Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-10, Section: A, page: 3670.

Adviser: David E. Apter.

This study undertakes a structural analysis of the dominant American culture and its effects on American encounters with Asiatic/Asian Others. It does so by viewing strands, themes, etc. within culture as discursive languages and formal syntagms that can be transformed into paradigmatic oppositions. At the level of these binary structures, culture possesses a structural unity that is obscured by the surface proliferation of utterances. These oppositions, furthermore, engender unwanted tensions, unbearable contradictions, etc. that prompt the culture to mediate them in various ways. In the dominant American culture, at least four major strands or themes exist (i.e. republicanism, liberalism, millennialism and historism) containing four corresponding sets of oppositions. The dominant American culture mediates these four paradigmatic oppositions by relying in various ways on an open frontier.

Access to this frontier, however, depended decisively upon the identity and disposition of its inhabitants. In expanding into the land frontier, Americans constructed a suitable Indian Other to justify their acts of subjugation and conquest. The identity of the dominant American Self thus emerged not only out of differences within the dominant American culture, but also from differences between itself and its subordinate Others. Indian resistance to subjugation, however, destabilized these structures of American identity and Indian alterity. The more successful the resistance, the more likely the dominant culture experiences a profound crisis of self-conceptualization. When confronted with the intolerable destabilizations of such a poststructural moment, however, the dominant culture vigorously restored structural stability by forcefully subjugating its Indian Other and securing an open frontier.

With the apparent closing of this first Asiatic frontier at the end of 19th C., the continuing need to mediate thematic oppositions prompted the dominant American culture to seek redefined frontiers. One of these new frontiers was located generally in Asia and particularly in China, the Philippines and Vietnam. As was the case on the old land frontier, however, access to this new Asian frontier also depended upon the identity and disposition of its inhabitants. In constructing a suitable Asian alterity to assure American access to the Asian frontier, the dominant culture affected American foreign relations with Asia by favoring certain policy options and sanctioning certain military tactics.