En Chine, le mot sensualité n'existe pas! «On parle tout au plus de «sentiment printanier». »
~ Français ~
Si l'on demande ä plusieurs sinologues de traduire "sensualité", on verra que chacun propose une version personnelle. Ce n'est, en effet, pas un mot facile à traduire. Que nous disent quelques dictionnaires : "sensualité" se traduit par "dan yu sheng-se" ou "yu haose" s'adonner aux femmes et aux chansons ou s'adonner aux belles filles.
Ou "yindang" : débauché, licencieux, dissolu.
On trouve aussi "rougan": sentiment charnel et "rouyu": désir charnel et dans un deuxième sens, "bonheur des cinq sens" (kuaile guanneng de) .
Donc, "sensualité", en chinois, cela existe bel et bien, même si ce n'est pas évident à traduire.
Mais tout d'abord, sait-on ce que cela signifie en français?
Le Robert n'explique pas le sens, il renvoie à sensuel: "Tout ce qui flatte les sens, tous les sens (épicurien)" mais d'après les renvois (érotisme, luxure, charnel, lascif...) semble pour le moins, assez orienté.
C'est bien ce que disent les Chinois: "débauché, licencieux, dissolu"...
Que veut nous dire ce cliché?
D'une part qu'un milliard et demi de Chinois sont le fruit de sentiments printaniers et pas du tout de fleurs du mal, ni de la philosophie dans le boudoir et encore moi du diable au corps.
D'autre part que les Chinois, et les Chinoises seraient plus fort que nous pour manier le langage imagé, indirect.
En fait, doit vouloir dire l'auteur du livre, la Chine serait une civilisation entière d'écrans du désir.
In: "Beaux livres ", un encadré signé C. Le, "Désirs volés". Commentaire de Georges-Marie Schmutz
www.lostateminor.com/.../2007/05/guan_zeju.jpg
GUAN ZEJU
www.weinstein.com (gallery)
~ English ~
Times of great upheaval often produce great artists. This seems to be a truism for the Twentieth Century. Its two world wars created environments rich with constant reevaluations of the role and purpose of art. Powerful movements, such as Surrealism, altered the way people view the world and communicate with each other. Similar contributions to the world of art from Asia have thus far not been wholly appreciated, such as the legacy provided by China's Social Realists. One of the greatest of these Social Realists is Guan Zeju.
Guan Zeju has lived through some of the most tumultuous times in China's five thousand year history. He has become a masterful painter and a great teacher through intense discipline and effort and obviously a great deal of inherent talent. As a teenager, people called him the "painting ox" for his single-minded focus, both in Western and in traditional Chinese modes of expression. Again and again, when he is asked about his experiences, his birth in 1941 in a small village outside of Guangzhou (Canton), his formal and informal education and apprenticeships, he returns to the same word in Mandarin, meaning roughly "effort."
Through the Cold War and the Cultural Revolution, Guan continued to paint, whether his surroundings and possessions were, by current standards, lavish or incredibly spartan. His efforts produced some of the finest Social Realist artwork in China, artwork now being understood for its influence on the social and political course of the world's most populous nation. His numerous portraits and murals of Mao Ze Dong, paintings and drawings of ethnic minorities, images exalting the glory of the Han Chinese, collections in the National Museum of China, significant works in the Museums of Nanchang and Henan Provinces, as well as numerous prestigious private collections, stand as important testaments to the times in which he has lived.
Guan began at a very young age with graphite and watercolor as well as traditional Chinese ink. At the age of fifteen, he was recognized as a prodigy and awarded by his junior high school with an exhibition of more than two hundred works of art in at least three media. He later graduated first in his class from the Guangzhou Institute of Fine Arts. His teachers at the Institute passed on to him knowledge of techniques and trends both within and outside of China. One of his two primary instructors spent a number of years studying in Russia. The other spent time in America, at the Art Institute of Chicago.
After art school and much success in the public sphere, Guan moved south with his wife to live in relative isolation on the large South China Sea island of Hainan. The work of this period includes many quickly executed studies of common people all over the island, many fishermen, women working with crops and government employees. For Guan, this was a communion with the fundamentals of painting, a technical mastery of which he had already achieved. The tropical light was more intense than any he had yet captured. And the colors, particularly reds, greens and blues, were richer than those he had thus far allowed himself to explore; this became the foundation for his great ability as a colorist. He lived with the people he painted, developing an empathy for particular individuals evident in the deepening expressions on their faces. Even the elements became part of his labors. Often, Guan would work by the sea, suffering terrible sunburns from days or weeks of sustained painting. Strong winds would blow sand onto his canvases, sticking on the oils and becoming part of the texture of his paintings. This place was his sanctuary, and he feels it represents the most peaceful and joyful fifteen years of his life to date.
With the entire history of art, with an emphasis on academic and Symbolist painting, as his inheritance, Guan possesses the skills to realize any flight of his own imagination. The subtle influences of Surrealism are also evident, particularly in earlier paintings, and clearly still inform aspects of perspective. He can paint like the most expressive of the Impressionists, or render people's features with a crispness similar to America's "hyper-realists." Technical virtuosity, however, is clearly not an end in itself. Rather, technique is the beginning from which the artist creates the imagery he desires. For Guan, that imagery is now dance, specifically the ballet.
Qian Xiao Ling, Guan's wife, is a successful choreographer of traditional Chinese folk dance, though she also studied ballet. As childhood friends, she first introduced Guan to the world of dance. Currently, Xiao Ling is the artistic director of the "Chinese Folk Dance Association of San Francisco." Guan counts among his close friends many excellent dancers. One of them is the San Francisco Ballet's principal dancer, Yuan Yuan Tan. Guan believes Tan is the most formidable dancer he's seen since his first experience with the ballet in 1958. At the time, he was seventeen, and one of the former Soviet Union's greatest dancers was making her first appearance in China. The young man was captivated by the dignity, grace and power of this dancer, Galina Ulanova, a woman many consider to be the greatest dancer/choreographer in the history of Russian ballet. It was a production of "Swan Lake," and it remains with Guan to this day. Interestingly, at a competition in 1992 in Paris, it was Ulanova who judged Tan's ability flawless and gave her a perfect score.
Guan's passion for dance is not an emulation of past artists such as Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec. Rather, he is working from his own unique and reverent love of the ballet and of theater in general. As previously stated, his technique, both painterly and well-defined, but always highly expressive, is entirely his own. His paintings are complex in narrative content and not afraid to be essentially beautiful. Choosing almost sylvan backdrops for his portraits, nature invades the dancer's studio with generous light filtering through trees and curtains to catch a woman often in a moment of ease. These images convey the experience of watching an accomplished dancer float and spin about the stage, whether there is motion or stillness. Guan's work eavesdrops but does not invade upon the private moments of these dancers. They can be deep in contemplation before a recital, lacing a slipper or celebrating together a successful performance. When there are several dancers, the viewer finds in their distinctive expressions the camaraderie, jealousy or stage fright associated with their world.
A painting can require as much as several dozen preliminary sketches, investigations into both light and composition. These are sometimes preceded by many hours in the audience, backstage, in the studio, even in the orchestra pit, taking photographs. Once he makes it to canvas, a painting may take several weeks to several months to complete. He employs 18th and 19th century techniques, both in the preparation of the surface he will work on, and in the complex alchemy involved in utilizing thin glazes of translucent oil paints. Guan's palette ranges from subtle hues used to create the transparent folds of a dancer's costume to luminous red lips, indigo blue curtains and emerald green leaves.
When asked which artists Guan himself most admires, he responds not with his contemporaries, but with names like Alfred Sisley, the great Impressionist. He speaks with deep respect for the deceptive simplicity and powerful movement of Monet. Isaac Levitan, a Russian academic painter of landscapes is a favorite. But Guan's greatest admiration is reserved for the late nineteenth century Russian master Ilya Repin, a man who produced dramatic nearly monochrome canvases, scenes from the theater and portraits of friends like Leo Tolstoy.
With such great depth to his abilities, a willingness to learn and experiment, to "instruct" himself, Guan Zeju's greatest achievements are clearly ahead of him. Weinstein Gallery is deeply honored to be a part of his future, and to present his work to the public in America, in China and throughout the world. As this extraordinary artist continues to develop his own voice, his own visual language, one which combines all his disparate learning, he will undoubtedly produce wholly unexpected and new imagery for a world refreshingly enamored once more with representational art.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Brooklyn Museum of Art/Corbis
ca. 1810 --- by Katsushika Hokusai --- Image by ? Brooklyn Museum of Art/Corbis
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
ETHNIC AMERICA. Seminar outline
THE BLACK FEMALE AESTHETIC
Principal points of origination:
Post 1963 phase of Anglo feminism (Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique)
Black male aesthetic
Black female experience or the home
Black Female Aesthetic arises against the sexism of the black male aesthetes and the racism of the white feminists
Main form of expression: the blues
Central document: Combahee River Collective Statement
Leading spokeswomen: Barbara Smith, Alice Walker
Stereotypes of black females in American literature:
Mammy: named after Scarlett’s „Mammy” in Gone with the Wind (1936)
Castrating Matriarch, undermining the black male’s manhood, Granny in Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945)
Main goal: to improve the acceptance of the black female writer, considers both the black male, white female dominant groups.
Fight against triple jeopardy, or the triple-bind of oppression: gender, race, and class based subordination.
Centrifugal against black male, white female aesthetic
THE BLACK MALE AESTHETIC CENTRIPETAL ASPECTS
Two min schools of thought within the Black Aesthetic:
Committed School: this is associated with the centrifugal aspects, it is also essentialist, and particularistic, writes for an exclusive black readership
Detached School: universalist, emphasizes the author, instead of the black author
Meanings of centripetality:
Rejection of withdrawal from American culture, or cultural disengagement
Cultural addition over cultural subtraction
Using stereotypical images of blacks to achieve artistic and political purposes (Purlie Victorious)
Using elements of mainstream American culture: Declaration of Independence, John Winthrop’s sermon: ”we shall be a city upon a hill”
Leroi Jones: Dutchman (1964) title of the drama refers to the myth of the Flying Dutchman,Snow White legend, Paradise Motif, references to Romeo and Juliet, using Albee’s Zoo Story (1958) as a model,
Main features of centripetality in the Black Aesthetic:
-By its very nature keeps Black culture within the primary core as it counterbalances the centrifugal forces
-uses synchretization that is the combination of various cultural impulses
-refuses to write for an exclusively black audience, or to produce from an exclusively black vantage point
-unlike the centrifugal impulse, it finds an audience, postulates a receiver on the other end of the cultural communication chain
-it does not condemn the committed school, it finds alternatives
-it uses the master’s tools to deconstruct the master’s house: A famous quote from feminist scholarship that can be applied here as well. It means that the authors use white or Euro-American generated stereotypes, such as the minstrel image in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence (1966)
Principal points of origination:
Post 1963 phase of Anglo feminism (Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique)
Black male aesthetic
Black female experience or the home
Black Female Aesthetic arises against the sexism of the black male aesthetes and the racism of the white feminists
Main form of expression: the blues
Central document: Combahee River Collective Statement
Leading spokeswomen: Barbara Smith, Alice Walker
Stereotypes of black females in American literature:
Mammy: named after Scarlett’s „Mammy” in Gone with the Wind (1936)
Castrating Matriarch, undermining the black male’s manhood, Granny in Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945)
Main goal: to improve the acceptance of the black female writer, considers both the black male, white female dominant groups.
Fight against triple jeopardy, or the triple-bind of oppression: gender, race, and class based subordination.
Centrifugal against black male, white female aesthetic
THE BLACK MALE AESTHETIC CENTRIPETAL ASPECTS
Two min schools of thought within the Black Aesthetic:
Committed School: this is associated with the centrifugal aspects, it is also essentialist, and particularistic, writes for an exclusive black readership
Detached School: universalist, emphasizes the author, instead of the black author
Meanings of centripetality:
Rejection of withdrawal from American culture, or cultural disengagement
Cultural addition over cultural subtraction
Using stereotypical images of blacks to achieve artistic and political purposes (Purlie Victorious)
Using elements of mainstream American culture: Declaration of Independence, John Winthrop’s sermon: ”we shall be a city upon a hill”
Leroi Jones: Dutchman (1964) title of the drama refers to the myth of the Flying Dutchman,Snow White legend, Paradise Motif, references to Romeo and Juliet, using Albee’s Zoo Story (1958) as a model,
Main features of centripetality in the Black Aesthetic:
-By its very nature keeps Black culture within the primary core as it counterbalances the centrifugal forces
-uses synchretization that is the combination of various cultural impulses
-refuses to write for an exclusively black audience, or to produce from an exclusively black vantage point
-unlike the centrifugal impulse, it finds an audience, postulates a receiver on the other end of the cultural communication chain
-it does not condemn the committed school, it finds alternatives
-it uses the master’s tools to deconstruct the master’s house: A famous quote from feminist scholarship that can be applied here as well. It means that the authors use white or Euro-American generated stereotypes, such as the minstrel image in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence (1966)
Monday, June 9, 2008
Ethnic America by Eric Kaufmann
Events since 9/11 have heightened both foreign-policy and cultural divisions between Europe and the US. One view, often expressed by Europeans and liberal Americans, is that the US is becoming far more nationalistic and culturally conservative than Europe. Samuel Huntington's new book, Who Are We? America's Great Debate, is likely to reinforce this view. Huntington, the Harvard politics professor who wrote The Clash of Civilizations, has written an equally provocative book about the threats to American identity posed by regionally concentrated immigration from Mexico. The book has raised an enormous stir in intellectual and media circles and has been widely criticised in the US for "nativism" and anti-Hispanic scaremongering.
The nativist charge made by Alan Wolfe and other American reviewers is unjustified. Notwithstanding a few ambiguous passages, Huntington's celebration of the American racial melting pot is a far cry from the white nationalism of Peter Brimelow or Pat Buchanan. The main argument of the book is a very European one: that national identity is rooted in an ethno-cultural core rather than in abstract, universal principles. This premise, developed by the British theorist of nationalism Anthony Smith, holds that modern nations emerge from a pre-existing ethnic core, and that many of the myths, symbols and memories of nations have ethnic antecedents. Ethnicity is based on the idea of shared myths of descent. Most Europeans (the French and Swiss are partial exceptions) accept this idea for their own countries, but also believe the very different claim of American exceptionalism: that the US has always defined its national identity in ideological and political rather than ethnic terms. Huntington spends much of the early part of his book debunking this idea, and sketches the lineaments of America's Anglo-Protestant core. He correctly notes that the free population in 1776 was around 98 per cent Protestant and 80 per cent British in ancestry. However, he stresses that the nation evolved away from its Anglo-Protestant ethnic roots with the inclusion of the Irish Catholics and Germans after 1865 and southern and eastern Europeans after 1945, and left its white racial unity behind when African-Americans in the south gained civil and voting rights in the mid-1960s. He speaks of the nation as Anglo-Protestant in a cultural, rather than a strictly ethnic sense - an argument which writers like Arthur Schlesinger, Peter Salins and Francis Fukuyama also advanced in the early and mid-1990s.
