National Fantasy Research Articles

In the Womb of the Global Economy: Anak and the Construction of Transnational Imaginaries

This article intervenes into the connections between Philippine cinema's construction of transnational imaginaries and the post-Marcos era when neoliberal policies such as the export of feminized labor to developed countries by so-called “third world” countries like the Philippines have produced not only cultural values that are attuned to the culture of diasporic labor but also economic value in the form of spectatorship constantly mined by capital for its continued stability. To illustrate these connections, this study focuses on the discourses of narrative imperialism, national fantasy, and infantilized citizenship as ideological tropes that resolve the film's representation of prescribed feminine virtue, anxiety, melancholy, and maternal sacrifice. These discourses are constitutive of an invaginated visual economy that derives its conditions of possibility from the feminization of migrant labor in global capitalism. The invaginated visual economy inserts itself in the womb of the global economy through the production of transnational imaginaries, which in turn contradict not only the actual experience of warm-body export but also the worldwide solidarity movement among overseas Filipino workers who, beyond cinematic mediation, are beginning to fight back.

Implicational Spectatorship: Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke

Implicational Spectatorship:Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke Yuka Kanno (bio) What does it mean to have evidence of someone's sexual activities? of their sexuality? How can one even begin the assumption of that kind of knowledge except through the structures of phantasmatic projection? —Irit Rogoff, "Gossip as Testimony: A Postmodern Signature" The joke is the textual instance, which often seems most coercive in its production of reading effects. —Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis To fans of the now classic Japanese cinema of the late 1940s through the 1960s, the name of Hara Setsuko is always evoked with a certain nostalgia. For the younger generation who discovered the "good old Japan" of her postwar films, she is a privileged object of nostalgia, a locus of an imaginary longing for something they never experienced. The myth of this actress as "a goddess of postwar democracy" and "an ideal daughter of the middle class family" is also associated with the name Noriko, given to three separate yet parallel characters Hara plays in the films of Ozu Yasujirō: Late Spring (1949, Banshun), Early Summer (1951, Bakushū), and Tokyo Story (1953, Tōkyō [End Page 287] monogatari). These three films, along with Hara's Garbo-esque disappearance, cemented her image as the timeless and quintessential Ozu actress in Japan's national fantasy. Like many Ozuphiles, I have my own initiation tale. As a latecomer to Tokyo film culture, I watched this trilogy for the first time in the early nineties at Ginza's Namikiza theater.1 That tiny run-down theater, a now-destroyed landmark of Japanese cinema art houses, also introduced me to Naruse Mikio, nourishing my pleasure and imaginary nostalgia. Like many others, I was struck by Hara Setsuko, not so much by her legendary beauty as with what I can only now call a "queer" feeling, and the onscreen manner in which she evoked a seemingly conservative image of femininity. There was something odd, uncanny, and extravagant about the actress: the way she refused to marry, then suddenly changed her mind, and the extremely intimate manner in which she touched other women's bodies. The next two films of the Noriko trilogy continued to awaken the same feelings. Only now and retrospectively can I make sense of such an "illegitimate" sentiment that I strongly felt but was unable to then form into meaning. This essay explores the possibility of queer spectatorship by "implication," in which I take up the Noriko trilogy as an intersection of film, actress, and audience. By implication, I want to address the historicity of the present viewer, whose specificity is no less important than that of the past text. Instead of recreating the unified, closed, past world of the text and the spectator of the time, I insert my "now" with its desire to read the past film. My arguments for bridging the historical and temporal gap between the Noriko texts and the present condition are indebted to the notion of renrui (implication) proposed by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, who calls up the responsibility of those who "have not stolen land from others, but who live on stolen land."2 Therefore, what I do here is reconstitute the queerness of the past film text and the Noriko character in the present. Rather than confining the meanings of the past text to its contemporaneous spectator, it is my hope to open it up to the present spectator, thus making the former relevant to the latter. The term "implication" signals such a temporal and historical specificity of reading. Conversely, I am interested in the ways in which the rereading of the Noriko text helps present-day spectators to imagine a past queer spectatorship. Within film studies, the disciplinary master narrative of the 1980s "paradigm shift" around spectatorship theory is typically cast as a move from institutional theories (both apparatus and textual) to historical or empirical [End Page 288] studies of reception.3 Not only are the text and the viewer severed within this narrative, but the spectator is also divided into the conceptual and real. Following the lead of Judith Mayne, I use the term "spectator" to signify the point of tension between the cinematic...

