National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives

by Donald E. Pease

Overview

National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus of belonging established for the national community, the national narrative has represented other peoples (women, blacks, "foreigners", the homeless) from whom the property of nationness has been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of their norms. Dismantling this opposition has become the task of post-national (Post-Americanist) narratives, bent on changing the assumptions that found the "national identity."
This volume, originally published as a special issue of bounrary 2, focuses on the process of assembling and dismantling the American national narrative(s), sketching its inception and demolition. The contributors examine various cultural, political, and historical sources--colonial literature, mass movements, epidemics of disease, mass spectacle, transnational corporations, super-weapons, popular magazines, literary texts--out of which this narrative was constructed, and propose different understandings of nationality and identity following in its wake.

Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Lauren Berlant, Robert J. Corber, Elizabeth Freeman, Kathryn V. Lingberg, Jack Matthews, Alan Nadel, Patrick O'Donnell, Daniel O'Hara, Donald E. Pease, Ross Posnock, John Carlos Rowe, Rob Wilson

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822314929
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	06/15/1994
Series:	New Americanists Series
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1620L (what's this?)

About the Author

Donald E. Pease is Avalon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context and editor of a number of books including National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives and, with Amy Kaplan, Cultures of United States Imperialism, both published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives / Donald E. Pease 1

Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn / Jonathan Arac 14

The Politics of Nonidentity: A Genealogy / Ross Posnock 34

As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age / John T. Matthews 69

Failed Cultural Narratives: America in the Postwar Era and the Story of Democracy / Alan Nadel 95

Resisting History: Rear Window and the Limits of the Postwar Settlement / Robert J. Corber 121

Queer Nationality / Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman 149

Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative / Patrick O'Donnell 181

Techno-euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime / Rob WIlson 205

On Becoming Oneself in Frank Lentricchia / Daniel O'Hara 230

Melville's Typee: U.S. Imperialism at Home and Abroad / John Carlos Rowe 255

Mass Circulation versus The Masses: Covering the Modern Magazine Scene / Kathryne V. Lindberg 279

Contributors 312

Index 315