The idea that Anglo-Protestant Americanism has a cultural core which can assimilate ethnic and racial outsiders reflects recent currents in liberal nationalist political theory - particularly the writings of David Miller and Yael Tamir - that espouse a "deep" civic nationalism. These writers contend that liberalism can coexist with a national identity based on myths and symbols that runs deeper than the contractual ties between state and rational citizen that form the hallmark of Jürgen Habermas's thin "constitutional patriotism." Huntington defines America's Anglo-Protestant cultural core as consisting of the English language, American political history and a number of characteristics derived from a low-church Protestant heritage, namely its evangelical and congregational religiosity, moralistic politics, individualism and work ethic. He cites a vast array of contemporary survey evidence which shows that Americans are on average more religious, individualistic and hard-working than people in other developed countries. This cultural core, he claims, has altered little over two centuries despite the absorption of millions of immigrants from around the world. He notes with approval rising rates of intermarriage among Americans of all ethnic and racial groups and a sharp rise in the proportion of Americans who are ethnically or racially mixed. This, he claims, is evidence of the power of America's Anglo-Protestant based melting pot to dissolve ethnic boundaries.
Indeed, the ethno-cultural core itself remains far more demographically significant than is often supposed. It is true that Anglo-Protestants now make up slightly less than a quarter of the US population (whites as a whole are about 70 per cent). But the foreign-born population has averaged no more than 10 per cent of the total throughout American history. And the 4m (largely Wasp) whites, American Indians and African-Americans of 1776 have had the same demographic impact on today's population of 293m as the 66m immigrants who arrived after them. Had the US been settled by the French (as in Quebec) or the Spanish (as in Latin America), adds Huntington, the country would bear a completely different national identity. The corollary, of course, is that the idea of the US as a nation of immigrants united only by the liberal principles and constitutional patriotism of the American creed is "at best, a half truth."
Huntington's faith in the assimilative power of America's cultural core is not boundless, however. He argues that the Anglo-Protestant core succeeded in assimilating immigrants in the past not only because of its intrinsic appeal, but also because of concerted "Americanising" on the part of educators, intellectuals, government officials and business leaders. Business leaders like Henry Ford held civics and language classes and even staged pageants in which minority groups entered a symbolic pot in native dress later to emerge as flag-waving Americans. Legislators also played their part by entrenching English as the official language of all states despite resistance from ethnic blocs like the Germans. Americanisers were aided in their task by the nature of pre-1965 immigration. The mainly European immigrants dispersed broadly across the continent which helped to dissipate centrifugal pressures that might have fragmented America's Anglo-Protestant cultural unity. Meanwhile, world war and the 1925-65 period of immigration restriction helped to head off rising nativist sentiment.
But alas, all is not well in the land. Huntington charts a new set of conditions which, he warns, threaten the "societal security" of the US. Chief among these are the "denationalisation" of American intellectual and business leaders and the new character of post-1965 immigration. Cosmopolitan elites emphasise globalisation, diversity, multiculturalism and open borders. New immigrants use global communications to maintain dual political loyalties and long-distance diasporan identities, and are encouraged to do so by the white elite. Furthermore, persistently high levels of immigration from neighbouring Mexico to the American southwest, is an unprecedented - and threatening - development. The fact that the US won this territory from Mexico as recently as the 1840s means that Americans may face an ethnic separatist movement for the first time in their history. As evidence, Huntington cites the public statements of Mexican politicians like Vicente Fox and the reconquista discourse of the Aztlan movement in California. Above all, Hispanics (Latin-American immigrants and their descendants) in contrast to other immigrant groups, seem to want to co-determine the national culture in the present as opposed to merely retrospectively.
Bilingualism is a key weapon in this co-determination that threatens to strike at the heart of America's Anglo-Protestant core. In Miami, "Anglos" (non-Hispanic whites) are now outsiders and must adapt to its Hispanic culture if they wish to succeed in the job market or politics. The Anglo response has been white flight or cultural surrender, says Huntington. He predicts that the same dilemma will confront other parts of the nation, leading to a country that is part Anglo, part Hispanic.
Finally, Huntington considers the possibility of a white nationalist response to the changes taking place. He says that white nativism is a "plausible" response to white demographic decline, the cosmopolitan defection of the white elite and the fading power of the Anglo-Protestant core. The only way to head off these challenges, claims Huntington, is for the nation to reaffirm its Anglo-Protestant cultural identity through a new Americanisation effort and to roll back the gains made by advocates of multiculturalism. While little is mentioned about immigration control, Huntington is clear that both legal and illegal immigration must be restricted if assimilation with Anglo-Protestant culture is to take place. He leaves us in no doubt that the universalist creed cannot hold together a nation battered by fundamental cultural divisions.
Taken as a whole, the book provides a powerful statement of American nationalism. It is well written, meticulously researched and passionately argued. It draws on many of the insights of historians and social scientists in the 1990s, maintains a comparative perspective, and will add to the growing civic nationalist chorus of writers like Michael Lind, Arthur Schlesinger, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Francis Fukuyama. But this is not an original statement of American cultural nationalism such as Lind's The Next American Nation. Like Huntington, Lind criticises the cosmopolitanism of American cultural elites and the belief, at least on the left, that it is possible to sustain a welfare state devoid of national identity. But Lind argues that the individualism of conservatives sits uncomfortably with a liberal nationalist orientation. Huntington, by contrast, shows little awareness of how individualism and the minimal state can blunt the bonds of nationhood.
Huntington correctly identifies the American elite as cosmopolitan, but overstates the novelty of this development. It is a long time since Wasp intellectuals defended Anglo-Protestant nationalism. The break came in the early 20th century with John Dewey and New York radicals like Randolph Bourne, who refined hazy pronouncements about American universalism into a cosmopolitan vision of the nation. Picked up by the main Protestant denominations by the 1910s, the cosmopolitan message gathered force in the 1920s (despite the upsurge of nativism and eugenics) and emerged as the dominant elite discourse as early as the 1930s and 1940s. Spreading more widely among the middle class thanks to the rise of higher education and television in the 1960s, cultural cosmopolitanism gradually gained pre-eminence, though it never assumed political form.
This combination of nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism emerged when the measure of Americanism was partly redefined from "Waspness" to anti-communism. The imperatives of the cold war helped to provide an overarching bond of transethnic unity and a focus for civic nationalism. This allowed cultural cosmopolitans to claim that the idea of the US as a nation of immigrants (symbolised by the reinvention of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon to immigrants) was a patriotic notion, while Wasp hegemony caused division in the face of the enemy. But this cosmopolitanism was accompanied by a hardening of America's political nationalism. The rapidly growing American federal state, its burgeoning multiethnic armed forces and the anti-communist crusade helped in this "ethnic to civic" shift. McCarthyism epitomises the shift: Senator Joe McCarthy, whose Catholic faith would formerly have cast a shadow of "un-Americanism" upon him, attacked internationalist Wasps like Alger Hiss, and was backed by both Catholic Democrats like John F Kennedy and southern Protestants. This helps to explain why today's American elites seem more willing to relax their ethno-cultural boundaries than their European counterparts, but are less willing to pool national political sovereignty.
Huntington warns that he writes as both a "patriot" and a "scholar" and that these two aims may conflict. This is indeed a difficult balancing act. As a scholar, his zeal for the truth leads him to speculate on sensitive issues like racial differences in patriotic feeling and economic performance which can only alienate African-Americans - who might otherwise sympathise with his message. As a patriot, he overstates the threat to American political unity posed by both Mexican immigration and dual citizenship. For instance, New Mexico, unlike California, has always had a near-majority of Hispanics, but there has been little talk of secession in Santa Fe. Likewise, the territorial claims of Mexican-Americans are undermined by their propensity for intermarriage and geographic mobility, and by the hazy quality of their pre-American collective memory.
The chapter on the Hispanic threat is nevertheless an original one, though some of its themes have been echoed by others like the late John Higham. But Huntington finds it hard to make up his mind about Mexican-Americans. Are they patriots who oppose bilingualism and high levels of immigration, convert to evangelical Protestantism, and also join the US armed forces in large numbers? Or are they defined by the alienated high-school dropouts who have turned their back on the American dream to congregate in a separatist enclave owing allegiance to another civilisation? One can find support for both conclusions in this book. Intermarriage and the rise of mixed-heritage individuals point towards a post-ethnic future, yet Huntington also contends that ethnic diasporas are increasing in importance in the US.
The thorniest tension in this book is between Huntington's political identity with the American nation state and his ethnic identity as a white American. His book largely sticks to the civic-nationalist script, but there is an undertow of concern over the future of the white majority in America. As a result, we find two visions which do not easily fit together: on the one hand, there is the futuristic and confident vision of a transracial melting pot "new man" that writers have celebrated since Hector St John de Crèvecoeur. On the other hand, Huntington portrays an insecure white dominant ethnic group in flight from an ever-growing minority population.
Huntington's dilemma follows a well-worn groove of nationalist thought. Both Crèvecoeur (1782) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1835), for instance, considered Americans as the "British race in America," yet this did not prevent these writers from heralding the emergence of a cosmopolitan "new man." Likewise, Ralph Waldo Emerson exclaimed in 1846 that the US was "the asylum of all nations… the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race." Yet he also ventured that: "It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied... a very high place in the human family... The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance."
Emerson labelled his dualism "double-consciousness" and nearly all elite American historians, politicians and writers before 1910 viewed their nation in the same schizophrenic manner, switching between the lenses of their dominant ethnic group and that of a futuristic utopian America. None of these writers adequately explained his state of "double-consciousness" though many had ideas about assimilation. Some thought that a northern climate would "whiten" racial minorities while others were convinced that Catholics could be educated to the Protestant faith. Emerson assumed that assimilation turned immigrants into English descendants. Fifty years later, future president Theodore Roosevelt thought that the German and Irish immigrants would produce an Anglo-Saxon mix akin to that of Saxon and Briton in England leaving the Wasp majority securely in place.
The 19th-century elite believed that Anglo-Protestant assimilation would allow America to remain largely ethnically unchanged, yet the boldness of their cosmopolitan rhe-toric suggests that they simultaneously sought to transcend their own Wasp identities. Samuel Huntington reflects these old tensions, and raises some of the more recent issues which political theorists of nationalism and multiculturalism are grappling with.
Much of the argument revolves around a basic dilemma for ethnic majorities: how do you construct a national identity that will satisfy your need for belonging and meaning but won't alienate minorities? Huntington is right to point to the English language, Protestant religiosity, individualism and the work ethic as defining characteristics of America. But American Catholics will not identify themselves with a Protestant nation, atheists will cringe at the thought of celebrating American religiosity, communitarians will reject the emphasis on individualism and work, Hispanics will not identify with the English language, and so on.
In short, trying to squeeze cultural depth into a nation like the US is bound to be divisive. A thin set of universal principles based on a constitution, some uncontentious pieces of state history, values like honesty and fair play, or platitudes like "toleration" and "unity in diversity" may be the only choice on offer in a liberal society. On the other hand, for many people the abstract quality of the American creed will be psychologically inadequate as a source of meaning and identity. By contrast, thicker ethnic identities, according to the French writer Régis Debray, tell people that "they belong to ancient associations of 'their kind' with definite boundaries in time and space, and this gives their otherwise ambiguous and precarious lives a degree of certainty and purpose."
This suggests that ethnicity, rather than the state, is the best vehicle for maintaining a deep Anglo-Protestant culture in the US. Following this logic Americanisers should focus on developing a rich "American" ethnic option whose boundaries are open to like-minded non-Wasps, but whose mytho-symbolic core can only be altered by insiders. The problem with defining all 293m Americans as an Anglo-Protestant nation is that too many citizens do not identify with Anglo-Protestantism. An "American" ethnic option avoids this conflict with liberalism since no one is obliged to join and coexisting Americanisms are possible.
Most of the literature on nationalism and ethnicity fails to recognise that groups like the Jews in Israel, the English in England or English-speaking whites in America are as "ethnic" as minorities and have similar cultural needs. A neutral, managerial state based on constitutional patriotism cannot satisfy the existential needs of majorities any better than it can the aspirations of minorities. The recognition of majority cultural needs is urgent if the dominant-ethnic impulse is to discharge itself along liberal lines. This is one area in which Huntington is correct: US elites, like their counterparts in Europe, must accept that majority "native" cultures need to be recognised and that it is both wrong and dangerous to suppose that all majority ethnics can become cosmopolites. Writing in 1917, the pluralist Randolph Bourne urged his fellow Wasp Americans to transcend their Anglo-Saxon upbringing and "breathe a larger air" of cosmopolitanism, yet he simultaneously lauded the "proud Jew who sticks to his faith." This contradiction places the Wasp at the moral centre of the multicultural project, at once the "bland" Other to be transcended and the backdrop against which exotic ethnics can identify themselves.
The notion that the majority should be cosmopolitan while minorities should retain their culture is a patronising elite Wasp fallacy. Some form of multiculturalism is an appropriate policy for the 95 per cent of the world's states that are multiethnic, but in the US the policy must abandon its anti-majoritarian bias. State unity will emerge largely as the by-product of a self-confident majority group and need not be imposed on reluctant minorities. In this context, dual citizenship or even divided loyalties pose little threat to the state. Indeed, multinational and federal states with an electorally and demographically dominant ethnic group are generally more stable than those with no hegemonic group.
If Americanisers focus on creating a national sect, rather than a national church, they can replicate the success of American religion. Liberated from the constraints of equal symbolic treatment, they can construct an ethnic option that draws on the full richness of the American experience. The English language and Protestantism will certainly be core symbols, but Huntington's emphasis on the work ethic, mobility and individualism are less inspiring. More relevant are the icons and folkways which spring from the main Anglo-Protestant traditions of New England, the middle Atlantic, the west and the south. The pioneer and yeoman farmer are American lifestyle icons, akin to the habitant and coureur de bois in Quebec or the nomad among the Arabs. The place names, myths, vernacular architecture, dialects, traditional crafts and music of the cultural heartlands formed the basis of the regionalist cultural revival movement of the 1930s and 1940s and are a sturdier basis on which to build American particularity.
Black Anglo-Protestant Americans have been integral to American history since the beginning and their vernacular culture (music, migratory myths, southern rural traditions, religion) is ineluctably American. Similarly, the legends, landscapes and place names of American Indians are important material if one is to define an authentic American culture. They are both touchstones for a more settled Americanism of the future in which the American ethnic core fuses the myths and symbols of the main groups whose collective memory is based on the American landscape and is thus indigenous to the US experience. If ethnicity is based on myths of shared ancestry, then this new American ethnic group would trace its heritage back to these indigenous groups. This is where Huntington might borrow a page from his Mexican adversary's notebook. The blend of Anglo, Afro and Indian influences is the key to creating a new American type that is as powerful as the mestizo (a myth which weaves together Spanish and Aztec lineages) is for Mexico. This is surely a better formula for national unity than a racial caste alliance of whites and light-skinned Asians.