Travelling Ideas of (the British) Empire: Translating the Caribbean World for the Eighteenth-Century German Stage

This essay discusses Cumberland's 1771 play The West Indian and two of its German translations, by Bode (1772) and Kotzebue (1815). Existing research on the relationship between foreign colonial settings and German national fantasies helps demonstrate that bringing the Caribbean world onto the German stage had multiple effects that include but are not limited to cultivating the national imagination. Translating the global shaped the local settings, the self-understanding, and self-image of the German cities where the play was published or to be performed. Translation intersected with and fostered the development of particular local and sentimental communities. In turn, Kotzebue's play in particular can help to understand the national and global effects of popular aesthetic paradigms that emerged around 1800.

Inside the Dream of the Warfare State: Mass and Massive Fantasies in Don DeLillo's Underworld

ABSTRACT This essay explores the question of “realness” in Don DeLillo's Underworld, realness in unofficial, individual fantasies and in national fantasies that shape the idea of the nation in the latter half of the twentieth century. The essay focuses on reality as an ideological fantasy-construction, a sense of the sublime deriving from all-powerful military technology and economic and racial contradictions in marginal areas of the nation. This study intends a critique of the ideological workings of the warfare state in Underworld through an investigation into the characters' psychological mechanisms as they fluctuate between anxiety about, and fascination with, destructive technology.

Hawthorne’s Transnational Coup : Double-Crossing the Na(rra)tion

Hawthorne’s Transnational Coup: Double-Crossing the Na(rra)tion John Dolis (bio) for Ken Dauber The idea of “America,” its “National Fantasy,” as Lauren Berlant defines it (4–5), reveals a complex network of discursive practices, a network that represses, by definition, the diachronic insofar as it represents America as something necessary, mythic, ideal, utopian—a phantasy, indeed. Puritanism installs the commonplace—still not uncommon today: America is not a common place; it is, instead, a sacred stead, the Homestead in the Sky. Transcendentalism further elaborates the ideological dimensions of this mise-en-scène: America is natural, belongs to nature itself—“nature’s nation,” nature’s very own.1 With this “turn” of events, Jacksonian democracy, taking its own time, cements the final piece of Uncle Sam in place: cross-dressed in Mother Nature’s skirt, natura naturans, America henceforth transforms, transcends itself: e pluribus unum: a plural One, integral, complete, a whole unto itself.2 America invites this mix of metaphors, the symptoms con-fused. It (always already) arrives on time; it needn’t bide its time; its history and destiny are manifest, (re)cite the same event—timely yet timeless at once. Thus progress mistakes itself, takes itself for granted: here, to call upon Kant, time falls from its hinges. Sublation knows its whereabouts. Simultaneously, “America” knows nothing of borders. It borders the sublime. Self-contained, yet uncontained, it is, by definition, exceptional, the exception to geography and politics. Bound by possibility alone, what borders it naturally belongs to it (including the Oregon Territory). It’s not by chance Thoreau remarks that “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. . . . That way the nation is moving, [End Page 35] and I may say that mankind progresses from east to west” (“Walking” 106). Thus manifest destiny rewrites the nation’s primal scene: “England” is always already repressed—its original intercourse with “America” erased—or, what politically amounts to the same, hated, rejected, the abject as such. In boundary disputes, England’s claims are fraudulent—indeed, unnatural. Hence, the development of transcendentalism, as Paul Giles observes, “should be seen as interwoven systematically with the belligerent anglophobia of this era” (“Transnationalism” 66). Emersonian idealism stages the transcendental “spatiality” of this event: the national imaginary resembles nothing if not a circle whose center, like Augustine’s God, is everywhere, its circumference nowhere (65). Such discourse is itself, of course, sublime. Thoreau, in turn, will reinvent the figure that defines America’s extent: “The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun” (“Walking” 105). All progress goes west; regression goes east: “We go eastward to realize history . . . , retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions” (106). Make no mistake, repression plays the principal role in this scenario: forgetting on purpose. Indeed, as Sam W. Haynes observes, anglophobia was shared by millions of Americans in the 1840s (117).3 In the wake of such sentiment, “America” is nothing if not current, its future open, unbounded, sublime. It’s not by accident that nature, not culture, is at work: “a subtle magnetism in Nature” seduces Thoreau toward the west (“Walking” 104). Indeed, throughout the oeuvre, there is an undercurrent of hostility toward “England”—as though England were, itself, somehow unnatural, a perversion. “America,” conversely, takes (its) place naturally. It’s not “the annals of the country” that determine the national imaginary, but rather “the natural facts” themselves, the “perennials, which are ever without date” (Thoreau, Week 219). Conflating nature and nation, Thoreau’s narrative sublimates all politics; it configures nation and narration in a single gesture that naturally affiliates both, as Giles suggests, as though “the American relation to the land were a purely natural phenomenon and the English claims merely distant and legalistic [End Page 36] . . . . In...

