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The arrival of mass film and television reshaped the long-established literary conceit of the tinker. Thus, the final chapter considers screen portrayals of Travellers, particularly contemporary American depictions of the descendants of Traveller immigrants. US racial history facilitates the cinematic figuring of the Irish-American Traveler as a lovable ‘white trash’ rascal who invokes both post-Famine Irish-American ‘ethnic whiteness’ and furtively appealing Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots) roguishness; though eventually integrated into an unhyphenated ‘white’ Americanness, the 18th-century Ulster Irish were initially perceived to be scoundrels. The discourse of an ethnically unmarked ‘white trashness’, originally created in response to the incivility of the subsequently assimilated eighteenth-century Irish, inflects the ‘white‘ Traveler’s contemporary image as unreformed but reformable Same. This is considered as an explicit contrast to the irrefutable Othering of the Irish Traveller in many Irish films.

Examines the three-volume novel Zelica; the Creole (1820), most often attributed to Leonora Sansay. The author argues that Zelica ambivalently constructs a narrative in which during the Revolution, women of color become the principle guardians of “white” women, whom they protect from both men of color and male European colonists. In addition, the novel provokes questions about the nature of a gendered revolution that often made no room for benevolence and kindness as a form of rebellion against authority.

This chapter examines the historical relation between African Americans, immigrant Islam and the dominant culture in the U.S. during the 20th century. It describes African African Muslim thought during the Third Resurrection as a prescriptive ideal, and attempts to reconcile blackness, Americanness and adherence to Islam. It contends that it was not Islam but certain oversights and obsessions of Black and especially Post-Colonial Religion that impeded the African American Muslim's ability to come to terms with America.

This chapter discusses the Celluloid Princess, who personified many of the early issues connected to the anxiety about the racial and cultural boundaries of Americanness. This character was able to interact with white society, and it is her violent death which reflected this anxiety and social turmoil that marked the early twentieth century. Thanks to the complex images and cultural attitudes that were woven into the character of the Celluloid Princess, it made her an important figure among the thousands of Indian images that were found in early Westerns and Indian films.

This chapter discusses the increasingly complicated and fluid associations of jazz's “American” identity. It studies some of the ways that jazz musicians displayed or represented “Americanness”—through professional strategy, musical style, and subjective identity—at the start of the twenty-first century. The chapter also aims to deepen the understandings of American jazz musicians in other countries and the notions of authenticity, cultural hybridity, and nationality connected to them.

This chapter describes what American history would be like in the future and promotes an agenda for historians in the coming century of global interdependence. It urges scholars to revive a national framework for historical analysis and enhance it by analyzing international connections and comparisons. American institutions are characterized by three distinct centers or centralizing systems: state, economy, and culture. By restructuring history, the separateness of these three systems, along with their conflicts and their phases of convergence, could be clarified. This chapter also emphasizes the need for some readjustments in research priorities in order to regain a national focus on American culture, such as recognizing the important role of assimilation in attaining a cohesive culture, investigating “Americanness” as a powerful level of national awareness, returning to broad-gauged regional studies, and appreciating social classes as national segments.

This chapter explores how conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, more famously known as the “Siamese twins,” negotiated their way through shifting identities of “Asian” and “American” in the United States during the late 1840s and the 1850s. It first considers the changes in the lives of Chang and Eng as family men amid debates over abolitionism, sectionalism, and nativism that dominated the public discourse at the time, along with developments that served to reemphasize the twins' “Asianness” in comparison to the Chinese in the United States and their “Americanness” in relation to sectionalism. It then examines representations of the twins' domestic life both in Siam and in North Carolina to get a sense for where they had been and where they were in the late 1840s. It also discusses the international forces that shaped the way Americans understood Chang and Eng in the early 1850s by focusing on the twins' story as part of a royal Siamese embassy to Vietnam as well as the Taiping Rebellion in China. Finally, the chapter discusses the twins' experience as slaveholders in relation to race, class, masculinity, and foreignness.

The first chapter argues for the pervasiveness, and productivity, of self-endangerment in mainstream cinema. It does so via one of the most popular and exportable genres, the action film, which thrives on the self-endangerment of its predominantly male protagonists. Establishing, initially, the place of peril in narrative per se as a ‘recovery momentum’, this recovery momentum proves a useful analogue for mainstream cinema's (conservative) investment in cure and self-affirmation. The often-damaged but invulnerable heroes who frequent the action genre provide a steady stream of maverick, heroic but also reckless self-risk. Indeed, this non-conformity and wildness prove central to the pleasures of the genre and its construction of heroism, especially its Americanness. By the end of the films, however, the heroes appear reformed and the status quo restored. But the battles that are won in the action films discussed in this chapter are shown to be ideological ones ultimately, and the representation of self-endangerment proves an integral part of this. For all its testimony to the grandeur, and pleasure, of spectacle and to the cheapness of life, the action film is shown to foment enduring principles of the valuation of life in nationalist and gendered terms.

This chapter examines the issue of identity and citizenship for American Muslims. It suggests that American Muslims should wholeheartedly embrace their Americanness, which would enable and entitle them to contribute to what it means to be an American. It explains how embracing Americanness might be appealing to both native-born and immigrant American Muslims and discusses one of the key features of Americanness that relates to an Islamic religious rationale of immigration. This article also contends that the personal and collective interests of American Muslims are better served by community-based practice of Sharia under the principle of normative pluralism, than by a policy whereby Sharia norms are enforced by state courts in the name of legal pluralism.

