Behdad Ali Behdad

Forgetful Nation (eBook, PDF)

On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

In A Forgetful Nation, the renowned postcolonialism scholar Ali Behdad turns his attention to the United States. Offering a timely critique of immigration and nationalism, Behdad takes on an idea central to American national mythology: that the United States is "e;a nation of immigrants,"e; welcoming and generous to foreigners. He argues that Americans' treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility, and that this deep-seated ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of national identity. Building on the insights of Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, he develops a theory of the historical amnesia that enables the United States to disavow a past and present built on the exclusion of others.Behdad shows how political, cultural, and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known-J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass-and lesser-known-such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country's violent beginnings, including its conquest of Native Americans, brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant "e;aliens"e; today, particularly along the Mexican border.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 232
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. Juli 2005
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822387039
• Artikelnr.: 54936322

Autorenporträt

Ali Behdad is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, also published by Duke University Press.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface ix
Introduction: Nation and Immigration 1
Imagining America: Forgeful Fathers and the Founding Myths of the Nation
23
Historicizing America: Tocqueville and the Ideology of Exceptionalism 48
Immigrant America: Liberal Discourse of Immigration and the Ritual of
Self-Renewal 76
Discourses of Exclusion: Nativism and the Imaginging of a “White Nation”
111
Practices of Exclusion: National Borders and the Disciplining of Aliens
143
Conclusion: Remembering 9/11 169
Notes 117
Bibliography 193
Index 205