Once More with Feeling

national sentimentality project, following The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991) and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997). Historically speaking, how ever, it is the second, covering the mid-nineteenth century through the 1980s. It is also the most satisfy ingly coherent of the series. The Anatomy of National Fantasy was brilliant but claustrophobic (can we really still be talking about Hawthorne?), whereas The Queen of America was the reverse, brilliant but scattered; it often read more like a collection of individually marvelous essays than a book (as indeed, its subtitle signaled). The Female Complaint is perfectly scaled, a series of interlocking case studies that together build a breathtaking account of U.S. women's culture. The book's cohesion is especially impressive considering that Ber lant began it in the late 1980s and published versions of many of the chapters as essays over the past fif teen or so years. Her archive and argument revisit that period's of ten heated discussions of the

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura (review)

Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura. By Leonora Sansay. Edited by Michael Drexler. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2007. Pp. 319. Paper, $19.95.)Reviewed by Christopher IanniniIn this splendid edition, Michael Drexler republishes two strange and important narratives by the Philadelphia-based author Leonora Sansay. The first, Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, recounts the experiences of two young American sisters caught in the turmoil of revolutionary Saint Domingue, where they have gone to live with the eldest sister's French creole husband. The second, Laura, concerns the secret marriage of a beautiful young orphan to a gallant medical student, who dies in a duel to defend his wife's honor. With its meticulous editing, clear and insightful introduction, and invaluable appendices, this new edition will go a long way toward placing these texts in the prominent light they deserve.Indeed, while both narratives deserve far more scholarly attention than they yet have received, the relative neglect of Secret History, in particular, in the two centuries since its publication, is as worthy of remark as the text itself. Considered solely for its subject matter, this should already have become an indispensable text for historians and literary scholars alike. Based on Sansay's first-hand observation of the Haitian Revolution in its turbulent final phase, Secret History provides a sustained and nuanced literary representation of the sole successful slave rebellion in the colonial Americas. While the specters of race slavery and warfare stalk the edges of a number of early American novels, from Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond and Arthur Mervyn to Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, they inhabit the vivid center of Sansay's narrative. If its subject matter was not in itself a sufficient source of interest, both in its own day and in ours, the notoriety of its main addressee might have made it a sensation, for this epistolary narrative is addressed to the author's reputed lover Aaron Burr - dueler, libertine, seditious conspirator, and, by the time the novel was published, vortex of early national fantasy and fear.As Drexler's introduction makes plain, however, these are only the most obvious of the narrative's rewards. Secret History is also a fascinating formal creation. It moves fluently between genres as varied as travelogue, epistolary narrative, sentimental and gothic novel, and political reportage, and it shifts with disconcerting ease between a decadent domestic realm of balls and erotic intrigues in a besieged Cap Francais and the violent warfare of revolution itself. As Colin Dayan first observed, one of the signal achievements of the narrative is to make visible the tight interconnectedness within a Caribbean slave society between social and sexual rivalry in the so-called domestic sphere and the more visible and public conflict for military and political control Haiti, History, and the Gods, Berkeley, CA, 1995). …

Facing Traumatizing Texts: Reading Nahum's Nationalistic Rage

The biblical book of Nahum may be the last book to which one would turn in time of national crisis due to a foreign attack. When read as a vengeance fantasy resulting from national trauma, however, facing Nahum's dire words against his enemy might provide readers with tools for self-reflection when national fantasies of vengeance arise in our own context.

