Our America : nativism, modernism, and pluralism / Walter Benn Michaels.

Durham : Duke University Press, [1995]

1 online resource (186 pages)

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Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity - linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos - something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties.

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Print version: Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America. Durham : Duke University Press, [1995]

Books / Online

English

August 24, 2018

Includes bibliographical references (pages [143]-182) and index.

Electronic books.