formation, the manifestations of black presences, however marginal in their articulation, must be anything but marginal in import. Mistaking the representation of black characters as extraneous, we fall into a common trap Toni Morrison has cautioned against, the assumption that “the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular ‘Americanness’ that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence” (5). Moving beyond the treatment of black characters in Welty’s work 1 For example, even in an article entitled “Recovering Otherness in The Golden Apples.,” Susan V. Donaldson almost entirely confines her study of pairings to the white characters; although she mentions Virgie Rainey’s “unspoken bond” (506) with the black beggar woman at the conclusion of The Golden Apples collection, she does not elaborate on the particularity of this pairing. 2 Suzanne Marrs provides a partial analysis of black characters in The Golden Apples, but largely confines her study to Delta Wedding, explaining that “Black characters . . . are not so prominent [in The Golden Apples] as they are in Delta Wedding, but they are essential to the book’s thematic development” (702). 96 Laura J. Schrock as merely atmospheric or “decorative”3 allows for an explanation of their active role in constituting her depictions of American selfhood, a process revealed intimately in much of her fiction. In “Sir Rabbit” and “Moon Lake,” which figure early in The Golden Apples, Welty probes the formation of a specifically white feminine consciousness as it works out its identity in the context of racial and sexual stratifications of the American South and thereby highlights the pivotal role blackness plays in the definition of white sexual normativity. In both stories the representative white females participate in the construction and valorization of a specifically American mythic masculinity, that of the aloof and violent white Western expansionist, in order to maintain racial privilege even at the expense of sexual subjugation. The perpetual reification of this white masculine ideal benefits the white female to the extent that it reinstates her privileged status as sexual conquest and, inversely, as potential seducer and conqueror of the dominant figure on the mythic American landscape. The white woman enjoys the cultural capital of proximity to the one who is “both white and male,” and thus finds herself potentially in conflict with the black man who, though black, might take advantage of the cultural capital of maleness.4 Because the black man’s potential for sexual dominance threatens to uproot the lynchpin of the entire system of white privilege, namely the preeminence of race as cultural marker, his masculinity necessitates emphatic suppression. “Sir Rabbit” and “Moon Lake” depict these crucial categories of racial and sexual privilege to be always already trembling on the verge of collapse, as the white feminine consciousness must call forth and encounter the threatening figure of the black male in order to ensure its repression. 3 Morrison remarks on her initial naivete about the presence of African Americans in traditional American literature: “As a reader my assumption had always been that . . . Africans and their descendants were not, in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, theyweredecorative—displaysoftheagilewriter’stechnical expertise” (16). 4 Robyn Wiegman explores how early pseudo-scientific studies contributed to the construction of an anatomical analogy between the black male and white female brains, a comparison which “simultaneously differentiated and...

Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (review)