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature by Arne Koch

MLR, 103.2, 2oo8 587 Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity inNine teenth-CenturyGerman Literature. By ARNE KOCH. (North American Studies inNineteenth-Century German Literature, 39) Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. 2oo6. 266 pp. C3I; ?47.40; $52.95. ISBN 978-3-039Io-939-5. While the combined impacts of globalization, postcolonial migration, and European unification redefine the relationship between regions and nation in transnational con texts in the twenty-firstcentury,Germany's struggle fornational unification during thenineteenth century faced thecombined obstacles of regional cultural diversity and political fragmentation. Studying the tensions between regional and national identity inGerman Realist literature of themid to latenineteenth century,Arne Koch seeks to unravel the seeming paradox thatprominent authors such as Berthold Auerbach, Fritz Reuter, Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane, Gottfried Keller, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach can be viewed (and have been seen) aswriters of regional literaturewhile still contributing in theirdifferentways to the discourse on German (or Swiss orAustrian) national identity.Starting from the observation 'that regional belonging as constructed via a geographic consciousness often encompasses a sense of national identity aswell' (p. 23), Koch argues convincingly against readings which see region and nation asmutually exclusive or posit a linear development from regionalism to nationalism in nineteenth-century German literature. Exploring the complex interplay between regional and national affiliations and identities inRealist writing, Koch instead highlights the literaryrepresentation of 'simultaneous harmony and contrast' between 'region' and 'center' (p. 25) and the writers' contributions to the emergence of aGerman concept of national identitywhich includes an acknowledge ment of regional diversity. Inmost of these authors he notes a 'sense of thepossibility and even a need tomaintain regional traditions and communities for a coexistence of regional identitieswithin a German nation' as well as 'a critical position vis-a-vis authoritative and homogenizing structures' (p. i68). Auerbach's village tales (Schwarzwdlder Dorfgeschichten, I842) provide Koch with his earliest example. Placed 'in-betweennation and region', novellas such as 'Befehler les' and 'Der Lauterbacher' are shown to 'question' both 'authenticated region and the conscientious superregion' (p. 30), critiquing thepressures ofuniformity inunity and validating 'particularitywithin totality' (p. 43).With reference toHomi Bhabha's con cept of 'DissemiNation', Koch also reads Storm's novellas set inSchleswig-Holstein, such asDer Schimmelreiter (i 888), as representations of 'region broadly as an inclusive and exclusive locality that thrives on a paradox of existing ties to and tensions with theworld outside the region' (p. 57), including Denmark and Prussia. Marking the significance of both regional and national history inRealist fiction,Storm's novella Zur Chronik vonGrieshuus (i 884/85) is thengiven a comparative readingwith Raabe's satirical novella Die Gdnse von Buitzow (i866), untypically set inMecklenburg and therefore said to complement 'the intraregional perspectives of Storm, Reuter, and Fontane' (p. 94). Unsurprisingly, this is one of the least convincing chapters, since this text is clearly not representative of theway inwhich Raabe promotes his liberal ideas of nationhood in stories setmostly inLower Saxony between the Weser river, theHarz mountains, and the local capital of Braunschweig. Raabe's historical novel Das Odfeld, one of his fictional accounts of the interaction between liberalism and nationalism in the nineteenth century, such as Gutmanns Reisen, or one of his social novels, such asMeister Autor, would have allowed foramore appropriate discussion ofRaabe in the context of thismonograph. More problematic than this unfortunate choice of text, however, isKoch's con tinued reliance on binary oppositions between 'center' and 'margins' and between authors who are thought to be 'writingon the inside' and others who are believed to be 'writingon the outside' of the emerging German nation state.Given Schleswig 588 Reviews Holstein's political history,Storm may just be said tobewriting 'from thegeographic margins of theGerman-speaking states' (p. 23), but this does notmean thathis sto ries are positioned 'on the fringes' of the 'unifying process' (p. I03); and locating Auerbach's village tales at the 'margins' of 'theGerman territories' (p. 103) isclearly at odds with linguistic, cultural, geographical, and indeed political realities in the nineteenth century.The lack of a 'center of theGerman territories' (p. I03) has long been acknowledged as one of thedefining elements in the interplay between regional and national identity inGermany, and it isat...