It is true that American cultural elites have become excessively cosmopolitan but Huntington is wrong to counter this with individualism, fundamentalist religion and flag-waving patriotism. All three have played their part in forestalling a more settled and culturally secure Americanism which can allay the anxieties of the majority. Indeed it may be no exaggeration to claim that when that majority has a serious ethnic option, we may see a reversal of the cold war shift towards a strident political nationalism. A secure sense of cultural belonging will remove the pressing need for unifying political ideologies and projects. The country will then be able to re-invest in international institutions without fear of losing its soul, and can once again become a team player in resolving so many of our most pressing global issues.
The nativist charge made by Alan Wolfe and other American reviewers is unjustified. Notwithstanding a few ambiguous passages, Huntington's celebration of the American racial melting pot is a far cry from the white nationalism of Peter Brimelow or Pat Buchanan. The main argument of the book is a very European one: that national identity is rooted in an ethno-cultural core rather than in abstract, universal principles. This premise, developed by the British theorist of nationalism Anthony Smith, holds that modern nations emerge from a pre-existing ethnic core, and that many of the myths, symbols and memories of nations have ethnic antecedents. Ethnicity is based on the idea of shared myths of descent. Most Europeans (the French and Swiss are partial exceptions) accept this idea for their own countries, but also believe the very different claim of American exceptionalism: that the US has always defined its national identity in ideological and political rather than ethnic terms. Huntington spends much of the early part of his book debunking this idea, and sketches the lineaments of America's Anglo-Protestant core. He correctly notes that the free population in 1776 was around 98 per cent Protestant and 80 per cent British in ancestry. However, he stresses that the nation evolved away from its Anglo-Protestant ethnic roots with the inclusion of the Irish Catholics and Germans after 1865 and southern and eastern Europeans after 1945, and left its white racial unity behind when African-Americans in the south gained civil and voting rights in the mid-1960s. He speaks of the nation as Anglo-Protestant in a cultural, rather than a strictly ethnic sense - an argument which writers like Arthur Schlesinger, Peter Salins and Francis Fukuyama also advanced in the early and mid-1990s.
The idea that Anglo-Protestant Americanism has a cultural core which can assimilate ethnic and racial outsiders reflects recent currents in liberal nationalist political theory - particularly the writings of David Miller and Yael Tamir - that espouse a "deep" civic nationalism. These writers contend that liberalism can coexist with a national identity based on myths and symbols that runs deeper than the contractual ties between state and rational citizen that form the hallmark of Jürgen Habermas's thin "constitutional patriotism." Huntington defines America's Anglo-Protestant cultural core as consisting of the English language, American political history and a number of characteristics derived from a low-church Protestant heritage, namely its evangelical and congregational religiosity, moralistic politics, individualism and work ethic. He cites a vast array of contemporary survey evidence which shows that Americans are on average more religious, individualistic and hard-working than people in other developed countries. This cultural core, he claims, has altered little over two centuries despite the absorption of millions of immigrants from around the world. He notes with approval rising rates of intermarriage among Americans of all ethnic and racial groups and a sharp rise in the proportion of Americans who are ethnically or racially mixed. This, he claims, is evidence of the power of America's Anglo-Protestant based melting pot to dissolve ethnic boundaries.
Indeed, the ethno-cultural core itself remains far more demographically significant than is often supposed. It is true that Anglo-Protestants now make up slightly less than a quarter of the US population (whites as a whole are about 70 per cent). But the foreign-born population has averaged no more than 10 per cent of the total throughout American history. And the 4m (largely Wasp) whites, American Indians and African-Americans of 1776 have had the same demographic impact on today's population of 293m as the 66m immigrants who arrived after them. Had the US been settled by the French (as in Quebec) or the Spanish (as in Latin America), adds Huntington, the country would bear a completely different national identity. The corollary, of course, is that the idea of the US as a nation of immigrants united only by the liberal principles and constitutional patriotism of the American creed is "at best, a half truth."
Huntington's faith in the assimilative power of America's cultural core is not boundless, however. He argues that the Anglo-Protestant core succeeded in assimilating immigrants in the past not only because of its intrinsic appeal, but also because of concerted "Americanising" on the part of educators, intellectuals, government officials and business leaders. Business leaders like Henry Ford held civics and language classes and even staged pageants in which minority groups entered a symbolic pot in native dress later to emerge as flag-waving Americans. Legislators also played their part by entrenching English as the official language of all states despite resistance from ethnic blocs like the Germans. Americanisers were aided in their task by the nature of pre-1965 immigration. The mainly European immigrants dispersed broadly across the continent which helped to dissipate centrifugal pressures that might have fragmented America's Anglo-Protestant cultural unity. Meanwhile, world war and the 1925-65 period of immigration restriction helped to head off rising nativist sentiment.
But alas, all is not well in the land. Huntington charts a new set of conditions which, he warns, threaten the "societal security" of the US. Chief among these are the "denationalisation" of American intellectual and business leaders and the new character of post-1965 immigration. Cosmopolitan elites emphasise globalisation, diversity, multiculturalism and open borders. New immigrants use global communications to maintain dual political loyalties and long-distance diasporan identities, and are encouraged to do so by the white elite. Furthermore, persistently high levels of immigration from neighbouring Mexico to the American southwest, is an unprecedented - and threatening - development. The fact that the US won this territory from Mexico as recently as the 1840s means that Americans may face an ethnic separatist movement for the first time in their history. As evidence, Huntington cites the public statements of Mexican politicians like Vicente Fox and the reconquista discourse of the Aztlan movement in California. Above all, Hispanics (Latin-American immigrants and their descendants) in contrast to other immigrant groups, seem to want to co-determine the national culture in the present as opposed to merely retrospectively.
Bilingualism is a key weapon in this co-determination that threatens to strike at the heart of America's Anglo-Protestant core. In Miami, "Anglos" (non-Hispanic whites) are now outsiders and must adapt to its Hispanic culture if they wish to succeed in the job market or politics. The Anglo response has been white flight or cultural surrender, says Huntington. He predicts that the same dilemma will confront other parts of the nation, leading to a country that is part Anglo, part Hispanic.
Finally, Huntington considers the possibility of a white nationalist response to the changes taking place. He says that white nativism is a "plausible" response to white demographic decline, the cosmopolitan defection of the white elite and the fading power of the Anglo-Protestant core. The only way to head off these challenges, claims Huntington, is for the nation to reaffirm its Anglo-Protestant cultural identity through a new Americanisation effort and to roll back the gains made by advocates of multiculturalism. While little is mentioned about immigration control, Huntington is clear that both legal and illegal immigration must be restricted if assimilation with Anglo-Protestant culture is to take place. He leaves us in no doubt that the universalist creed cannot hold together a nation battered by fundamental cultural divisions.
Taken as a whole, the book provides a powerful statement of American nationalism. It is well written, meticulously researched and passionately argued. It draws on many of the insights of historians and social scientists in the 1990s, maintains a comparative perspective, and will add to the growing civic nationalist chorus of writers like Michael Lind, Arthur Schlesinger, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Francis Fukuyama. But this is not an original statement of American cultural nationalism such as Lind's The Next American Nation. Like Huntington, Lind criticises the cosmopolitanism of American cultural elites and the belief, at least on the left, that it is possible to sustain a welfare state devoid of national identity. But Lind argues that the individualism of conservatives sits uncomfortably with a liberal nationalist orientation. Huntington, by contrast, shows little awareness of how individualism and the minimal state can blunt the bonds of nationhood.
Huntington correctly identifies the American elite as cosmopolitan, but overstates the novelty of this development. It is a long time since Wasp intellectuals defended Anglo-Protestant nationalism. The break came in the early 20th century with John Dewey and New York radicals like Randolph Bourne, who refined hazy pronouncements about American universalism into a cosmopolitan vision of the nation. Picked up by the main Protestant denominations by the 1910s, the cosmopolitan message gathered force in the 1920s (despite the upsurge of nativism and eugenics) and emerged as the dominant elite discourse as early as the 1930s and 1940s. Spreading more widely among the middle class thanks to the rise of higher education and television in the 1960s, cultural cosmopolitanism gradually gained pre-eminence, though it never assumed political form.
This combination of nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism emerged when the measure of Americanism was partly redefined from "Waspness" to anti-communism. The imperatives of the cold war helped to provide an overarching bond of transethnic unity and a focus for civic nationalism. This allowed cultural cosmopolitans to claim that the idea of the US as a nation of immigrants (symbolised by the reinvention of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon to immigrants) was a patriotic notion, while Wasp hegemony caused division in the face of the enemy. But this cosmopolitanism was accompanied by a hardening of America's political nationalism. The rapidly growing American federal state, its burgeoning multiethnic armed forces and the anti-communist crusade helped in this "ethnic to civic" shift. McCarthyism epitomises the shift: Senator Joe McCarthy, whose Catholic faith would formerly have cast a shadow of "un-Americanism" upon him, attacked internationalist Wasps like Alger Hiss, and was backed by both Catholic Democrats like John F Kennedy and southern Protestants. This helps to explain why today's American elites seem more willing to relax their ethno-cultural boundaries than their European counterparts, but are less willing to pool national political sovereignty.
Huntington warns that he writes as both a "patriot" and a "scholar" and that these two aims may conflict. This is indeed a difficult balancing act. As a scholar, his zeal for the truth leads him to speculate on sensitive issues like racial differences in patriotic feeling and economic performance which can only alienate African-Americans - who might otherwise sympathise with his message. As a patriot, he overstates the threat to American political unity posed by both Mexican immigration and dual citizenship. For instance, New Mexico, unlike California, has always had a near-majority of Hispanics, but there has been little talk of secession in Santa Fe. Likewise, the territorial claims of Mexican-Americans are undermined by their propensity for intermarriage and geographic mobility, and by the hazy quality of their pre-American collective memory.
The chapter on the Hispanic threat is nevertheless an original one, though some of its themes have been echoed by others like the late John Higham. But Huntington finds it hard to make up his mind about Mexican-Americans. Are they patriots who oppose bilingualism and high levels of immigration, convert to evangelical Protestantism, and also join the US armed forces in large numbers? Or are they defined by the alienated high-school dropouts who have turned their back on the American dream to congregate in a separatist enclave owing allegiance to another civilisation? One can find support for both conclusions in this book. Intermarriage and the rise of mixed-heritage individuals point towards a post-ethnic future, yet Huntington also contends that ethnic diasporas are increasing in importance in the US.
The thorniest tension in this book is between Huntington's political identity with the American nation state and his ethnic identity as a white American. His book largely sticks to the civic-nationalist script, but there is an undertow of concern over the future of the white majority in America. As a result, we find two visions which do not easily fit together: on the one hand, there is the futuristic and confident vision of a transracial melting pot "new man" that writers have celebrated since Hector St John de Crèvecoeur. On the other hand, Huntington portrays an insecure white dominant ethnic group in flight from an ever-growing minority population.
Huntington's dilemma follows a well-worn groove of nationalist thought. Both Crèvecoeur (1782) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1835), for instance, considered Americans as the "British race in America," yet this did not prevent these writers from heralding the emergence of a cosmopolitan "new man." Likewise, Ralph Waldo Emerson exclaimed in 1846 that the US was "the asylum of all nations… the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race." Yet he also ventured that: "It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied... a very high place in the human family... The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance."
Emerson labelled his dualism "double-consciousness" and nearly all elite American historians, politicians and writers before 1910 viewed their nation in the same schizophrenic manner, switching between the lenses of their dominant ethnic group and that of a futuristic utopian America. None of these writers adequately explained his state of "double-consciousness" though many had ideas about assimilation. Some thought that a northern climate would "whiten" racial minorities while others were convinced that Catholics could be educated to the Protestant faith. Emerson assumed that assimilation turned immigrants into English descendants. Fifty years later, future president Theodore Roosevelt thought that the German and Irish immigrants would produce an Anglo-Saxon mix akin to that of Saxon and Briton in England leaving the Wasp majority securely in place.
The 19th-century elite believed that Anglo-Protestant assimilation would allow America to remain largely ethnically unchanged, yet the boldness of their cosmopolitan rhe-toric suggests that they simultaneously sought to transcend their own Wasp identities. Samuel Huntington reflects these old tensions, and raises some of the more recent issues which political theorists of nationalism and multiculturalism are grappling with.
Much of the argument revolves around a basic dilemma for ethnic majorities: how do you construct a national identity that will satisfy your need for belonging and meaning but won't alienate minorities? Huntington is right to point to the English language, Protestant religiosity, individualism and the work ethic as defining characteristics of America. But American Catholics will not identify themselves with a Protestant nation, atheists will cringe at the thought of celebrating American religiosity, communitarians will reject the emphasis on individualism and work, Hispanics will not identify with the English language, and so on.
In short, trying to squeeze cultural depth into a nation like the US is bound to be divisive. A thin set of universal principles based on a constitution, some uncontentious pieces of state history, values like honesty and fair play, or platitudes like "toleration" and "unity in diversity" may be the only choice on offer in a liberal society. On the other hand, for many people the abstract quality of the American creed will be psychologically inadequate as a source of meaning and identity. By contrast, thicker ethnic identities, according to the French writer Régis Debray, tell people that "they belong to ancient associations of 'their kind' with definite boundaries in time and space, and this gives their otherwise ambiguous and precarious lives a degree of certainty and purpose."
This suggests that ethnicity, rather than the state, is the best vehicle for maintaining a deep Anglo-Protestant culture in the US. Following this logic Americanisers should focus on developing a rich "American" ethnic option whose boundaries are open to like-minded non-Wasps, but whose mytho-symbolic core can only be altered by insiders. The problem with defining all 293m Americans as an Anglo-Protestant nation is that too many citizens do not identify with Anglo-Protestantism. An "American" ethnic option avoids this conflict with liberalism since no one is obliged to join and coexisting Americanisms are possible.
Most of the literature on nationalism and ethnicity fails to recognise that groups like the Jews in Israel, the English in England or English-speaking whites in America are as "ethnic" as minorities and have similar cultural needs. A neutral, managerial state based on constitutional patriotism cannot satisfy the existential needs of majorities any better than it can the aspirations of minorities. The recognition of majority cultural needs is urgent if the dominant-ethnic impulse is to discharge itself along liberal lines. This is one area in which Huntington is correct: US elites, like their counterparts in Europe, must accept that majority "native" cultures need to be recognised and that it is both wrong and dangerous to suppose that all majority ethnics can become cosmopolites. Writing in 1917, the pluralist Randolph Bourne urged his fellow Wasp Americans to transcend their Anglo-Saxon upbringing and "breathe a larger air" of cosmopolitanism, yet he simultaneously lauded the "proud Jew who sticks to his faith." This contradiction places the Wasp at the moral centre of the multicultural project, at once the "bland" Other to be transcended and the backdrop against which exotic ethnics can identify themselves.
The notion that the majority should be cosmopolitan while minorities should retain their culture is a patronising elite Wasp fallacy. Some form of multiculturalism is an appropriate policy for the 95 per cent of the world's states that are multiethnic, but in the US the policy must abandon its anti-majoritarian bias. State unity will emerge largely as the by-product of a self-confident majority group and need not be imposed on reluctant minorities. In this context, dual citizenship or even divided loyalties pose little threat to the state. Indeed, multinational and federal states with an electorally and demographically dominant ethnic group are generally more stable than those with no hegemonic group.