Reviewed by: Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary Daniel Chaskes Christian Moraru . Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. xii + 428 pp. In Cosmodernism, Christian Moraru launches an ambitious new critical concept aimed at certain ethically charged territories of the post-Cold War cultural topos. Moraru nimbly builds on a weighty corpus of internationalist scholarship, largely from the last forty years, in articulating his vision of a post-Cold War "cultural imaginary" (2). The cosmodern is, simply put, a compassionate understanding of the other and the self based on difference, and on relations that bridge and yet affirm that difference. In his words, "cosmodern logic is fundamentally, systematically, and pointedly relational, turning as it does on self and other's foundational corelationality with respect to one another" (17). Moraru divides the book into five parts. In his introductory first part, he critiques those existing strains of literary scholarship that have thus far reckoned with globalization, that is, cosmopolitanism, global American studies, and comparative fields such as transnationalism and hemispheric studies. The shortcoming of these particular critical movements, according to Moraru, is that they lack a truly dialectical premise. Global American studies, for example, tends to focus on Americans abroad, and as he writes in the prologue, "we cannot 'rely' solely on ourselves to comprehend and achieve our American selves" (4). Moraru's theoretical fluency and the ease with which he moves between texts in articulating the cosmodern is nothing short of virtuosic, if also occasionally overwhelming. He focuses on thinkers like Derrida, Levinas, and Jean-Luc Nancy, or those who have wrestled with the ethics of selfhood, as cosmodernism is in large measure an "ethical imperative" (5). Moraru persuasively argues the importance of establishing relations with the other to build a community of difference, in contrast to the competing late-global phenomenon of relations built on consumerist homogeny. He organizes the remainder of the book around four modes of cosmodern relation: language, naming, translation, and embodiment, and supports each of these modalities with an illuminating set of readings. Moraru begins with the "linguistic imaginary" and identifies cosmodern texts in which a heteroglossic English language resolves conflicts of American identity. In a notable reading of Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker, Moraru finds it is only through the nonnative other's adaptations of language that one is able to situate oneself in one's community. Moraru returns to Lee in his second chapter, where he investigates the onomastic for signs of cultural exchange and gives his most assured reading: that of Lee's A Gesture Life. In that novel [End Page 159] the Japanese immigrant Franklin Hata must construct himself in the space between a name he has left to his traumatic past and the anglicized ur-American name he has taken in his adopted home. In parts three and four, Moraru turns to translation and reading. He calls translation an act that can be deeply cosmodern, for in cosmodernism, the point "is contrast itself, more exactly the unwonted with-ness it bears, its relational undertow." Though inevitably burdened with shortcomings, translation is a foundation of relations across cultures: "Since relationality is the keystone of the cosmodern and translation is a relational form, translation scenes and, with them, an entire translational way of seeing the world take up a central position in the cultural projections of cosmodernism." Moraru reads Nicole Mones and Suki Kim, paying particular attention for the "cosmodern shift in the history of translation" (158). The focus on the reasoning behind the use of 1989 as a historical pivot is welcomed, given that such reasoning is somewhat overlooked in the first few chapters. In these texts, concludes Moraru, the translator is herself translated, remade, renegotiated. While late globalization yields flattening and seamlessness, the translator discovers that which remains different and particular. Something similar happens to the reader of the cosmodern novel: though faced with fewer obstacles than the translator, the reader gains an intimacy with foreign peoples and places, an experience that lets the reader construct his or her own epistemic frames: "Other-reading reaches beyond the informative; it is formative" (204-5). Like naming...

The artist as critic, style as ethics: Amis's American stylists and Self's stylisation

The paper examines the multiple voices and blended registers with which John Self is endowed in Money, in light of two facets of Amis's literary journalism – his critical engagements with the works of notable American authors, and his pronouncements on the ethical agency of style. Focusing initially on the avowed influence of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, the paper demonstrates how Amis's more equivocal reception of John Updike's fiction in particular, may be read in similar terms; as such, Amis's discussion of Updike's art offers a productive lens through which to view the moral discourses at work in Money. Rather than interpret Self's stylised narrative excursions in terms of ‘doubling’ and/or authorial intrusion, the paper argues for the subtle interlacing of a plethora of discourses. Blind excess and nuanced perspicacity thus co-exist, and seem to emanate from a subject whose style we might question in both senses. The breach between perceptions and actions becomes artificially bridged by literary means; means that nevertheless pose ethical questions about the culture depicted in Money.

What Puritan Guarantee?