This chapter discusses the initial responses of African American writers and intellectuals regarding the war. These writers, who were often subject to the severe circumscriptions of wartime sedition legislation and intense security from the federal authorities, were often torn between expressions of nationalism and hopes that the war could become a vehicle for greater civil rights and African American inclusion into national life. These writers were often subjected under pressures to assert England and France's moral and ethical superiority against Germany without offending the European nations and the African colonies. They were asked to mobilize support against Germany while being aware that the mainstream strategies for doing so were unpleasantly familiar. While they were asked to contribute by any means they could, black Americans were constantly aware that the elastic conceptions of Americanness and whiteness were not elastic enough to include them.

This chapter examines the role played by the “environment” in shaping American religion and culture. It organizes the story of religion and the environment in the study of religions in the United States around two foci, which often overlap and which build on the current trend in the study of religion of acknowledging the importance of “place”—an element largely ignored by “word”-oriented religions—and scholars. It begins with a review of studies emphasizing the “Americanness” of the environment and the role that “nature” has played in Americans' cultural and religious identity. It then considers studies that result from religions responding to the environmental movement, which generally yields a more global perspective and puts religious studies scholars in dialogue with scientists, environmental historians, and political scientists. It also explores how the lines between scholarship and advocacy should or should not be drawn, since most scholars working in the area of environmentalism and religion want to discuss solutions to our “environmental crisis”.

This chapter describes how celebrity had already branded Mark Twain as the embodiment of “American Humour” when Samuel Clemens first visited England in 1872. Some fifteen years later, Clemens capitalized on his international fame in a global tour of live performances to convert his travel experiences into a new book, Following the Equator. His practice of trading on his Americanness for profit at home and abroad led Amy Kaplan to complain, “His famous ‘homespun’ qualities were...woven from the tangled threads of imperial travel.” Samuel Clemens reversed the imperial relations that gave American humor its distinctive postcolonial inflections by exporting American language and his comic sensibility through commerce.

This chapter examines the emergence of the “World Wide Web”—the Internet's best-known hypertext system—when the global nature of the Internet became an animating idea in news media and popular culture as well as for policymakers and academics. It explores how, despite being understood as global, the Internet is nonetheless identified as a distinctly American space, or an “American virtual nation.” This Americanness was visible in the organization of the Internet, including the ways the U.S. government retained control over Internet addresses and domains. The American virtual nation was also visible, however, in news media and policy language describing the Internet as a “new democratic frontier” and an “information superhighway.” These terms were enabled by hopeful U.S. policymakers, who aimed to colonize the Internet before competitors arrived. Major Internet corporations also capitalized on this presumptive Americanness of the Internet in their efforts to become “American corpoNations.”

This book chronicles the experiences of first and second generation West African immigrants and refugees in the United States during the last four decades. Drawing on field work and oral histories of West African immigrants aggregated in various locations from West Africa to the West Indies to destinations like metropolitan Atlanta, the book examines how significant segments of black America are forging new meanings and interpretive frameworks for understanding the paradigm of the Atlantic World. More specifically, it explores the transfiguration in the diversity and complexity of the role of the new West African diaspora in the recent history of the black Atlantic. It considers the intricate patterns of adaptation and incorporation among the immigrants and their children, along with the impact of the recent postcolonial and voluntary immigration of West Africans on the changing meanings of “African Americanness.” It also tackles issues of cultural identity formation and socioeconomic incorporation among immigrants and refugees from West Africa, and whether these migrants will become the newest African Americans.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Mormon question. In the 1830s, a young American named Joseph Smith founded a new religion that would come to be called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—commonly known as the Mormons. As the Church developed, the practice of plural marriage became central to Mormon theology. Polygamy generated decades of cultural conflict that contemporaries broadly referred to as “the Mormon question.” The conflict was more than a simple condemnation of sexual and marital practices unacceptable to Victorian norms. Rather, it was a contest over the very meaning of Americanness. The Mormon question then generated national discussions about gender, family, and the nature of citizenship that would define the parameters of membership in the late-nineteenth-century American body politic.

This chapter explores Mormon communitarian practices in Utah after the public pronouncement in 1852 that Mormons practiced plural marriage. Mormons made little distinction between the home and the community outside it, but rather constituted that community as a kind of broad, privatized family they juxtaposed to a broader American “public” polity and state. Indeed, Mormons attempted to “live together as one great family,” constituting a privatized community governed by God through His government. Polygamy also accompanied a communitarian economic vision of communal property ownership that undermined notions of private property. In arguing for the compatibility of polygamy and Americanness, Mormons attempted to construct a vision of American citizenship and polity unrelated to marital structures. This entailed dissociating Americanness from the monogamous family and claiming that Church government itself was a perfection of American political principles.

This chapter explores the connections anti-Mormons made between private and public in Mormonism. They contended that the institution of polygamy was inseparable from the practice of political theocracy in Utah and that polygamy replaced the marital contract with male tyranny in the household. That tyranny, by extension, replaced the fraternal contract of a republican social order with patriarchal political despotism that flew in the face of American political values. Moreover, anti-Mormons claimed that because of polygamy, the structure of government in Utah was imbued with Church authority and constituted the invasion of an illegal polygamic theocracy into republican government. Indeed, anti-Mormons convinced themselves that Mormon polygamic theocracy was a grave threat to republican government and threatened the very essence of Americanness.

This chapter reviews Kuniyoshi's prewar works and their critical reception. It argues that despite being commended for his ability to assimilate Occidental artistic methods and traditions, the term “individualist” that many critics bestowed on him was in fact a coded label that functioned both as approbation and distinction, one that insisted on attributing Kuniyoshi's art to his national and racial origin, and thus implicitly distinguished him from other Caucasian/white artists and their claim to “Americanness.” The individualist label pointed to critics' difficulty in deciding exactly where to place or categorize Kuniyoshi and his art, a challenge that would reverberate throughout his career and contribute to many of his identity crises both during and after World War II.