If Americanisers focus on creating a national sect, rather than a national church, they can replicate the success of American religion. Liberated from the constraints of equal symbolic treatment, they can construct an ethnic option that draws on the full richness of the American experience. The English language and Protestantism will certainly be core symbols, but Huntington's emphasis on the work ethic, mobility and individualism are less inspiring. More relevant are the icons and folkways which spring from the main Anglo-Protestant traditions of New England, the middle Atlantic, the west and the south. The pioneer and yeoman farmer are American lifestyle icons, akin to the habitant and coureur de bois in Quebec or the nomad among the Arabs. The place names, myths, vernacular architecture, dialects, traditional crafts and music of the cultural heartlands formed the basis of the regionalist cultural revival movement of the 1930s and 1940s and are a sturdier basis on which to build American particularity.
Black Anglo-Protestant Americans have been integral to American history since the beginning and their vernacular culture (music, migratory myths, southern rural traditions, religion) is ineluctably American. Similarly, the legends, landscapes and place names of American Indians are important material if one is to define an authentic American culture. They are both touchstones for a more settled Americanism of the future in which the American ethnic core fuses the myths and symbols of the main groups whose collective memory is based on the American landscape and is thus indigenous to the US experience. If ethnicity is based on myths of shared ancestry, then this new American ethnic group would trace its heritage back to these indigenous groups. This is where Huntington might borrow a page from his Mexican adversary's notebook. The blend of Anglo, Afro and Indian influences is the key to creating a new American type that is as powerful as the mestizo (a myth which weaves together Spanish and Aztec lineages) is for Mexico. This is surely a better formula for national unity than a racial caste alliance of whites and light-skinned Asians.
It is true that American cultural elites have become excessively cosmopolitan but Huntington is wrong to counter this with individualism, fundamentalist religion and flag-waving patriotism. All three have played their part in forestalling a more settled and culturally secure Americanism which can allay the anxieties of the majority. Indeed it may be no exaggeration to claim that when that majority has a serious ethnic option, we may see a reversal of the cold war shift towards a strident political nationalism. A secure sense of cultural belonging will remove the pressing need for unifying political ideologies and projects. The country will then be able to re-invest in international institutions without fear of losing its soul, and can once again become a team player in resolving so many of our most pressing global issues.
Introduction: the landscape of ethnic American children's literature - Critical Essay
Katharine Capshaw Smith
In The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), Carter G. Woodson asserts that "there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom" (2). By suggesting the formative influence of children's culture on social relations, Woodson highlights an idea that courses through the body of ethnic American children's literature. Whether writing in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first centuries, authors infuse texts with the hope that through childhood, that potent period in an individual's development, sensibilities can be transformed. Children's literature allows readers a means to reconceptualize their relationship to ethnic and national identities. Telling stories to a young audience becomes the conduit for social and political revolution.
For some readers of MELUS, this volume may be their first introduction to the vital field of ethnic children's literature. Most interesting for scholars will be the field's special contextual and theoretical issues. A primary factor that distinguishes ethnic children's literature from adult literature is its complexly layered audience, for children's literature reaches various adult mediators as well as child readers. Publishers, librarians, schoolteachers, and parents read and evaluate children's texts in anticipation of a young audience, which is also multiply constituted. Ethnic children's literature becomes a particularly intense site of ideological and political contest, for various groups of adults struggle over which versions of ethnic identity will become institutionalized in school, home, and library settings; groups and individuals often advance specific reading and purchasing guidelines.
Extending the tiers of adult mediation are the multiple prizes and awards which help shape marketplace demand and expectations for ethnic children's literature. (1) In addition to the Caldecott and Newbery Awards, prizes specific to ethnic texts are becoming determinative, including the Pura Belpre Award given by the American Library Association (ALA), the Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature sponsored by the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP), the ALA's Coretta Scott King Award, the Wordcraft Circle Award, the Carter G. Woodson Book Award, and the Tomas Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award, among others.
Institutions in their various forms--parents' groups, school systems, library associations, publishers--are powerful forces shaping the contours and content of ethnic children's texts. Julia Mickenberg's essay and the interviews here with Christopher Paul Curtis and Nicolas Kanellos acknowledge the complex ideological exchanges that preface the publication of any ethnic children's text. Because works often narrate and explain details of a traumatic past, like the internment of Japanese Americans or the enslavement of African Americans, to an audience innocent of historical knowledge, the stakes are high: adult mediators recognize the gravity of their role as gatekeepers to history and arbiters of ethnic identity. Scholars of ethnic literature will therefore find much complexity in the ways writers construct history and negotiate the demands of various audiences.
In addition to adult mediators and young readers, ethnic children's literature is often targeted both to insider and outsider groups. If part of its agenda is didactic in advancing revivified versions of history and identity, texts often consciously address both the ethnic child reader and those in other populations. For children of the ethnicity represented textually, authors encourage resistance to pejorative categorizations by asking the reader to reimagine herself, to identify herself with the texts' cultural models. For a reader from another ethnic group, texts often encourage cross-cultural amity and understanding as a means to dispel prejudice. Early children's literature (perhaps because of the features of the marketplace) appears even more sensitive to the presence of a non-ethnic child audience and seems deeply invested in realignments of social power and in responding to ethnic stereotypes, as Tony Dykema-VanderArk's essay reminds us. Reversals of power have always had special force in works for children. For many ethnic children's texts of any era, the presence of a white audience is palpable. Writers imagine the fact of a multiple audience as an opportunity to change the minds of adults and children, of both insiders and outsiders. To speak to children particularly reflects their special position as readers within the terrain of ethnic literature, for writers assert that children are open to the rewards of the imagination in ways that adults may not be.
While MELUS readers will recognize Charles Eastman, Sui Sin Far, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Judith Ortiz Cofer, many of the authors examined in this volume belong to artistic communities somewhat hidden from view. Even major children's writers like Laurence Yep, Virginia Hamilton, and Christopher Paul Curtis may be unfamiliar to some MELUS readers. But because the field shares many qualities with adult ethnic writing, MELUS readers may recognize moments of exchange between the concerns of adult literature and those of children's texts. Many of the major writers we associate with the ethnic experience in America--Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Frank Chin, and Louise Erdrich, among others--have written texts intended for children or appropriated by young readers. Reconsidering our major writers as children's authors changes our sense of the breath of their readership and enhances our understanding of writers' complicated aesthetic and political purposes. Layers of meaning and a recognition of polyvocalism emerge from considering the poems of, say, Langston Hughes as "crosswritten" for both a child and adult audience.
Certainly there is much thematic crossover between adult and child ethnic literature: issues of identity, assimilation, nationalism, and cultural pluralism permeate both genres. Children's texts manipulate perception and language, rendering whiteness as an ethnicity and playing with constructions of cultures as "other," as Leona Fisher argues about Laurence Yep in our volume. Theoretically, however, issues fundamental to ethnic studies take on a different cast when examined through the lens of children's literature. Identity formation takes center stage, as Rocio G. Davis indicates, in fictional and non-fictional autobiography, coming of age stories, and the bildungsroman since such forms emphasize childhood and child protagonists. Artists often rewrite their childhoods or narrate their contact with their own children, which establishes a kind of reciprocal relationship with the child reader who is both audience and a form of inspiration, a cycle which might not occur in adult literature. Themes common to adult texts, like the relationship of the individual to collective identities of family, ethnicity, nationality, and religion, are brought into relief by children's writers who often unravel the child character's hybrid cultural position. Just as adult ethnic writing incorporates oral traditions and folklore, children's texts also frequently spotlight orality, but they also exploit issues of language acquisition since their subjects and readers are consciously grappling with the gap between oral child culture and learning written languages. Through play and experimentation, children's texts foreground the possibilities of linguistic hybridity, bilingualism, and biculturalism. Additionally, examination of children's literature highlights the thread of inter-generational storytelling that runs through the fabric of many ethnic texts and traditions. In our volume, Jarasa Kanok and Nina Mikkelsen discuss related themes regarding the oral tradition and language.
Although debates about legitimacy often undergird discussions of adult ethnic texts, authenticity becomes a particularly potent issue for children's literature because of the didactic imperatives both embedded in the texts and imposed contextually by adult arbiters. Since narrative can influence political realities, those adults who purchase and distribute children's texts recognize their responsibility to offer "true" depictions of ethnic experience, particularly when these books are endorsed by institutional structures. Likewise, authors writing to children realize that their texts can influence a child's socialization, and so work consciously to respond to prejudiced narratives of ethnicity through signification, allusion, and confrontation. Texts recoup lost heroes, fill the gaps of historical memory, subvert ethnic stereotypes, and advance revisionary versions of cultural identity. Children's texts are often intensely dialogic: they interact with biased versions of the past that have previously been fortified within the classroom setting. In our volume, issues of authenticity permeate nearly all of the critical articles, but are especially important to Michelle Pagni Stewart.
If adult mediators often advance specific texts as the "true" versions of ethnic American identity, authors contend with both their desire to represent ethnicity accurately and their awareness that the pressure for authenticity often delimits the multiple and fluid nature of lived cultural experience. If some adults find it convenient to imagine cultural identity hermetically, so that their students or children can gather knowledge about their own culture or outside cultures, writers often resist easy compartmentalization of ethnicity by revealing the permeable boundaries of ethnic communities. Flux often characterizes ethnic identity in children's texts, for child characters face the junctures of cultural contact, generational tensions, and evolving senses of history. The "authentic" ethnic experience becomes associated with fluidity, for few writers describe their culture outside a historical moment of change. In this way, writers are able to react against essentialization and the "othering" of ethnic experience, for identity is relational and emerges in moments of cultural interaction. In our volume, the interview with Naomi Shihab Nye and Martha Cutter's essay explore issues of fluid ethnic identity.
Many ethnic children's texts also refuse to "fix" their stories within a single genre or mode. Aware of the various cultural influences that create identity, texts combine folklore, oral histories, songs, school knowledge, memories, and family stories, moving seamlessly through various strategies and narratives. In this way, texts imagine a sophisticated and multiply literate ethnic child reader, one who can speak the language of the schoolhouse as well as the language of the folk, one who can negotiate the traditions of family life as well as the demands of school institutions, as Katharine Rodier notes within our volume. Importantly, depicting such a range of knowledge and experience underscores the fluidity of the ethnic child's identity as well as the child's ability to traverse boundaries imaginatively.
An awareness of ethnic children's literature may open up our approaches to studying and teaching adult texts, for children's literature enriches our knowledge of the vast artistic achievement of ethnic writers in America. We cannot tell the story of ethnic American writing without the voice of children's literature. Additionally, recognizing the intersections between the two genres can be an important development in resisting the compartmentalization of children's literary studies, and ethnic children's literature in particular. As a discipline, children's literature continually combats marginalization within the academy. Ethnic scholars, who have waged similar battles on behalf of their own fields, can seize the opportunity to position ethnic children's literature at the center of academic study rather than on the periphery.
Notes
(1.) Groundbreaking texts include Larrick; Hirschfelder; Johnson-Feeling; MacCann; Slapin and Seale; Gregory; Thompson.
Works Cited
Gregory, Lucille H. "The Puerto Rican `Rainbow': Distortions vs. Complexities." The Children's Literature Association Quarterly 18.1 (1993): 29-35.
Hirschfelder, Arlene B. American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children: A Reader and Bibliography. Metuchen: Scarecrow P, 1982.
Johnson-Feelings, Dianne. Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and the Promise of African-American Literature for Youth. New York: Greenwood, 1990.
Larrick, Nancy. "The All-White World of Children's Books." Saturday Review 48 (11 September 1965): 63-65, 84-85. Rpt. in The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism. Ed. Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard. Metuchen: Scarecrow P, 1972. 156-68.
MacCann, Donnarae. "Multicultural Books and Interdisciplinary Inquiries." The Lion and the Unicorn 16.1 (1992): 43-56.
--. White Supremacy in Children's Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Sims, Rudine. Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary Children's Fiction. Urbana IL: NCTE, 1982.
Slapin, Beverly and Dora Seale. Through Indian Eyes: Native Experience in Books for Children. Philadelphia: New Society, 1992.
Thompson, Melissa Kay. "A Sea of Good Intentions: Native Americans in Books for Children." The Lion and the Unicorn 25.3 (2001): 353-74.
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-Education of the Negro. 1933. Nashville: Winston-Derek, 1990.
Katharine Capshaw Smith is writing a book on children's literature of the Harlem Renaissance. She teaches African American literature, ethnic American literature, and children's literature at Florida International University in Miami.
COPYRIGHT 2002 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
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In The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), Carter G. Woodson asserts that "there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom" (2). By suggesting the formative influence of children's culture on social relations, Woodson highlights an idea that courses through the body of ethnic American children's literature. Whether writing in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first centuries, authors infuse texts with the hope that through childhood, that potent period in an individual's development, sensibilities can be transformed. Children's literature allows readers a means to reconceptualize their relationship to ethnic and national identities. Telling stories to a young audience becomes the conduit for social and political revolution.
For some readers of MELUS, this volume may be their first introduction to the vital field of ethnic children's literature. Most interesting for scholars will be the field's special contextual and theoretical issues. A primary factor that distinguishes ethnic children's literature from adult literature is its complexly layered audience, for children's literature reaches various adult mediators as well as child readers. Publishers, librarians, schoolteachers, and parents read and evaluate children's texts in anticipation of a young audience, which is also multiply constituted. Ethnic children's literature becomes a particularly intense site of ideological and political contest, for various groups of adults struggle over which versions of ethnic identity will become institutionalized in school, home, and library settings; groups and individuals often advance specific reading and purchasing guidelines.
Extending the tiers of adult mediation are the multiple prizes and awards which help shape marketplace demand and expectations for ethnic children's literature. (1) In addition to the Caldecott and Newbery Awards, prizes specific to ethnic texts are becoming determinative, including the Pura Belpre Award given by the American Library Association (ALA), the Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature sponsored by the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP), the ALA's Coretta Scott King Award, the Wordcraft Circle Award, the Carter G. Woodson Book Award, and the Tomas Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award, among others.
Institutions in their various forms--parents' groups, school systems, library associations, publishers--are powerful forces shaping the contours and content of ethnic children's texts. Julia Mickenberg's essay and the interviews here with Christopher Paul Curtis and Nicolas Kanellos acknowledge the complex ideological exchanges that preface the publication of any ethnic children's text. Because works often narrate and explain details of a traumatic past, like the internment of Japanese Americans or the enslavement of African Americans, to an audience innocent of historical knowledge, the stakes are high: adult mediators recognize the gravity of their role as gatekeepers to history and arbiters of ethnic identity. Scholars of ethnic literature will therefore find much complexity in the ways writers construct history and negotiate the demands of various audiences.