In The Puritan Origins of American Self Sacvan Bercovitch claims American Puritans believed God had made a long promised summons to them, irreversible as was irresistible, to erect New Jerusalem in (97). Eventually, their speculations about millennial site [of New Jerusalem] shifted from New England to, vaguely, America itself (xviii). This divine irreversible geographic guarantee had extraordinary implications. It meant the idea of America ... assured settlers of success.... The American Puritan self was a garden enclosed from threat even of secular failure (101). Over centuries, that Puritan guarantee evolved into a nation's divine right to expand (xvii). Cotton Mather's writings, main focus of Puritan Origins, are ideal for explicating this American Puritan guarantee because, according to Bercovitch, Mather is a come to life (68). Historians reviewed Puritan Origins enthusiastically when came out in 1975. But by time arrived at graduate school twelve years later, enthusiasm had faded. Historians had grown dubious about an American self and about New England as foundation of American history. Puritan specialists became more interested in connections between American and English Puritanism than differences. Perhaps most important, Dwight Bozeman argued persuasively intentionally world-changing Puritan errand into wilderness, millennial or otherwise, was an artifact of mid-twentieth-century scholarship (Guru). Before read Puritan Origins in graduate school, understood, as still do, New Englanders assumed no guarantee of success. God summoned New England as he had summoned ancient Israel, conditionally on holiness of region's inhabitants. As John Winthrop in A Modell of Christian Charitie in 1630 warned, if our heartes shall turne away, soe wee will not obey [God] ... wee shall surely perishe out of good land (48). The conditionality of God's relationship with New England was repeated countless times afterwards, in tones ranging from mild optimism to severe anxiety, not only by individual ministers but by ministers and laity speaking collectively. (1) Millennialism did not alter conditionality. By middle of 1630s, some New Englanders started to believe their pure churches foreshadowed millennium (Winship, Making 61-62). Puritan Origins' many quotations linking New England and millennium express no more than this foreshadowing; they could be piled up endlessly without ever conveying anything about guaranteed success or an American New Jerusalem* The prominent minister John Cotton, for example, served as a very enthusiastic emigrant around 1635 when he wrote to a friend in Holland the order of churches and commonwealth ... brought into his mind new heaven and new earth (C. Mather, Magnalia 1: 325). But Cotton emphasized New England churches needed much more holiness to participate in millennium and there was no certainty of them achieving it. The closest he came to Bercovitch's irreversible Puritan guarantee was I hope Lord will bring us to it (Churches 16, 20-22). Cotton identified New Jerusalem not with America but with coming church of those Jews who were to convert to Christianity as millennium approached (Way 10). Cotton Mather, John Cotton's grandson, was no less representative in his speculation about New England (1702) in Magnalia Christi Americana. There he suggested Christ had intended New England to be a pattern to his other churches, worried this role was finished, and asked whether Plantation may not, soon after this, come to nothing (1: 27). Mather claimed New Jerusalem would hover not over America but over earthly Jerusalem (Smolinski 375-77). Both ministers knew Israel, God's church, did not necessarily need a permanent New England Israel in order to realize prophecies in which New England appeared to play a role. …

Eros, Thanatos: Amsterdam in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

This article compares a recent American fiction set in Amsterdam (David Liss’s The Coffee Trader, 2003) with several other Anglophone fictions set in the same city to show how several centuries of literary heterostereotypes of Amsterdam have influenced American ideas on the city in literature. Foreign spaces in fiction almost inevitably draw American projections of the American self that cannot be recognized at home, yet Amsterdam’s particular nexus of projection is perhaps one of the most striking and underexamined, with roots reaching back to the founding mythos of America as Pilgrims’ last stop in Europe and extending to today’s often negative projections of libertinism contrasted with traditional American-style Puritanism. How do the spaces of Amsterdam in a highly detailed work like Liss’s allow a range of issues pertinent to contemporary American society to play themselves out on an “othered” stage? Contemporary questioning of capitalism, sexual and ethical mores, and Americans’ relationship with death are highlighted in this space safely outside the American self, and which thus provides a more comfortable locus for their analysis and narrative development.