"Get Your Map of America": Tempering Dystopia and Learning Topography in The Plot Against America

Ever since Neil Klugman speculated in the opening pages of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) that the drive up to the hills of the Newark suburbs might bring closer to heaven, Philip Roth has made the frustration of longings for utopia of his major themes. (1) Especially since his American trilogy, Roth's critics have been rightly preoccupied with his application of anti-utopian and anti-pastoral thinking to increasingly large swaths of American history, his critique of what Ross Posnock identifies as his characters' drive to exist in mythic yesteryear, creating national fantasy. (2) The American trilogy critiques postwar cast of, as Murray says in I Married Communist (1998), utopianists. These include believers in socialism like Murray's brother Ira, but also non-ideological dreamers like Ira's wife Eve, whose desire for the perfect home needs, according to Roth, a dose of life's (3) Swede Levov's hope for domestic stability in American Pastoral (1997) calls for similar dose. Roth always insists on making messy experience overwhelm any attempt to retreat to an absolving locale: Faunia's dirty mop water and Les's violent mind give the lie to the pure and peaceful image, as The Human Stain (2000) ends, of fisherman alone on lake constantly turning over its water atop an Arcadian mountain in America. (4) But though (as Nathan Zuckerman emphatically concludes in Communist) [t]here are no utopias and (as his wife does in The Counterlife) [t]he pastoral is not your genre, Roth has not developed in his work the seemingly most natural counterlife to utopia, dystopian social order. His turn to the pogroms and pro-Nazi Lindbergh presidency of The Plot Against America (2004) does seem to signal such deployment of the dystopian. (5) But it turns out that dystopia isn't Roth's genre either; some purity is mixed in with the dung. For all the perpetual fear it evinces, The Plot, in its concentration on familial strength and resilient boyhood consciousness, depicts an unexpectedly limited and tempered dystopia, dwelling less on American Nazis and Jewish persecution than on the sentimental idealization of his childhood Newark as an inviolate haven that Roth confessed to in The Facts (1988). (6) I argue here that Roth's neutralizing refusal to grant either utopian or dystopian extreme full sway leads him to newly enriched interest in the simply topographical. The Plot mediates its dark materials of global conspiratorial plotting and race hatred by illuminating child's more mundane and localized acts of plotting--his participatory mapping of his surroundings and his out-of-school education in how to regard the vast nation of which he knows himself to be part but which he cannot fully fathom (101). Following on Roth's well-established interest in illiterates learning to read, young Philip undergoes an initiation into cartographic literacy, term I borrow from historian of geography David Matless, who links it to the modern subject's mature conception of citizenship. (7) Engaging dramatic political extreme of the sort his work has so often scrupulously avoided in depicting the U.S., Roth re-investigates the discursive means by which home links to homeland in the American mind. Dystopian fiction tends to demonstrate the and between utopian and dystopian perspectives, according to Erika Gottlieb's comparison of dystopias from democracies and totalitarian states between 1920 and 1991. [E]ach dystopian society contains within it seeds of utopian dream. (8) Kristan Kumar writes in similar vein that anti-utopia and dystopia are one side of dialogue of the self with individuals who have been indelibly stamped with the utopian temperament. (9) Roth, an inveterate idealizer of the meaning of America but also dogged critic of such idealization, seems to fit this psychological type, Gottlieb's push and pull of opposites correlating loosely with the anti-myth[s] of counterlives so many of his characters construct. …

