Forgetful Nation

On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States

Автор: Ali Behdad

Език:

Корици: С твърди корици

Издател: Duke University Press

Наличност: 50% вероятност

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In "A Forgetful Nation", the renowned postcolonial studies scholar Ali Behdad turns his attention to...

Информация за книгата

Автор

Ali Behdad

Език

Английски език

Корици

Книга - С твърди корици

Издадена

2005

страници

232

EAN

9780822336068

ISBN

0822336065

Enbook ID

04938226

Издател

Duke University Press

Теглоt

476

Размери

152 x 239 x 20

Пълно описание

In "A Forgetful Nation", the renowned postcolonial studies 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 U.S. is 'a nation of immigrants', open-armed and welcoming 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 U.S. 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 the nativist nineteenth-century political party the Know-Nothings and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the U.S. 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 labour force; and, the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant 'aliens' today, particularly along the U.S.-Mexico border.

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