The Cosmopolitan Origins of the American Self

The Cosmopolitan Origins of the American Self

Religious Exceptionalism and American Literary History: The Puritan Origins of the American Self in 2012

Religious Exceptionalism and American Literary History: The Puritan Origins of the American Self in 2012

Shelf Life

Shelf Life Matthew P. Brown (bio) Leave your screen for a moment, please. If you would, walk over or bike over or bus over to the university or college library you most frequent. Once there, do your best with the windowlessness and the fluorescent lighting, the aged carpeting and bad art, the—let’s face it—smell. And do enjoy the buzz of human labor, the student workers and sunny staff, this stunning and sometimes curmudgeonly reservoir of good will and deep knowledge, this collective, this workshop, this hive. Make your way to the Library of Congress catalogue system’s F 7 area within the, I hope, open stacks. (Stop checking your gadget!) Chances are—insofar as you are reading this article and this symposium—you know where the F 7 section is. If the library had an adequate budget in the mid-1970s, go straight to F 7 .B48. There it is. The first edition of The Puritan Origins of the American Self. Pull it down from the shelf. Leaf through it. I’m serious. Read no further until you’ve done that. Are you back? Great! And thank you! It was nice, wasn’t it, getting away from the screen? Anyway, you may have found, in the first edition, an errata sheet. Yale University Press issued Puritan Origins with three errors that it corrected with a tipped-in leaf found, in my library’s copy, loudly dressing the table of contents page. But good on Yale for alerting early readers of Bercovitch to these errors, which the press corrected in all later printings, including of course the second edition the symposium is now honoring.1 What were the errata? One added nineteen words to page 77, another requested quotation marks be removed from page 126, and the third goes like this: “On page 156, the word personal in line 33 should not be italicized.” In the early modern period the use of italics and capitals for emphasis was called “pointing.” I would like to use the errata sheet’s concern for pointing and the term personal as an occasion to explore certain larger meanings of Puritan Origins. I will begin by describing ways that Puritan [End Page 421] Origins valuably prophesies, as it were, paradigms of inquiry following in its wake, not least the field of book studies, which, in part, investigates the kinds of textual variants displayed on the errata sheet. Next, I summarize the monograph’s argument in terms of content, but also with an eye to method, lighting on a signal, audacious achievement, for Bercovitch, of Cotton Mather’s life writing and the ideology it seeds: that it converts rhetoric into fact. Then, I will return to the question of pointing and variants, noting how early modern writers, contemporary readers, and Bercovitch himself address the importance of typography to meaning. However we construe the denial of history that constitutes the American rhetoric of personhood in Bercovitch’s argument, I will suggest that rhetoric itself has a material history, communicated through the physicality of books. The errata sheet, variants between copies and between editions, the textual afterlife of Puritan Origins itself—all open out on to a cavil I have with Bercovitch’s grander designs and a case I make for the history of the book. The field of book studies awakens us to error, surprise, and contingency in the historical record, in contrast to a seamlessness in Bercovitch’s argument that tends to settle meaning in advance. Books live volatile, animate lives on the shelves of our cultural repositories. They tell stories in their material composition that can unsettle the stories they tell in words. Over the last forty years, Sacvan Bercovitch’s influence on the study of American letters is perhaps unparalleled—and rightly so. His posts at Columbia and Harvard; his searching monographs such as The Office of the Scarlet Letter and Rites of Assent; his editorship of the Cambridge History of American Literature, with, to name just one example, the extraordinary set of essays in volume 1—all have redefined our corner of humanities criticism and research. It is hard for them not to loom over the revisiting of his early work...