The (Il)legible Arab Body and the Fantasy of National Democracy

Although it has become quite common to use the term American, one must ask how such a category has emerged historically. What is the relationship between the constitution of this category and the developing field of Arab studies? This article begins to unpack the dense cultural logic of this field. To examine this cultural logic, I move between three discrete textual sites: the debates of the last decade around the demographics of Arab America, US court rulings from the early twentieth century on the relationship between Syrian immigrants and the legal definitions of the term free white persons, and the introductory essay to a recent anthology of Arab fiction. I argue that the category American has been implicated historically in the maintenance of exclusionary practices of US nationalism, even as it has revealed the contradictions of such practices. The rulings in George Dow's 1914 petition for naturalization used what we might call racial visibility to categorize Arab bodies as distinct from an abstract form of citizenship. The courts first ruled that Dow was non-white, before reinscribing him as white. Paradoxically, this inscription was inverted in the 1990s census debates. Advocates for a revision of the US census claimed that Arab bodies had become politically invisible when classified as white, yet all too visible in the national imaginary; Arab Americans should therefore be re-categorized (as Middle Eastern, Near Eastern, or Arab) in order to more securely access the rights and protections guaranteed by national citizenship. In today's post-Patriot Act climate and the seemingly permanent War on Terror, such a strategy is impeded by the state-sanctioned juridical and military practices that continue to inscribe Arabness (and its problematic twin political Islam) as a racialized identity cordoned off from access to these same rights and protections. The introductory essay to Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Arab Fiction suggests ways of productively destabilizing this contradiction through a feminist, diasporic articulation of Arab genealogy. By unpacking this logic, I underscore the critical importance of thinking about how the term literature both sustains and undermines US nationalism. (1) Classifying Arab Citizenship Like other ideological formations, whiteness has emerged from a nexus of social and historical relationships. As scholars like Matthew Frye Jacobson have demonstrated, in the US whiteness has historically emerged as both a theory and a practice of citizenship; as such, it has provided for social invisibility (Whiteness 223-44). Whiteness has allowed for the practice of individual social and economic mobility by offering a theory of the right to own one's body. It has promised a higher social class, a more secure community, and a voice taken more seriously. (2) Classic narratives of passing like James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen's Passing, and William Peter Blatty's farcical Which Way to Mecca, Jack?, among many others, depict how being read as white, unmarked and unremarkable, normal, typical, and therefore excused from the practice of being read, involves an historically-specific struggle to gain access to the dominant national fantasy. Passing, in this sense, is a strategy that reveals the complex disciplinary apparatus that polices the boundaries of whiteness (Mullen 72). One must pass into whiteness, pass as white, and therefore pass as invisible by fading into equivalence. A citizen in this context must paradoxically struggle to be read as unreadable. Given this historical emergence of whiteness in the United States, recent debates about Arabness take on particularly weighted meaning. These debates entail an important inversion of normative reading practices and clarify how US nationalism--the linkage of abstract citizenship and exclusion--is tied to social, political, and economic forces operative both within and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. …

"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building

As cultural theorists privilege global, transnational, and postnational subjectivities, the bloody spectacle of nation-building in Iraq reminds us that the age of nations appears far from its predicted denouement. The official rationale for invading and occupying that antique land—that we Americans have a “Manifest Destiny,” a divine duty, to liberate people from tyranny and thereby extend our own brand of freedom, capitalism, and materialism—marks a further aggrandizement of nineteenth-century national fantasies of power and virtue. Rooted in obstinate conceptions of English and Anglo-Saxon superiority, America’s “millennial role” as a “redeemer nation”—to recall Ernest Lee Tuveson’s Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (1968)—became a cultural axiom in the 1840s as the tangled project of US nation-building coalesced for the first time into a popular dream of empire. The decision to “civilize” the continent, to annex Texas and wrest control of the Southwest from Mexico, fundamentally redefined national aspirations. Understanding the inherent contradictions of American nationhood that have subtly impelled our mutation from a much-admired republic wary of foreign entanglements into a dominant superpower scornful of world opinion forms one objective of this study. Despite current emphasis in the profession on thinking beyond the nation—envisioning literature as a deterritorialized field of activity, a space of cosmopolitan hybridity—the resurgence of jingoism thus compels renewed attention to the phantasm of American exceptionalism that still haunts us like an ominous bird of yore. More than a decade ago Annette Kolodny implored Americanists to relinquish their “grand obsessions” with an essential national literature and a concomitant “myth of origins”—to focus on “frontiers” as points of intercultural contact, rejecting the notion of an “overarching”

The figure of woman and the fantasy of the modern Australian nation: travelling to the ‘Empty Centre’