In addition to adult mediators and young readers, ethnic children's literature is often targeted both to insider and outsider groups. If part of its agenda is didactic in advancing revivified versions of history and identity, texts often consciously address both the ethnic child reader and those in other populations. For children of the ethnicity represented textually, authors encourage resistance to pejorative categorizations by asking the reader to reimagine herself, to identify herself with the texts' cultural models. For a reader from another ethnic group, texts often encourage cross-cultural amity and understanding as a means to dispel prejudice. Early children's literature (perhaps because of the features of the marketplace) appears even more sensitive to the presence of a non-ethnic child audience and seems deeply invested in realignments of social power and in responding to ethnic stereotypes, as Tony Dykema-VanderArk's essay reminds us. Reversals of power have always had special force in works for children. For many ethnic children's texts of any era, the presence of a white audience is palpable. Writers imagine the fact of a multiple audience as an opportunity to change the minds of adults and children, of both insiders and outsiders. To speak to children particularly reflects their special position as readers within the terrain of ethnic literature, for writers assert that children are open to the rewards of the imagination in ways that adults may not be.
While MELUS readers will recognize Charles Eastman, Sui Sin Far, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Judith Ortiz Cofer, many of the authors examined in this volume belong to artistic communities somewhat hidden from view. Even major children's writers like Laurence Yep, Virginia Hamilton, and Christopher Paul Curtis may be unfamiliar to some MELUS readers. But because the field shares many qualities with adult ethnic writing, MELUS readers may recognize moments of exchange between the concerns of adult literature and those of children's texts. Many of the major writers we associate with the ethnic experience in America--Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Frank Chin, and Louise Erdrich, among others--have written texts intended for children or appropriated by young readers. Reconsidering our major writers as children's authors changes our sense of the breath of their readership and enhances our understanding of writers' complicated aesthetic and political purposes. Layers of meaning and a recognition of polyvocalism emerge from considering the poems of, say, Langston Hughes as "crosswritten" for both a child and adult audience.
Certainly there is much thematic crossover between adult and child ethnic literature: issues of identity, assimilation, nationalism, and cultural pluralism permeate both genres. Children's texts manipulate perception and language, rendering whiteness as an ethnicity and playing with constructions of cultures as "other," as Leona Fisher argues about Laurence Yep in our volume. Theoretically, however, issues fundamental to ethnic studies take on a different cast when examined through the lens of children's literature. Identity formation takes center stage, as Rocio G. Davis indicates, in fictional and non-fictional autobiography, coming of age stories, and the bildungsroman since such forms emphasize childhood and child protagonists. Artists often rewrite their childhoods or narrate their contact with their own children, which establishes a kind of reciprocal relationship with the child reader who is both audience and a form of inspiration, a cycle which might not occur in adult literature. Themes common to adult texts, like the relationship of the individual to collective identities of family, ethnicity, nationality, and religion, are brought into relief by children's writers who often unravel the child character's hybrid cultural position. Just as adult ethnic writing incorporates oral traditions and folklore, children's texts also frequently spotlight orality, but they also exploit issues of language acquisition since their subjects and readers are consciously grappling with the gap between oral child culture and learning written languages. Through play and experimentation, children's texts foreground the possibilities of linguistic hybridity, bilingualism, and biculturalism. Additionally, examination of children's literature highlights the thread of inter-generational storytelling that runs through the fabric of many ethnic texts and traditions. In our volume, Jarasa Kanok and Nina Mikkelsen discuss related themes regarding the oral tradition and language.
Although debates about legitimacy often undergird discussions of adult ethnic texts, authenticity becomes a particularly potent issue for children's literature because of the didactic imperatives both embedded in the texts and imposed contextually by adult arbiters. Since narrative can influence political realities, those adults who purchase and distribute children's texts recognize their responsibility to offer "true" depictions of ethnic experience, particularly when these books are endorsed by institutional structures. Likewise, authors writing to children realize that their texts can influence a child's socialization, and so work consciously to respond to prejudiced narratives of ethnicity through signification, allusion, and confrontation. Texts recoup lost heroes, fill the gaps of historical memory, subvert ethnic stereotypes, and advance revisionary versions of cultural identity. Children's texts are often intensely dialogic: they interact with biased versions of the past that have previously been fortified within the classroom setting. In our volume, issues of authenticity permeate nearly all of the critical articles, but are especially important to Michelle Pagni Stewart.
If adult mediators often advance specific texts as the "true" versions of ethnic American identity, authors contend with both their desire to represent ethnicity accurately and their awareness that the pressure for authenticity often delimits the multiple and fluid nature of lived cultural experience. If some adults find it convenient to imagine cultural identity hermetically, so that their students or children can gather knowledge about their own culture or outside cultures, writers often resist easy compartmentalization of ethnicity by revealing the permeable boundaries of ethnic communities. Flux often characterizes ethnic identity in children's texts, for child characters face the junctures of cultural contact, generational tensions, and evolving senses of history. The "authentic" ethnic experience becomes associated with fluidity, for few writers describe their culture outside a historical moment of change. In this way, writers are able to react against essentialization and the "othering" of ethnic experience, for identity is relational and emerges in moments of cultural interaction. In our volume, the interview with Naomi Shihab Nye and Martha Cutter's essay explore issues of fluid ethnic identity.
Many ethnic children's texts also refuse to "fix" their stories within a single genre or mode. Aware of the various cultural influences that create identity, texts combine folklore, oral histories, songs, school knowledge, memories, and family stories, moving seamlessly through various strategies and narratives. In this way, texts imagine a sophisticated and multiply literate ethnic child reader, one who can speak the language of the schoolhouse as well as the language of the folk, one who can negotiate the traditions of family life as well as the demands of school institutions, as Katharine Rodier notes within our volume. Importantly, depicting such a range of knowledge and experience underscores the fluidity of the ethnic child's identity as well as the child's ability to traverse boundaries imaginatively.
An awareness of ethnic children's literature may open up our approaches to studying and teaching adult texts, for children's literature enriches our knowledge of the vast artistic achievement of ethnic writers in America. We cannot tell the story of ethnic American writing without the voice of children's literature. Additionally, recognizing the intersections between the two genres can be an important development in resisting the compartmentalization of children's literary studies, and ethnic children's literature in particular. As a discipline, children's literature continually combats marginalization within the academy. Ethnic scholars, who have waged similar battles on behalf of their own fields, can seize the opportunity to position ethnic children's literature at the center of academic study rather than on the periphery.
Notes
(1.) Groundbreaking texts include Larrick; Hirschfelder; Johnson-Feeling; MacCann; Slapin and Seale; Gregory; Thompson.
Works Cited
Gregory, Lucille H. "The Puerto Rican `Rainbow': Distortions vs. Complexities." The Children's Literature Association Quarterly 18.1 (1993): 29-35.
Hirschfelder, Arlene B. American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children: A Reader and Bibliography. Metuchen: Scarecrow P, 1982.
Johnson-Feelings, Dianne. Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and the Promise of African-American Literature for Youth. New York: Greenwood, 1990.
Larrick, Nancy. "The All-White World of Children's Books." Saturday Review 48 (11 September 1965): 63-65, 84-85. Rpt. in The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism. Ed. Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard. Metuchen: Scarecrow P, 1972. 156-68.
MacCann, Donnarae. "Multicultural Books and Interdisciplinary Inquiries." The Lion and the Unicorn 16.1 (1992): 43-56.
--. White Supremacy in Children's Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Sims, Rudine. Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary Children's Fiction. Urbana IL: NCTE, 1982.
Slapin, Beverly and Dora Seale. Through Indian Eyes: Native Experience in Books for Children. Philadelphia: New Society, 1992.
Thompson, Melissa Kay. "A Sea of Good Intentions: Native Americans in Books for Children." The Lion and the Unicorn 25.3 (2001): 353-74.
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-Education of the Negro. 1933. Nashville: Winston-Derek, 1990.
Katharine Capshaw Smith is writing a book on children's literature of the Harlem Renaissance. She teaches African American literature, ethnic American literature, and children's literature at Florida International University in Miami.
COPYRIGHT 2002 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
COPYRIGHT http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2278/is_2_27/ai_92589722
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Syllabus ETHNIC AMERICA
The purpose of the course is to familiarize students with the ethnic and racial landscape of the United States. The course will emphasize the interaction among the major components of the color multiculture, in addition to providing an overview of theories and recent research results concerning this dynamically growing area of American Studies
Instructor András Tarnóc PhD
Schedule
WEEK ONE: Introduction
WEEK TWO: Theories and laws of the immigration process Reading, Tarnóc, Introduction
WEEK THREE: Modeling American culture, the macrocultural landscape Reading Tarnóc, 1.1, 1.2
WEEK FOUR: The black experience 1619-1865 Reading: Tarnóc 2.1, 3.1
WEEK FIVE: The black experience. 1865-1970’s Reading Tarnóc 4.1.1
WEEK SIX: The Chicano experience Reading Tarnóc 2.2, 3.2, 4.2.1
WEEK SEVEN Midterm quiz
WEEK EIGHT: Native American cultures I
WEEK NINE: Native American cultures II
WEEK TEN: Asian immigration
WEEK ELEVEN The Central European experience
WEEK TWELVE The Crisis of Multicultural America, the revival of nativism
WEEK THIRTEEN: Final quiz
WEEK FOURTEEN: Evaluation, wrap-up
Text: Tarnóc, András. The Dynamics of American Multiculturalism: A Model-Based Study. Eger: EKF Líceum Kiadó, 2005.
Presentation topics:
Dutch immigration to America
Norwegians in America
The Italians
The Irish
Hungarian Immigration to America
The Swedes
The Vietnamese
Immigrants from India
Chinese Immigration
The Japanese
The Cubans
The Puerto Ricans
Grading: The course grade is a composite of marks earned as a result of the completion of three elements: two quizzes and an in-class presentation. The presentation should be no more than 15 minutes in length, and it should include the following elements: a brief overview of the history of the given immigrant group’s country, the analysis of their acculturation process, main representatives in American culture, the given group’s legacy in American society and culture.
Instructor András Tarnóc PhD
Schedule
WEEK ONE: Introduction
WEEK TWO: Theories and laws of the immigration process Reading, Tarnóc, Introduction
WEEK THREE: Modeling American culture, the macrocultural landscape Reading Tarnóc, 1.1, 1.2
WEEK FOUR: The black experience 1619-1865 Reading: Tarnóc 2.1, 3.1
WEEK FIVE: The black experience. 1865-1970’s Reading Tarnóc 4.1.1
WEEK SIX: The Chicano experience Reading Tarnóc 2.2, 3.2, 4.2.1
WEEK SEVEN Midterm quiz
WEEK EIGHT: Native American cultures I
WEEK NINE: Native American cultures II
WEEK TEN: Asian immigration
WEEK ELEVEN The Central European experience
WEEK TWELVE The Crisis of Multicultural America, the revival of nativism
WEEK THIRTEEN: Final quiz
WEEK FOURTEEN: Evaluation, wrap-up
Text: Tarnóc, András. The Dynamics of American Multiculturalism: A Model-Based Study. Eger: EKF Líceum Kiadó, 2005.
Presentation topics:
Dutch immigration to America
Norwegians in America
The Italians
The Irish
Hungarian Immigration to America
The Swedes
The Vietnamese
Immigrants from India
Chinese Immigration
The Japanese
The Cubans
The Puerto Ricans
Grading: The course grade is a composite of marks earned as a result of the completion of three elements: two quizzes and an in-class presentation. The presentation should be no more than 15 minutes in length, and it should include the following elements: a brief overview of the history of the given immigrant group’s country, the analysis of their acculturation process, main representatives in American culture, the given group’s legacy in American society and culture.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Ethnic America
vents since 9/11 have heightened both foreign-policy and cultural divisions between Europe and the US. One view, often expressed by Europeans and liberal Americans, is that the US is becoming far more nationalistic and culturally conservative than Europe. Samuel Huntington's new book, Who Are We? America's Great Debate, is likely to reinforce this view. Huntington, the Harvard politics professor who wrote The Clash of Civilizations, has written an equally provocative book about the threats to American identity posed by regionally concentrated immigration from Mexico. The book has raised an enormous stir in intellectual and media circles and has been widely criticised in the US for "nativism" and anti-Hispanic scaremongering.
The nativist charge made by Alan Wolfe and other American reviewers is unjustified. Notwithstanding a few ambiguous passages, Huntington's celebration of the American racial melting pot is a far cry from the white nationalism of Peter Brimelow or Pat Buchanan. The main argument of the book is a very European one: that national identity is rooted in an ethno-cultural core rather than in abstract, universal principles. This premise, developed by the British theorist of nationalism Anthony Smith, holds that modern nations emerge from a pre-existing ethnic core, and that many of the myths, symbols and memories of nations have ethnic antecedents. Ethnicity is based on the idea of shared myths of descent. Most Europeans (the French and Swiss are partial exceptions) accept this idea for their own countries, but also believe the very different claim of American exceptionalism: that the US has always defined its national identity in ideological and political rather than ethnic terms. Huntington spends much of the early part of his book debunking this idea, and sketches the lineaments of America's Anglo-Protestant core. He correctly notes that the free population in 1776 was around 98 per cent Protestant and 80 per cent British in ancestry. However, he stresses that the nation evolved away from its Anglo-Protestant ethnic roots with the inclusion of the Irish Catholics and Germans after 1865 and southern and eastern Europeans after 1945, and left its white racial unity behind when African-Americans in the south gained civil and voting rights in the mid-1960s. He speaks of the nation as Anglo-Protestant in a cultural, rather than a strictly ethnic sense - an argument which writers like Arthur Schlesinger, Peter Salins and Francis Fukuyama also advanced in the early and mid-1990s.
The idea that Anglo-Protestant Americanism has a cultural core which can assimilate ethnic and racial outsiders reflects recent currents in liberal nationalist political theory - particularly the writings of David Miller and Yael Tamir - that espouse a "deep" civic nationalism. These writers contend that liberalism can coexist with a national identity based on myths and symbols that runs deeper than the contractual ties between state and rational citizen that form the hallmark of Jürgen Habermas's thin "constitutional patriotism." Huntington defines America's Anglo-Protestant cultural core as consisting of the English language, American political history and a number of characteristics derived from a low-church Protestant heritage, namely its evangelical and congregational religiosity, moralistic politics, individualism and work ethic. He cites a vast array of contemporary survey evidence which shows that Americans are on average more religious, individualistic and hard-working than people in other developed countries. This cultural core, he claims, has altered little over two centuries despite the absorption of millions of immigrants from around the world. He notes with approval rising rates of intermarriage among Americans of all ethnic and racial groups and a sharp rise in the proportion of Americans who are ethnically or racially mixed. This, he claims, is evidence of the power of America's Anglo-Protestant based melting pot to dissolve ethnic boundaries.
Indeed, the ethno-cultural core itself remains far more demographically significant than is often supposed. It is true that Anglo-Protestants now make up slightly less than a quarter of the US population (whites as a whole are about 70 per cent). But the foreign-born population has averaged no more than 10 per cent of the total throughout American history. And the 4m (largely Wasp) whites, American Indians and African-Americans of 1776 have had the same demographic impact on today's population of 293m as the 66m immigrants who arrived after them. Had the US been settled by the French (as in Quebec) or the Spanish (as in Latin America), adds Huntington, the country would bear a completely different national identity. The corollary, of course, is that the idea of the US as a nation of immigrants united only by the liberal principles and constitutional patriotism of the American creed is "at best, a half truth."