Response to Jonathan Freedman

Jonathan Freedman's American and Ethnic Studies Have a Problem; or, When Is an Ethnic Not an Ethnic, and What Should We Do about It? highlights the degree which American studies has fallen outside the purview of American studies and ethnic studies. The author attributes this marginalization in part a disciplinary rigidity that dogmatically delineates white from non-white. As Freedman avers, It is one thing think about Jewishness-as-whiteness in the context of the black-white binary that structures the historical constitution of the United States, but it is another to think about Jewishness in the context of Asian American or Latino or even Native American identities and experiences. At stake in Freedman's polemic is another way of seeing Jewishness outside established racial scripts of and privilege. Such a recuperative proposal--which re-members the contested ethnoreligious registers of American selfhood--revises the role of such affiliations in the making of American studies, engages other ethnic studies fields of inquiry, and expands the purview of American studies by way of transnationalism, globalization, and diaspora. In so doing, Freedman charts an evocative course for a comparative American/ethnic studies, wherein identities are relationally contextualized, subjectivities are presently fluid, and notions of US citizenship shift. To be sure, the essay's title explicitly calls forth an intersectional framework. Freedman's so-named Jewish Problem, which speaks the current state of American studies and ethnic studies affairs, accesses a turn-of-the-twentieth-century anxiety about Anglo-Saxon and heteronormative selfhood that was matched by the Immigrant Problem, the Chinese Problem, the Negro Problem, and the Woman Question. Such dilemmas substantiate Freedman's call for the evaluation of relations between and other forms of ethnic belonging and bring light connective national stories of anti-Semitism, nativism, racism, and sexism. This intersectional American studies/ethnic studies approach eschews essentialism in favor of complexity, privileges dialogues over monologues, and imaginatively restages the American experience by way of inter- and intra-ethnic movements. The invisibility afforded Americans--who, as Freedman maintains, are nonethnic ethnics--is most familiar those in Asian American studies. Born out of late-1960s student strikes and a Civil Rights Movement concerned with self-determinism, human rights, and representational politics, Asian American studies suffers from an analogous crisis. In particular, Asian Americans (like their counterparts) are de facto model minorities who achieve probationary whiteness by way of hard work, perseverance, and traditional family values. …

‘Just to make sure people know I was born here’: Muslim women constructing American selves

The scene for this paper is set in the USA immediately post-9/11 when the meaning of nation shifted dramatically, in turn shaping Muslim American identity. I examine Muslim American undergraduate women's performance of immigrant, gendered, youthful, Muslim and American identities. The findings are framed within symbolic interactionist, Foucauldian and cultural production frameworks, and I use ethnographic vignettes gathered during research in Washington, DC from 2002 to 2003 to illustrate the discursive and performative construction of an imagined American community by Muslim Americans and majority Americans respectively. Muslim American youth both experience and conduct acts of ‘everyday nationalism’ and construct Muslim American citizenship, deploying and covering racial, cultural, religious and immigrant attributes contextually. Facets of identity such as birth, transnational ties, racial and facial features, cultural practices, types and degrees of religiosity, all come into play in a battle for survival that is at once personal, political, social and symbolic.

The American self and the long march to legal equality

Legally, women, Native Americans, and African-Americans were defined by the American Constitution as inferior. The pragmatists gradually showed that all selves are equal. These ideas helped the minorities to attain nearly full legal status. But economic status is going in the other direction, toward inequality. It threatens to overcome the hard-won legal equality and make it meaningless.