How does a political entity such as nation so seduce and beguile that it appears to its subjects to constitute the very grounding of identity, the very grounding even of meaning itself? One of the ways it does this, for both male and female national subjects, is through the image of Woman, a phenomenon most evident in the cultural productions of a nation—its novels and films, its poetry and painting. It is in these ‘texts’ that the reach of the image of Woman in reproducing the particular fantasies that sustain the belief in our national identity, our ‘unique way of life’ can be seen. In his novel The Plains, Gerald Murnane satirises the Australian fantasy of nation that elevates Woman to such a status that she becomes both the sublime image of the very essence of nation and an always unattainable object of desire. As Lacanian theory tells us, this fantasy of Woman as the impossible sublime object is a form that is most often found on the male side of sexuation. The image of Woman that sustains such fantasies is an empty container, a pure image that contains only its own constitutive no-thing, but an image that nevertheless is compelling, that captures the gaze, appearing to offer all. That is, it has a fascinatory effect. Given that masculinist fantasies of nation continue to appear in all Australian cultural forms, reproducing predominant national meanings, it remains a vital part of the Australian feminist project to analyse these contemporary expressions of the place of Woman in national reproduction and how the masculine fantasy of Woman sustains a particular form of nation. Gerald Murnane's recently republished literary novel The Plains remains as relevant to these questions as it was when it was first published in 1982. This article offers a Lacanian analysis of the function of Woman in Murnane's The Plains, a novel which is itself preoccupied with the use made of the image of Woman in the reproduction of prevailing national fantasies.

Teaching Culture: Imagined Communities and National Fantasies in the O. J. Simpson Case

This article argues for a complex and contradictory presentation of culture in the language classroom. To demonstrate the possibilities, it uses theories of nationalism to examine treatment of the O. J. Simpson case-a murder trial in the United States. Coverage from popular news magazines is read through the lens of anthropology (Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, 1991) and of literary and social theory (Lauren Berlant's National Fantasies, 1991). The focus of these readings is the transformation of the race-neutral citizen Simpson into the racialized and criminalized defendant, then the "cultural work" (Tompkins, 1985) that once again attains a national perspective. As the media transformed Simpson, the individual reader was enfolded into an "us" that (re)built the nation at the moment of its disturbance. Exploring the cultural work that produced these transformations exposes the complex raw material from which cultural presentations can be drawn. The article argues that language students require a similarly nuanced sense of cultural events and artifacts if they are to avoid essentialist and anachronistic conceptions of "target cultures." The discussion ends with reflections on classroom practice. It begins with the author's early experience in the language classroom.

Gender and National Fantasy: Early Turkish Radio Drama

Women figure centrally in representations of modernity and of nations. This has caught the attention of researchers both in the West and in the context of “Third World” nationalisms. Yuval-Davis states: ”[I]t is women –not just (?) the bureaucracy and intelligentsia—who reproduce nations, biologically, culturally and symbolically” (1997, p. 2). However, an analysis of “women” as the subjects of the nation differs from a perspective that dwells on the representations of women produced by a (mostly) male elite. Jordanova argues that the Enlightenment in the West was a set of mental and practical activities of the male elite “who gained influence because of their ideas and ‘knowledge’” (1995, p. 64), and whose concern was “to establish the validity of their vision of the world” (p. 64). She shows convincingly that these activities were “sexual” in nature.

Big houses and small houses: Doing matriliny in West Sumatra

The big house is a potent symbol of rural Minangkabau life, embodying the centrality of Minangkabau women to the continuity and reproduction of the matrilineage. But big houses are not simply sites of social reproduction. Mothers and daughters negotiate and contest the ties of kinship embodied in the big house. Where big houses represented mother's power to control their daughters, national discourses of domesticity have reoriented daughters’ desires toward a house of their own. Daughters assert the importance of their own nuclear households as a way to resist their mother's control. Yet daughters have not become the housewives and mothers of national fantasy. They are reworking matrilineal ideology to gain the right to control their own small houses, ultimately reconstituting big houses in new forms.

The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Lauren BerlantWomen in Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Communities. Carol A. KolmertenFeminism, Utopia, and Narrative. Libby Falk Jones , Sarah Webster Goodwin

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Lauren Berlant Women in Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Communities. Carol A. Kolmerten Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative. Libby Falk Jones , Sarah Webster Goodwin Lucy M. FreibertLucy M. Freibert Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 18, Number 3Spring, 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/494827 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Review: The Office of "The Scarlet Letter.", by Sacvan Bercovitch and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life., by Lauren Berlant

Review: <i>The Office of "The Scarlet Letter."</i>, by Sacvan Bercovitch and <i>The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life.</i>, by Lauren Berlant