Huntington's faith in the assimilative power of America's cultural core is not boundless, however. He argues that the Anglo-Protestant core succeeded in assimilating immigrants in the past not only because of its intrinsic appeal, but also because of concerted "Americanising" on the part of educators, intellectuals, government officials and business leaders. Business leaders like Henry Ford held civics and language classes and even staged pageants in which minority groups entered a symbolic pot in native dress later to emerge as flag-waving Americans. Legislators also played their part by entrenching English as the official language of all states despite resistance from ethnic blocs like the Germans. Americanisers were aided in their task by the nature of pre-1965 immigration. The mainly European immigrants dispersed broadly across the continent which helped to dissipate centrifugal pressures that might have fragmented America's Anglo-Protestant cultural unity. Meanwhile, world war and the 1925-65 period of immigration restriction helped to head off rising nativist sentiment.
But alas, all is not well in the land. Huntington charts a new set of conditions which, he warns, threaten the "societal security" of the US. Chief among these are the "denationalisation" of American intellectual and business leaders and the new character of post-1965 immigration. Cosmopolitan elites emphasise globalisation, diversity, multiculturalism and open borders. New immigrants use global communications to maintain dual political loyalties and long-distance diasporan identities, and are encouraged to do so by the white elite. Furthermore, persistently high levels of immigration from neighbouring Mexico to the American southwest, is an unprecedented - and threatening - development. The fact that the US won this territory from Mexico as recently as the 1840s means that Americans may face an ethnic separatist movement for the first time in their history. As evidence, Huntington cites the public statements of Mexican politicians like Vicente Fox and the reconquista discourse of the Aztlan movement in California. Above all, Hispanics (Latin-American immigrants and their descendants) in contrast to other immigrant groups, seem to want to co-determine the national culture in the present as opposed to merely retrospectively.
Bilingualism is a key weapon in this co-determination that threatens to strike at the heart of America's Anglo-Protestant core. In Miami, "Anglos" (non-Hispanic whites) are now outsiders and must adapt to its Hispanic culture if they wish to succeed in the job market or politics. The Anglo response has been white flight or cultural surrender, says Huntington. He predicts that the same dilemma will confront other parts of the nation, leading to a country that is part Anglo, part Hispanic.
Finally, Huntington considers the possibility of a white nationalist response to the changes taking place. He says that white nativism is a "plausible" response to white demographic decline, the cosmopolitan defection of the white elite and the fading power of the Anglo-Protestant core. The only way to head off these challenges, claims Huntington, is for the nation to reaffirm its Anglo-Protestant cultural identity through a new Americanisation effort and to roll back the gains made by advocates of multiculturalism. While little is mentioned about immigration control, Huntington is clear that both legal and illegal immigration must be restricted if assimilation with Anglo-Protestant culture is to take place. He leaves us in no doubt that the universalist creed cannot hold together a nation battered by fundamental cultural divisions.
Taken as a whole, the book provides a powerful statement of American nationalism. It is well written, meticulously researched and passionately argued. It draws on many of the insights of historians and social scientists in the 1990s, maintains a comparative perspective, and will add to the growing civic nationalist chorus of writers like Michael Lind, Arthur Schlesinger, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Francis Fukuyama. But this is not an original statement of American cultural nationalism such as Lind's The Next American Nation. Like Huntington, Lind criticises the cosmopolitanism of American cultural elites and the belief, at least on the left, that it is possible to sustain a welfare state devoid of national identity. But Lind argues that the individualism of conservatives sits uncomfortably with a liberal nationalist orientation. Huntington, by contrast, shows little awareness of how individualism and the minimal state can blunt the bonds of nationhood.
Huntington correctly identifies the American elite as cosmopolitan, but overstates the novelty of this development. It is a long time since Wasp intellectuals defended Anglo-Protestant nationalism. The break came in the early 20th century with John Dewey and New York radicals like Randolph Bourne, who refined hazy pronouncements about American universalism into a cosmopolitan vision of the nation. Picked up by the main Protestant denominations by the 1910s, the cosmopolitan message gathered force in the 1920s (despite the upsurge of nativism and eugenics) and emerged as the dominant elite discourse as early as the 1930s and 1940s. Spreading more widely among the middle class thanks to the rise of higher education and television in the 1960s, cultural cosmopolitanism gradually gained pre-eminence, though it never assumed political form.
This combination of nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism emerged when the measure of Americanism was partly redefined from "Waspness" to anti-communism. The imperatives of the cold war helped to provide an overarching bond of transethnic unity and a focus for civic nationalism. This allowed cultural cosmopolitans to claim that the idea of the US as a nation of immigrants (symbolised by the reinvention of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon to immigrants) was a patriotic notion, while Wasp hegemony caused division in the face of the enemy. But this cosmopolitanism was accompanied by a hardening of America's political nationalism. The rapidly growing American federal state, its burgeoning multiethnic armed forces and the anti-communist crusade helped in this "ethnic to civic" shift. McCarthyism epitomises the shift: Senator Joe McCarthy, whose Catholic faith would formerly have cast a shadow of "un-Americanism" upon him, attacked internationalist Wasps like Alger Hiss, and was backed by both Catholic Democrats like John F Kennedy and southern Protestants. This helps to explain why today's American elites seem more willing to relax their ethno-cultural boundaries than their European counterparts, but are less willing to pool national political sovereignty.
Huntington warns that he writes as both a "patriot" and a "scholar" and that these two aims may conflict. This is indeed a difficult balancing act. As a scholar, his zeal for the truth leads him to speculate on sensitive issues like racial differences in patriotic feeling and economic performance which can only alienate African-Americans - who might otherwise sympathise with his message. As a patriot, he overstates the threat to American political unity posed by both Mexican immigration and dual citizenship. For instance, New Mexico, unlike California, has always had a near-majority of Hispanics, but there has been little talk of secession in Santa Fe. Likewise, the territorial claims of Mexican-Americans are undermined by their propensity for intermarriage and geographic mobility, and by the hazy quality of their pre-American collective memory.
The chapter on the Hispanic threat is nevertheless an original one, though some of its themes have been echoed by others like the late John Higham. But Huntington finds it hard to make up his mind about Mexican-Americans. Are they patriots who oppose bilingualism and high levels of immigration, convert to evangelical Protestantism, and also join the US armed forces in large numbers? Or are they defined by the alienated high-school dropouts who have turned their back on the American dream to congregate in a separatist enclave owing allegiance to another civilisation? One can find support for both conclusions in this book. Intermarriage and the rise of mixed-heritage individuals point towards a post-ethnic future, yet Huntington also contends that ethnic diasporas are increasing in importance in the US.
The thorniest tension in this book is between Huntington's political identity with the American nation state and his ethnic identity as a white American. His book largely sticks to the civic-nationalist script, but there is an undertow of concern over the future of the white majority in America. As a result, we find two visions which do not easily fit together: on the one hand, there is the futuristic and confident vision of a transracial melting pot "new man" that writers have celebrated since Hector St John de Cr�vecoeur. On the other hand, Huntington portrays an insecure white dominant ethnic group in flight from an ever-growing minority population.
Huntington's dilemma follows a well worn groove of nationalist thought. Both Cr�vecoeur (1782) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1835), for instance, considered Americans as the "British race in America," yet this did not prevent these writers from heralding the emergence of a cosmopolitan "new man." Likewise, Ralph Waldo Emerson exclaimed in 1846 that the US was "the asylum of all nations… the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race." Yet he also ventured that: "It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied... a very high place in the human family... The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance."
Emerson labelled his dualism "double-consciousness" and nearly all elite American historians, politicians and writers before 1910 viewed their nation in the same schizophrenic manner, switching between the lenses of their dominant ethnic group and that of a futuristic utopian America. None of these writers adequately explained his state of "double-consciousness" though many had ideas about assimilation. Some thought that a northern climate would "whiten" racial minorities while others were convinced that Catholics could be educated to the Protestant faith. Emerson assumed that assimilation turned immigrants into English descendants. Fifty years later, future president Theodore Roosevelt thought that the German and Irish immigrants would produce an Anglo-Saxon mix akin to that of Saxon and Briton in England leaving the Wasp majority securely in place.
The 19th-century elite believed that Anglo-Protestant assimilation would allow America to remain largely ethnically unchanged, yet the boldness of their cosmopolitan rhetoric suggests that they simultaneously sought to transcend their own Wasp identities. Samuel Huntington reflects these old tensions, and raises some of the more recent issues which political theorists of nationalism and multiculturalism are grappling with.
Much of the argument revolves around a basic dilemma for ethnic majorities: how do you construct a national identity that will satisfy your need for belonging and meaning but won't alienate minorities? Huntington is right to point to the English language, Protestant religiosity, individualism and the work ethic as defining characteristics of America. But American Catholics will not identify themselves with a Protestant nation, atheists will cringe at the thought of celebrating American religiosity, communitarians will reject the emphasis on individualism and work, Hispanics will not identify with the English language, and so on.
In short, trying to squeeze cultural depth into a nation like the US is bound to be divisive. A thin set of universal principles based on a constitution, some uncontentious pieces of state history, values like honesty and fair play, or platitudes like "toleration" and "unity in diversity" may be the only choice on offer in a liberal society. On the other hand, for many people the abstract quality of the American creed will be psychologically inadequate as a source of meaning and identity. By contrast, thicker ethnic identities, according to the French writer R�gis Debray, tell people that "they belong to ancient associations of 'their kind' with definite boundaries in time and space, and this gives their otherwise ambiguous and precarious lives a degree of certainty and purpose."
This suggests that ethnicity, rather than the state, is the best vehicle for maintaining a deep Anglo-Protestant culture in the US. Following this logic Americanisers should focus on developing a rich "American" ethnic option whose boundaries are open to like-minded non-Wasps, but whose mytho-symbolic core can only be altered by insiders. The problem with defining all 293m Americans as an Anglo-Protestant nation is that too many citizens do not identify with Anglo-Protestantism. An "American" ethnic option avoids this conflict with liberalism since no one is obliged to join and coexisting Americanisms are possible.
Most of the literature on nationalism and ethnicity fails to recognise that groups like the Jews in Israel, the English in England or English-speaking whites in America are as "ethnic" as minorities and have similar cultural needs. A neutral, managerial state based on constitutional patriotism cannot satisfy the existential needs of majorities any better than it can the aspirations of minorities. The recognition of majority cultural needs is urgent if the dominant-ethnic impulse is to discharge itself along liberal lines. This is one area in which Huntington is correct: US elites, like their counterparts in Europe, must accept that majority "native" cultures need to be recognised and that it is both wrong and dangerous to suppose that all majority ethnics can become cosmopolites. Writing in 1917, the pluralist Randolph Bourne urged his fellow Wasp Americans to transcend their Anglo-Saxon upbringing and "breathe a larger air" of cosmopolitanism, yet he simultaneously lauded the "proud Jew who sticks to his faith." This contradiction places the Wasp at the moral centre of the multicultural project, at once the "bland" Other to be transcended and the backdrop against which exotic ethnics can identify themselves.
The notion that the majority should be cosmopolitan while minorities should retain their culture is a patronising elite Wasp fallacy. Some form of multiculturalism is an appropriate policy for the 95 per cent of the world's states that are multiethnic, but in the US the policy must abandon its anti-majoritarian bias. State unity will emerge largely as the by-product of a self-confident majority group and need not be imposed on reluctant minorities. In this context, dual citizenship or even divided loyalties pose little threat to the state. Indeed, multinational and federal states with an electorally and demographically dominant ethnic group are generally more stable than those with no hegemonic group.
If Americanisers focus on creating a national sect, rather than a national church, they can replicate the success of American religion. Liberated from the constraints of equal symbolic treatment, they can construct an ethnic option that draws on the full richness of the American experience. The English language and Protestantism will certainly be core symbols, but Huntington's emphasis on the work ethic, mobility and individualism are less inspiring. More relevant are the icons and folkways which spring from the main Anglo-Protestant traditions of New England, the middle Atlantic, the west and the south. The pioneer and yeoman farmer are American lifestyle icons, akin to the habitant and coureur de bois in Quebec or the nomad among the Arabs. The place names, myths, vernacular architecture, dialects, traditional crafts and music of the cultural heartlands formed the basis of the regionalist cultural revival movement of the 1930s and 1940s and are a sturdier basis on which to build American particularity.
Black Anglo-Protestant Americans have been integral to American history since the beginning and their vernacular culture (music, migratory myths, southern rural traditions, religion) is ineluctably American. Similarly, the legends, landscapes and place names of American Indians are important material if one is to define an authentic American culture. They are both touchstones for a more settled Americanism of the future in which the American ethnic core fuses the myths and symbols of the main groups whose collective memory is based on the American landscape and is thus indigenous to the US experience. If ethnicity is based on myths of shared ancestry, then this new American ethnic group would trace its heritage back to these indigenous groups. This is where Huntington might borrow a page from his Mexican adversary's notebook. The blend of Anglo, Afro and Indian influences is the key to creating a new American type that is as powerful as the mestizo (a myth which weaves together Spanish and Aztec lineages) is for Mexico. This is surely a better formula for national unity than a racial caste alliance of whites and light-skinned Asians.
It is true that American cultural elites have become excessively cosmopolitan but Huntington is wrong to counter this with individualism, fundamentalist religion and flag-waving patriotism. All three have played their part in forestalling a more settled and culturally secure Americanism which can allay the anxieties of the majority. Indeed it may be no exaggeration to claim that when that majority has a serious ethnic option, we may see a reversal of the cold war shift towards a strident political nationalism. A secure sense of cultural belonging will remove the pressing need for unifying political ideologies and projects. The country will then be able to re-invest in international institutions without fear of losing its soul, and can once again become a team player in resolving so many of our most pressing global issues.
BY
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6167
The nativist charge made by Alan Wolfe and other American reviewers is unjustified. Notwithstanding a few ambiguous passages, Huntington's celebration of the American racial melting pot is a far cry from the white nationalism of Peter Brimelow or Pat Buchanan. The main argument of the book is a very European one: that national identity is rooted in an ethno-cultural core rather than in abstract, universal principles. This premise, developed by the British theorist of nationalism Anthony Smith, holds that modern nations emerge from a pre-existing ethnic core, and that many of the myths, symbols and memories of nations have ethnic antecedents. Ethnicity is based on the idea of shared myths of descent. Most Europeans (the French and Swiss are partial exceptions) accept this idea for their own countries, but also believe the very different claim of American exceptionalism: that the US has always defined its national identity in ideological and political rather than ethnic terms. Huntington spends much of the early part of his book debunking this idea, and sketches the lineaments of America's Anglo-Protestant core. He correctly notes that the free population in 1776 was around 98 per cent Protestant and 80 per cent British in ancestry. However, he stresses that the nation evolved away from its Anglo-Protestant ethnic roots with the inclusion of the Irish Catholics and Germans after 1865 and southern and eastern Europeans after 1945, and left its white racial unity behind when African-Americans in the south gained civil and voting rights in the mid-1960s. He speaks of the nation as Anglo-Protestant in a cultural, rather than a strictly ethnic sense - an argument which writers like Arthur Schlesinger, Peter Salins and Francis Fukuyama also advanced in the early and mid-1990s.