The Souls of Henry Adams: Du Boisian Aspects of The Education

The Souls of Henry Adams: Du Boisian Aspects of The Education Emily Donaldson Field (bio) It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness. . . . One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk With such standards, the Bostonian could not but develop a double nature. Life was a double thing. . . . The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran through life, and made the division between its perplexing, warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites. . . . for him, life was double. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams In 1907 Henry Adams privately circulated a hundred copies of his newly completed autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, a literary effort that would not become widely available until its posthumous publication in 1918, whereupon it promptly won a Pulitzer Prize. Adams begins his sprawling work with a meditation on the "double nature" of his young life, a doubleness he views as constitutive of his alienation from contemporary society (14). Along with his famous skepticism, Adams's dual stance of both insider and outsider, privileged and marginalized, has made him, in the words of John Carlos Rowe, "one of the archetypes of modernist selfhood" (Literary 19). But I will argue that we should read Adams's insistence on his divided self and his theme of unity and multiplicity within the context of turn-of-the-century concerns about the stability of racial, ethnic, and class hierarchies. In so doing, we should reconsider his famous declarations of doubleness through the lens of a contemporaneous text that may have [End Page 61] served as their unacknowledged, and perhaps unlikely, source: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois's 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. Adams's self-definition as essentially double functions as a claim that oppression and marginality in the U.S. belong not solely to African Americans but also to the allegedly beleaguered and declining white intellectual aristocracy. 1 Hardly the first or last white author to identify with the oppressed, Adams describes his own psychological state and social status in terms that echo and parody Du Bois's notion of double-consciousness, attempting through mocking mimicry to contain and purge the threat posed by Du Bois's anti-racist, anti-imperialist politics and his suggestion of African Americans as a model of national selfhood. The later chapters of The Education reveal an Adams concerned with saving his race from the swarming multiplicity of new immigrants, which he attempts to do by identifying himself with the quintessential American victims, African Americans, thereby planting his flag of relevancy in the fertile territory of the new century. There is no incontrovertible evidence that Adams read Du Bois's book, let alone that he was influenced by it or referred directly to it. I will make the case here, however, that sufficient contextual and textual evidence exists at least to entertain the notion of such a relationship. Whether or not we can establish with certainty that Adams read and drew from Du Bois, the unconventional pairing of these texts allows us to see two contemporaries with vastly different interests struggling to identify themselves in a changing world, which they each do by appropriating the available discourses about the self in ways that rewrite race and class. Read with Du Bois in mind, Adams's explicit assertion of his own exotic doubleness and resemblance to African Americans become a commentary on the exigencies of white American selfhood in the period. Drawing from Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates writes in a 1989 introduction to The Souls of Black Folk that Du Bois's book has served as the "silent second text" of many African American writers' works (xvii). In addition to its well-known position vis-à-vis African American letters, The Souls of Black Folk may function as the "silent second text" of The Education of Henry Adams. Henry Adams's and W. E. B. Du Bois's stays at Harvard...

Refashioning Indigenous Identities and Making the American Self: Native American Voices from Haskell and Yale

Joel Pfister. The Yale Indian: The Education of Henry Roe Cloud. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. xviii + 259 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, and index. $22.95. Myriam Vuckovic. Voices from Haskell: Students between Two Worlds, 1884-1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. ix + 330 pp. Illustra- tions, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. In the late nineteenth century, the federal government took on an ambitious and misguided plan to educate American children in large off-reservation boarding schools in order to transform their indigenous tribal identities into American identities shaped by white, Anglo-Saxon Christian values and concepts of work, personhood, and nation. Among these institutions, Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas (established in 1884) was at the forefront of these transformative efforts, reflecting the missionary-like zeal of the federal government to solve its perceived Indian Problem by converting as many young Indians as possible to the values of individualism, industry, and prog- ress that characterized late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of the ideal American citizenry. Halfway across the country, in New Haven, Connecticut, students (mostly white) at Yale were learning some of the same lessons about American selfhood during this period, and the higher education they received focused as much on the creation and maintenance of their elite class status and its concomitant cultural capital as it did on conveying a clas- sical education or professional skills. Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) student, Henry Roe Cloud, who was born the year that Haskell was established, became the first full-blood American person to receive an undergraduate (1910) and graduate (1914) degree from Yale. 1 Roe Cloud's groundbreaking solitary journey as a privileged Yalie may, at first glance, appear to be far from the shared experiences of younger boarding-school students at Haskell. However, authors Joel Pfister (The Yale Indian) and Myriam Vuckovic (Voices from Haskell) show us that, at both Yale and Haskell, indigenous identities and

Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and African American Literature

This article provides a series of close readings of Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father. It places the narrative within the history of African American literature and rhetoric and argues that Obama uses the text to create a life story that resonates with central concepts of African American selfhood and black male identity, including double consciousness, invisibility, and black nationalism. The article reads Dreams from My Father as an attempt to arrive at a state of “functional Blackness,” which moves away from questions of racial authenticity and identity politics but recognizes the narrative powers of African American literature to shape a convincing and appealing black self.