The idea that Anglo-Protestant Americanism has a cultural core which can assimilate ethnic and racial outsiders reflects recent currents in liberal nationalist political theory - particularly the writings of David Miller and Yael Tamir - that espouse a "deep" civic nationalism. These writers contend that liberalism can coexist with a national identity based on myths and symbols that runs deeper than the contractual ties between state and rational citizen that form the hallmark of Jürgen Habermas's thin "constitutional patriotism." Huntington defines America's Anglo-Protestant cultural core as consisting of the English language, American political history and a number of characteristics derived from a low-church Protestant heritage, namely its evangelical and congregational religiosity, moralistic politics, individualism and work ethic. He cites a vast array of contemporary survey evidence which shows that Americans are on average more religious, individualistic and hard-working than people in other developed countries. This cultural core, he claims, has altered little over two centuries despite the absorption of millions of immigrants from around the world. He notes with approval rising rates of intermarriage among Americans of all ethnic and racial groups and a sharp rise in the proportion of Americans who are ethnically or racially mixed. This, he claims, is evidence of the power of America's Anglo-Protestant based melting pot to dissolve ethnic boundaries.
Indeed, the ethno-cultural core itself remains far more demographically significant than is often supposed. It is true that Anglo-Protestants now make up slightly less than a quarter of the US population (whites as a whole are about 70 per cent). But the foreign-born population has averaged no more than 10 per cent of the total throughout American history. And the 4m (largely Wasp) whites, American Indians and African-Americans of 1776 have had the same demographic impact on today's population of 293m as the 66m immigrants who arrived after them. Had the US been settled by the French (as in Quebec) or the Spanish (as in Latin America), adds Huntington, the country would bear a completely different national identity. The corollary, of course, is that the idea of the US as a nation of immigrants united only by the liberal principles and constitutional patriotism of the American creed is "at best, a half truth."
Huntington's faith in the assimilative power of America's cultural core is not boundless, however. He argues that the Anglo-Protestant core succeeded in assimilating immigrants in the past not only because of its intrinsic appeal, but also because of concerted "Americanising" on the part of educators, intellectuals, government officials and business leaders. Business leaders like Henry Ford held civics and language classes and even staged pageants in which minority groups entered a symbolic pot in native dress later to emerge as flag-waving Americans. Legislators also played their part by entrenching English as the official language of all states despite resistance from ethnic blocs like the Germans. Americanisers were aided in their task by the nature of pre-1965 immigration. The mainly European immigrants dispersed broadly across the continent which helped to dissipate centrifugal pressures that might have fragmented America's Anglo-Protestant cultural unity. Meanwhile, world war and the 1925-65 period of immigration restriction helped to head off rising nativist sentiment.
But alas, all is not well in the land. Huntington charts a new set of conditions which, he warns, threaten the "societal security" of the US. Chief among these are the "denationalisation" of American intellectual and business leaders and the new character of post-1965 immigration. Cosmopolitan elites emphasise globalisation, diversity, multiculturalism and open borders. New immigrants use global communications to maintain dual political loyalties and long-distance diasporan identities, and are encouraged to do so by the white elite. Furthermore, persistently high levels of immigration from neighbouring Mexico to the American southwest, is an unprecedented - and threatening - development. The fact that the US won this territory from Mexico as recently as the 1840s means that Americans may face an ethnic separatist movement for the first time in their history. As evidence, Huntington cites the public statements of Mexican politicians like Vicente Fox and the reconquista discourse of the Aztlan movement in California. Above all, Hispanics (Latin-American immigrants and their descendants) in contrast to other immigrant groups, seem to want to co-determine the national culture in the present as opposed to merely retrospectively.
Bilingualism is a key weapon in this co-determination that threatens to strike at the heart of America's Anglo-Protestant core. In Miami, "Anglos" (non-Hispanic whites) are now outsiders and must adapt to its Hispanic culture if they wish to succeed in the job market or politics. The Anglo response has been white flight or cultural surrender, says Huntington. He predicts that the same dilemma will confront other parts of the nation, leading to a country that is part Anglo, part Hispanic.
Finally, Huntington considers the possibility of a white nationalist response to the changes taking place. He says that white nativism is a "plausible" response to white demographic decline, the cosmopolitan defection of the white elite and the fading power of the Anglo-Protestant core. The only way to head off these challenges, claims Huntington, is for the nation to reaffirm its Anglo-Protestant cultural identity through a new Americanisation effort and to roll back the gains made by advocates of multiculturalism. While little is mentioned about immigration control, Huntington is clear that both legal and illegal immigration must be restricted if assimilation with Anglo-Protestant culture is to take place. He leaves us in no doubt that the universalist creed cannot hold together a nation battered by fundamental cultural divisions.
Taken as a whole, the book provides a powerful statement of American nationalism. It is well written, meticulously researched and passionately argued. It draws on many of the insights of historians and social scientists in the 1990s, maintains a comparative perspective, and will add to the growing civic nationalist chorus of writers like Michael Lind, Arthur Schlesinger, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Francis Fukuyama. But this is not an original statement of American cultural nationalism such as Lind's The Next American Nation. Like Huntington, Lind criticises the cosmopolitanism of American cultural elites and the belief, at least on the left, that it is possible to sustain a welfare state devoid of national identity. But Lind argues that the individualism of conservatives sits uncomfortably with a liberal nationalist orientation. Huntington, by contrast, shows little awareness of how individualism and the minimal state can blunt the bonds of nationhood.
Huntington correctly identifies the American elite as cosmopolitan, but overstates the novelty of this development. It is a long time since Wasp intellectuals defended Anglo-Protestant nationalism. The break came in the early 20th century with John Dewey and New York radicals like Randolph Bourne, who refined hazy pronouncements about American universalism into a cosmopolitan vision of the nation. Picked up by the main Protestant denominations by the 1910s, the cosmopolitan message gathered force in the 1920s (despite the upsurge of nativism and eugenics) and emerged as the dominant elite discourse as early as the 1930s and 1940s. Spreading more widely among the middle class thanks to the rise of higher education and television in the 1960s, cultural cosmopolitanism gradually gained pre-eminence, though it never assumed political form.
This combination of nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism emerged when the measure of Americanism was partly redefined from "Waspness" to anti-communism. The imperatives of the cold war helped to provide an overarching bond of transethnic unity and a focus for civic nationalism. This allowed cultural cosmopolitans to claim that the idea of the US as a nation of immigrants (symbolised by the reinvention of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon to immigrants) was a patriotic notion, while Wasp hegemony caused division in the face of the enemy. But this cosmopolitanism was accompanied by a hardening of America's political nationalism. The rapidly growing American federal state, its burgeoning multiethnic armed forces and the anti-communist crusade helped in this "ethnic to civic" shift. McCarthyism epitomises the shift: Senator Joe McCarthy, whose Catholic faith would formerly have cast a shadow of "un-Americanism" upon him, attacked internationalist Wasps like Alger Hiss, and was backed by both Catholic Democrats like John F Kennedy and southern Protestants. This helps to explain why today's American elites seem more willing to relax their ethno-cultural boundaries than their European counterparts, but are less willing to pool national political sovereignty.
Huntington warns that he writes as both a "patriot" and a "scholar" and that these two aims may conflict. This is indeed a difficult balancing act. As a scholar, his zeal for the truth leads him to speculate on sensitive issues like racial differences in patriotic feeling and economic performance which can only alienate African-Americans - who might otherwise sympathise with his message. As a patriot, he overstates the threat to American political unity posed by both Mexican immigration and dual citizenship. For instance, New Mexico, unlike California, has always had a near-majority of Hispanics, but there has been little talk of secession in Santa Fe. Likewise, the territorial claims of Mexican-Americans are undermined by their propensity for intermarriage and geographic mobility, and by the hazy quality of their pre-American collective memory.
The chapter on the Hispanic threat is nevertheless an original one, though some of its themes have been echoed by others like the late John Higham. But Huntington finds it hard to make up his mind about Mexican-Americans. Are they patriots who oppose bilingualism and high levels of immigration, convert to evangelical Protestantism, and also join the US armed forces in large numbers? Or are they defined by the alienated high-school dropouts who have turned their back on the American dream to congregate in a separatist enclave owing allegiance to another civilisation? One can find support for both conclusions in this book. Intermarriage and the rise of mixed-heritage individuals point towards a post-ethnic future, yet Huntington also contends that ethnic diasporas are increasing in importance in the US.
The thorniest tension in this book is between Huntington's political identity with the American nation state and his ethnic identity as a white American. His book largely sticks to the civic-nationalist script, but there is an undertow of concern over the future of the white majority in America. As a result, we find two visions which do not easily fit together: on the one hand, there is the futuristic and confident vision of a transracial melting pot "new man" that writers have celebrated since Hector St John de Cr�vecoeur. On the other hand, Huntington portrays an insecure white dominant ethnic group in flight from an ever-growing minority population.
Huntington's dilemma follows a well worn groove of nationalist thought. Both Cr�vecoeur (1782) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1835), for instance, considered Americans as the "British race in America," yet this did not prevent these writers from heralding the emergence of a cosmopolitan "new man." Likewise, Ralph Waldo Emerson exclaimed in 1846 that the US was "the asylum of all nations… the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race." Yet he also ventured that: "It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied... a very high place in the human family... The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance."
Emerson labelled his dualism "double-consciousness" and nearly all elite American historians, politicians and writers before 1910 viewed their nation in the same schizophrenic manner, switching between the lenses of their dominant ethnic group and that of a futuristic utopian America. None of these writers adequately explained his state of "double-consciousness" though many had ideas about assimilation. Some thought that a northern climate would "whiten" racial minorities while others were convinced that Catholics could be educated to the Protestant faith. Emerson assumed that assimilation turned immigrants into English descendants. Fifty years later, future president Theodore Roosevelt thought that the German and Irish immigrants would produce an Anglo-Saxon mix akin to that of Saxon and Briton in England leaving the Wasp majority securely in place.
The 19th-century elite believed that Anglo-Protestant assimilation would allow America to remain largely ethnically unchanged, yet the boldness of their cosmopolitan rhetoric suggests that they simultaneously sought to transcend their own Wasp identities. Samuel Huntington reflects these old tensions, and raises some of the more recent issues which political theorists of nationalism and multiculturalism are grappling with.
Much of the argument revolves around a basic dilemma for ethnic majorities: how do you construct a national identity that will satisfy your need for belonging and meaning but won't alienate minorities? Huntington is right to point to the English language, Protestant religiosity, individualism and the work ethic as defining characteristics of America. But American Catholics will not identify themselves with a Protestant nation, atheists will cringe at the thought of celebrating American religiosity, communitarians will reject the emphasis on individualism and work, Hispanics will not identify with the English language, and so on.
In short, trying to squeeze cultural depth into a nation like the US is bound to be divisive. A thin set of universal principles based on a constitution, some uncontentious pieces of state history, values like honesty and fair play, or platitudes like "toleration" and "unity in diversity" may be the only choice on offer in a liberal society. On the other hand, for many people the abstract quality of the American creed will be psychologically inadequate as a source of meaning and identity. By contrast, thicker ethnic identities, according to the French writer R�gis Debray, tell people that "they belong to ancient associations of 'their kind' with definite boundaries in time and space, and this gives their otherwise ambiguous and precarious lives a degree of certainty and purpose."
This suggests that ethnicity, rather than the state, is the best vehicle for maintaining a deep Anglo-Protestant culture in the US. Following this logic Americanisers should focus on developing a rich "American" ethnic option whose boundaries are open to like-minded non-Wasps, but whose mytho-symbolic core can only be altered by insiders. The problem with defining all 293m Americans as an Anglo-Protestant nation is that too many citizens do not identify with Anglo-Protestantism. An "American" ethnic option avoids this conflict with liberalism since no one is obliged to join and coexisting Americanisms are possible.
Most of the literature on nationalism and ethnicity fails to recognise that groups like the Jews in Israel, the English in England or English-speaking whites in America are as "ethnic" as minorities and have similar cultural needs. A neutral, managerial state based on constitutional patriotism cannot satisfy the existential needs of majorities any better than it can the aspirations of minorities. The recognition of majority cultural needs is urgent if the dominant-ethnic impulse is to discharge itself along liberal lines. This is one area in which Huntington is correct: US elites, like their counterparts in Europe, must accept that majority "native" cultures need to be recognised and that it is both wrong and dangerous to suppose that all majority ethnics can become cosmopolites. Writing in 1917, the pluralist Randolph Bourne urged his fellow Wasp Americans to transcend their Anglo-Saxon upbringing and "breathe a larger air" of cosmopolitanism, yet he simultaneously lauded the "proud Jew who sticks to his faith." This contradiction places the Wasp at the moral centre of the multicultural project, at once the "bland" Other to be transcended and the backdrop against which exotic ethnics can identify themselves.
The notion that the majority should be cosmopolitan while minorities should retain their culture is a patronising elite Wasp fallacy. Some form of multiculturalism is an appropriate policy for the 95 per cent of the world's states that are multiethnic, but in the US the policy must abandon its anti-majoritarian bias. State unity will emerge largely as the by-product of a self-confident majority group and need not be imposed on reluctant minorities. In this context, dual citizenship or even divided loyalties pose little threat to the state. Indeed, multinational and federal states with an electorally and demographically dominant ethnic group are generally more stable than those with no hegemonic group.
If Americanisers focus on creating a national sect, rather than a national church, they can replicate the success of American religion. Liberated from the constraints of equal symbolic treatment, they can construct an ethnic option that draws on the full richness of the American experience. The English language and Protestantism will certainly be core symbols, but Huntington's emphasis on the work ethic, mobility and individualism are less inspiring. More relevant are the icons and folkways which spring from the main Anglo-Protestant traditions of New England, the middle Atlantic, the west and the south. The pioneer and yeoman farmer are American lifestyle icons, akin to the habitant and coureur de bois in Quebec or the nomad among the Arabs. The place names, myths, vernacular architecture, dialects, traditional crafts and music of the cultural heartlands formed the basis of the regionalist cultural revival movement of the 1930s and 1940s and are a sturdier basis on which to build American particularity.
Black Anglo-Protestant Americans have been integral to American history since the beginning and their vernacular culture (music, migratory myths, southern rural traditions, religion) is ineluctably American. Similarly, the legends, landscapes and place names of American Indians are important material if one is to define an authentic American culture. They are both touchstones for a more settled Americanism of the future in which the American ethnic core fuses the myths and symbols of the main groups whose collective memory is based on the American landscape and is thus indigenous to the US experience. If ethnicity is based on myths of shared ancestry, then this new American ethnic group would trace its heritage back to these indigenous groups. This is where Huntington might borrow a page from his Mexican adversary's notebook. The blend of Anglo, Afro and Indian influences is the key to creating a new American type that is as powerful as the mestizo (a myth which weaves together Spanish and Aztec lineages) is for Mexico. This is surely a better formula for national unity than a racial caste alliance of whites and light-skinned Asians.
It is true that American cultural elites have become excessively cosmopolitan but Huntington is wrong to counter this with individualism, fundamentalist religion and flag-waving patriotism. All three have played their part in forestalling a more settled and culturally secure Americanism which can allay the anxieties of the majority. Indeed it may be no exaggeration to claim that when that majority has a serious ethnic option, we may see a reversal of the cold war shift towards a strident political nationalism. A secure sense of cultural belonging will remove the pressing need for unifying political ideologies and projects. The country will then be able to re-invest in international institutions without fear of losing its soul, and can once again become a team player in resolving so many of our most pressing global issues.
BY
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6167
The Chinese-American Experience: An Introduction
From today’s perspective, it is difficult to believe that once upon a time in America, Chinese were considered heathens and subjected to widespread persecution and violence. The earlier hostile attitude toward Chinese is a far cry from the contemporary esteem for them as a "model minority" to be emulated by others. But as the pages of Harper’s Weekly document, in the 19th century, many people considered the Chinese to be unassimilable and therefore unacceptable—hence, their eventual exclusion from America in 1882.
In the mid-19th century, Chinese came to "Gold Mountain," as they called America, to join the "Gold Rush" that began at Sutter’s Mill, Sacramento, California. As the lure of gold diminished, they came simply to work. Initially welcomed, they became a significant part of the labor force that laid the economic foundation of the American West. Chinese could be found throughout the region, laboring in agriculture, mining, industry, and wherever workers were needed. They are best known for their contribution to the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, the completion of which united the country economically and culturally.
In spite of their indispensable role in the development of the American West, the Chinese suffered severe exploitation. They were discriminated against in terms of pay and forced to work under abysmal conditions. White workers viewed them as economic competitors and racial inferiors, thereby stimulating the passage of discriminatory laws and the commission of widespread acts of violence against the Chinese. According to John Higham:
No variety of anti-European sentiment has ever approached the violent extremes to which anti-Chinese agitation went in the 1870s and 1880s. Lynching, boycotts, and mass expulsions…harassed the Chinese. *
Under the racist slogan, "Chinese must go!" an anti-Chinese movement emerged that worked assiduously to deprive the Chinese of a means of making a living in the general economy. The movement’s goal was to drive them out of the country. This hostility hindered efforts by the Chinese to become American. It forced them to flee to the Chinatowns on the coasts, where they found safety and support. In these ghettos, they managed to eke out a meager existence, but were isolated from the rest of the population, making it difficult if not impossible to assimilate into mainstream society. To add insult to injury, Chinese were criticized for their alleged unassimilability.
Finally, Chinese workers were prevented from immigrating to America by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Its passage was a watershed event in American history. Besides identifying for the first time a specific group of people by name as undesirable for immigration to the United States, the act also marked a fateful departure from the traditional American policy of unrestricted immigration.
After China became an ally during World War II, the exclusion laws proved to be an embarrassment and were finally repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943. This bill made it possible for Chinese to become naturalized citizens and gave them an annual quota of 105 immigrants. While the bill ended an injustice that had been committed sixty-one years earlier, the damage to the Chinese community had already been done. Between the 1890s and 1920s, the Chinese population in America declined. But the worst effect was to undermine the one thing that was most precious to the Chinese, their families. Chinese men were forced to live lonely bachelor lives in the almost all-male society that was Chinatown. Meanwhile, wives and children were forced to remain in China, supported by remittances from the United States and rarely seeing their husbands and fathers. Such separations made it difficult to maintain strong family ties.
As the annual quota of 105 immigrants indicates, America’s immigration policy was restrictive and particularly discriminatory against Chinese and other Asians. Equality in immigration only came with the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1965, which repealed the iniquitous national origins quota system that had been established earlier. Since the 1960s, Chinese have immigrated to the United States in significant numbers, taking particular advantage of the immigration policy’s emphasis on family reunification. At the end of the 20th century, there are an estimated 2.3 million Chinese-Americans.
Today, Chinese-Americans are doing relatively well. They are generally seen as hard-working professionals or small business people, with stable families. Indeed, the most recent census data indicates that they have median household incomes and educational levels higher than their White counterparts. While problems of discrimination still exist, they are mild compared to those reported in Harper’s Weekly over a century ago.
Harper’s Weekly and the Chinese
As one would expect from a publication of such stature, Harper’s Weekly reported on the Chinese in America. Besides carrying articles on Sino-American relations and some of the more exotic features of Chinese culture, Harper’s Weekly provided lengthy essays on aspects of the Chinese that were of interest to the public, such as opium consumption and Chinese coolies. These writings and the detailed illustrations that accompanied them provide important information about the daily lives of the Chinese. As the "Chinese Question" evolved from a regional to a national issue, Harper’s Weekly increased its coverage of the Chinese community. It looked at events such as the signing of the Burlingame Treaty in 1868, between China and the United States, in terms of its implications for the Chinese in America.
Even more significant than the articles were the editorials in which the editors of Harper’s Weekly commented extensively on the Chinese. In keeping with the sentiment of the times, the editorials perceived the Chinese as the most alien of the immigrants to come to American shores. As such, some of the editors were ambivalent about the assimilability of the Chinese. However, the editors staunchly defended the right of Chinese to be here and to be treated with dignity, basing their arguments on American ideals and a shared humanity. They implicitly challenged the popular 19th-century definition of "the American" as a White person and considered the Chinese to be citizen material. Furthermore, the editors roundly condemned the acts of violence that were perpetrated against the Chinese, including the massacre at Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885.
In Harper’s Weekly, the efforts of the editors were complemented by the work of Thomas Nast, the most accomplished political cartoonist of his age. He drew over fifty cartoons featuring the Chinese, depicting their trials and tribulations, criticizing their unfair treatment and relating it to the plight of other people of color, such as Blacks and Native Americans. Nast’s work contrasts with that of Frank Bellew, a fellow Harper’s Weekly cartoonist, who caricatured the Chinese and ridiculed their speech.
The significance of Nast’s work is indicated by the continued use of his drawings by contemporary scholars. For example, his Harper’s Weekly depiction of the Rock Springs Massacre was used on the dust jacket of Alexander Saxton’s classic study, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (University of California Press, 1971), and his political cartoons were featured in the documentary, "Misunderstanding China," that was produced on the eve of President Richard M. Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972.
In sum, Harper’s Weekly is an important primary source about Chinese living in America during the 19th- century, providing information about them and their communities, and commenting on the controversies that surrounded them. Much to their credit, the editors exercised their moral responsibility and decried the injustices visited upon the Chinese during their most difficult period in America.
By William Wei
Professor of History, University of Colorado at Boulder
http://immigrants.harpweek.com/
In the mid-19th century, Chinese came to "Gold Mountain," as they called America, to join the "Gold Rush" that began at Sutter’s Mill, Sacramento, California. As the lure of gold diminished, they came simply to work. Initially welcomed, they became a significant part of the labor force that laid the economic foundation of the American West. Chinese could be found throughout the region, laboring in agriculture, mining, industry, and wherever workers were needed. They are best known for their contribution to the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, the completion of which united the country economically and culturally.
In spite of their indispensable role in the development of the American West, the Chinese suffered severe exploitation. They were discriminated against in terms of pay and forced to work under abysmal conditions. White workers viewed them as economic competitors and racial inferiors, thereby stimulating the passage of discriminatory laws and the commission of widespread acts of violence against the Chinese. According to John Higham:
No variety of anti-European sentiment has ever approached the violent extremes to which anti-Chinese agitation went in the 1870s and 1880s. Lynching, boycotts, and mass expulsions…harassed the Chinese. *
Under the racist slogan, "Chinese must go!" an anti-Chinese movement emerged that worked assiduously to deprive the Chinese of a means of making a living in the general economy. The movement’s goal was to drive them out of the country. This hostility hindered efforts by the Chinese to become American. It forced them to flee to the Chinatowns on the coasts, where they found safety and support. In these ghettos, they managed to eke out a meager existence, but were isolated from the rest of the population, making it difficult if not impossible to assimilate into mainstream society. To add insult to injury, Chinese were criticized for their alleged unassimilability.
Finally, Chinese workers were prevented from immigrating to America by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Its passage was a watershed event in American history. Besides identifying for the first time a specific group of people by name as undesirable for immigration to the United States, the act also marked a fateful departure from the traditional American policy of unrestricted immigration.
After China became an ally during World War II, the exclusion laws proved to be an embarrassment and were finally repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943. This bill made it possible for Chinese to become naturalized citizens and gave them an annual quota of 105 immigrants. While the bill ended an injustice that had been committed sixty-one years earlier, the damage to the Chinese community had already been done. Between the 1890s and 1920s, the Chinese population in America declined. But the worst effect was to undermine the one thing that was most precious to the Chinese, their families. Chinese men were forced to live lonely bachelor lives in the almost all-male society that was Chinatown. Meanwhile, wives and children were forced to remain in China, supported by remittances from the United States and rarely seeing their husbands and fathers. Such separations made it difficult to maintain strong family ties.
As the annual quota of 105 immigrants indicates, America’s immigration policy was restrictive and particularly discriminatory against Chinese and other Asians. Equality in immigration only came with the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1965, which repealed the iniquitous national origins quota system that had been established earlier. Since the 1960s, Chinese have immigrated to the United States in significant numbers, taking particular advantage of the immigration policy’s emphasis on family reunification. At the end of the 20th century, there are an estimated 2.3 million Chinese-Americans.
Today, Chinese-Americans are doing relatively well. They are generally seen as hard-working professionals or small business people, with stable families. Indeed, the most recent census data indicates that they have median household incomes and educational levels higher than their White counterparts. While problems of discrimination still exist, they are mild compared to those reported in Harper’s Weekly over a century ago.
Harper’s Weekly and the Chinese
As one would expect from a publication of such stature, Harper’s Weekly reported on the Chinese in America. Besides carrying articles on Sino-American relations and some of the more exotic features of Chinese culture, Harper’s Weekly provided lengthy essays on aspects of the Chinese that were of interest to the public, such as opium consumption and Chinese coolies. These writings and the detailed illustrations that accompanied them provide important information about the daily lives of the Chinese. As the "Chinese Question" evolved from a regional to a national issue, Harper’s Weekly increased its coverage of the Chinese community. It looked at events such as the signing of the Burlingame Treaty in 1868, between China and the United States, in terms of its implications for the Chinese in America.
Even more significant than the articles were the editorials in which the editors of Harper’s Weekly commented extensively on the Chinese. In keeping with the sentiment of the times, the editorials perceived the Chinese as the most alien of the immigrants to come to American shores. As such, some of the editors were ambivalent about the assimilability of the Chinese. However, the editors staunchly defended the right of Chinese to be here and to be treated with dignity, basing their arguments on American ideals and a shared humanity. They implicitly challenged the popular 19th-century definition of "the American" as a White person and considered the Chinese to be citizen material. Furthermore, the editors roundly condemned the acts of violence that were perpetrated against the Chinese, including the massacre at Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885.
In Harper’s Weekly, the efforts of the editors were complemented by the work of Thomas Nast, the most accomplished political cartoonist of his age. He drew over fifty cartoons featuring the Chinese, depicting their trials and tribulations, criticizing their unfair treatment and relating it to the plight of other people of color, such as Blacks and Native Americans. Nast’s work contrasts with that of Frank Bellew, a fellow Harper’s Weekly cartoonist, who caricatured the Chinese and ridiculed their speech.
The significance of Nast’s work is indicated by the continued use of his drawings by contemporary scholars. For example, his Harper’s Weekly depiction of the Rock Springs Massacre was used on the dust jacket of Alexander Saxton’s classic study, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (University of California Press, 1971), and his political cartoons were featured in the documentary, "Misunderstanding China," that was produced on the eve of President Richard M. Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972.
In sum, Harper’s Weekly is an important primary source about Chinese living in America during the 19th- century, providing information about them and their communities, and commenting on the controversies that surrounded them. Much to their credit, the editors exercised their moral responsibility and decried the injustices visited upon the Chinese during their most difficult period in America.
By William Wei
Professor of History, University of Colorado at Boulder
http://immigrants.harpweek.com/
American Ethnic Geography
A Selected Bibliography of the
Ethnic and Cultural Geography of the
United States and Canada
Ethnic and Cultural Geography of the
United States and Canada
The literature in English on American ethnic groups and their cultural characteristics is truly voluminous. No one bibliography contains every available source, this one included. What this means is that there are many sources beyond what is listed in the pages that follow. This bibliography is only a beginning, so do not hesitate to dig deeper.
This bibliography does, however, contain most of the major secondary sources prepared by geographers or which have appeared in geographical publications. So, since this is a geography course, any research for the term paper should begin here. While you may use additional sources, any term paper which does not contain references to the relevant geographical literature will receive a lower grade.
Some of the sources cited in this bibliography may be found in Moellering Library, especially those in the main geography journals, like Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Geographical Review. Other sources, however, are not held by Moellering Library. This is especially true of many specialized journals and periodicals. This is not an excuse for ignoring this literature. With planning and forethought, sources unavailable on campus can be obtained through Interlibrary Loan . . . and should be. Remember, neglecting these important sources, though they may take extra effort to acquire, will result in a lower term paper grade.
This bibliography was compiled from a wide variety of sources, some of which contained only partial bibliographic information. Because of this, some of the references do not have a complete listing. There should, nevertheless, be enough information for you to locate and acquire any source. However, once you have obtained a source, you are to include the complete bibliographic citation at the end of your paper, regardless of its completeness here.
Finally, this bibliography also contains a list of suitable atlases from which you may draw the map to accompany your term paper. In some cases it will not be necessary to consult an atlas, as many of the books and articles listed in the bibliography themselves contain excellent maps. Just remember that if you are having difficulty finding a good map for your subject, you may find one in one of these atlases. If you use an atlas, be sure to list it as a source in your bibliography.
BY.
http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/geo/courses/geo200/bibcom.html
This bibliography does, however, contain most of the major secondary sources prepared by geographers or which have appeared in geographical publications. So, since this is a geography course, any research for the term paper should begin here. While you may use additional sources, any term paper which does not contain references to the relevant geographical literature will receive a lower grade.
Some of the sources cited in this bibliography may be found in Moellering Library, especially those in the main geography journals, like Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Geographical Review. Other sources, however, are not held by Moellering Library. This is especially true of many specialized journals and periodicals. This is not an excuse for ignoring this literature. With planning and forethought, sources unavailable on campus can be obtained through Interlibrary Loan . . . and should be. Remember, neglecting these important sources, though they may take extra effort to acquire, will result in a lower term paper grade.
This bibliography was compiled from a wide variety of sources, some of which contained only partial bibliographic information. Because of this, some of the references do not have a complete listing. There should, nevertheless, be enough information for you to locate and acquire any source. However, once you have obtained a source, you are to include the complete bibliographic citation at the end of your paper, regardless of its completeness here.
Finally, this bibliography also contains a list of suitable atlases from which you may draw the map to accompany your term paper. In some cases it will not be necessary to consult an atlas, as many of the books and articles listed in the bibliography themselves contain excellent maps. Just remember that if you are having difficulty finding a good map for your subject, you may find one in one of these atlases. If you use an atlas, be sure to list it as a source in your bibliography.
BY.
http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/geo/courses/geo200/bibcom.html
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