Robert S. Levine
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807832264
- eISBN:
- 9781469605654
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807887882_levine
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and ...
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American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. This book challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, it argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period. The book emphasizes the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in its analysis of four illuminating “episodes” of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. It examines Charles Brockden Brown and the Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and the debates on the Missouri Compromise; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts and the blood-based literary nationalism and expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century; and Frederick Douglass and his approximately forty-year interest in Haiti. The book offers critiques of recent developments in whiteness and imperialism studies, arguing that a renewed attention to the place of contingency in American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments.Less
American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. This book challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, it argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period. The book emphasizes the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in its analysis of four illuminating “episodes” of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. It examines Charles Brockden Brown and the Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and the debates on the Missouri Compromise; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts and the blood-based literary nationalism and expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century; and Frederick Douglass and his approximately forty-year interest in Haiti. The book offers critiques of recent developments in whiteness and imperialism studies, arguing that a renewed attention to the place of contingency in American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804754903
- eISBN:
- 9780804772501
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804754903.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
This chapter explores how Du Bois translated nineteenth-century German romantic nationalism into his own racial nationalism even as he fractured any symmetry between race and nation with the psychic ...
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This chapter explores how Du Bois translated nineteenth-century German romantic nationalism into his own racial nationalism even as he fractured any symmetry between race and nation with the psychic construct of double consciousness. The pre-psychoanalytic language of the psyche that Du Bois draws on describes a black self located simultaneously within the United States and without it, both in the sense of lacking the nation and lying beyond it, in such extranational places and times as ancient Egypt, precolonial Ethiopia, and the resurgent black world of Du Bois's dreaming. The divisions and connections of double consciousness are mirrored in the formal strategies of Du Bois' polygeneric manifesto, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and writ large in his social realist romance, Dark Princess (1928), and final trilogy, The Black Flame (1957–61). Du Bois' straddling of racialist, nationalist, anti-imperialist, and diasporic allegiances illustrates one of this book's central tensions: the simultaneous pull between territorialization and deterritorialization, between a concept of identity rendered isomorphic with place and emblematic of race and nation, and identity reconceived as that which evades place per se and constitutes an altogether different kind of being, at once more interiorized and more diffused.Less
This chapter explores how Du Bois translated nineteenth-century German romantic nationalism into his own racial nationalism even as he fractured any symmetry between race and nation with the psychic construct of double consciousness. The pre-psychoanalytic language of the psyche that Du Bois draws on describes a black self located simultaneously within the United States and without it, both in the sense of lacking the nation and lying beyond it, in such extranational places and times as ancient Egypt, precolonial Ethiopia, and the resurgent black world of Du Bois's dreaming. The divisions and connections of double consciousness are mirrored in the formal strategies of Du Bois' polygeneric manifesto, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and writ large in his social realist romance, Dark Princess (1928), and final trilogy, The Black Flame (1957–61). Du Bois' straddling of racialist, nationalist, anti-imperialist, and diasporic allegiances illustrates one of this book's central tensions: the simultaneous pull between territorialization and deterritorialization, between a concept of identity rendered isomorphic with place and emblematic of race and nation, and identity reconceived as that which evades place per se and constitutes an altogether different kind of being, at once more interiorized and more diffused.
Benjamin W. Goossen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691174280
- eISBN:
- 9781400885190
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691174280.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter demonstrates how, although historians emphasizing popular consent for the Third Reich have accurately identified the fluidity of racial nationalism, they problematically assume a ...
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This chapter demonstrates how, although historians emphasizing popular consent for the Third Reich have accurately identified the fluidity of racial nationalism, they problematically assume a distinction between Nazism as ideology and Germans as people. Such approaches imply a relatively self-contained German national community, whose continuity was fundamentally interrupted by fascism's arrival. Yet, as demonstrated by some Mennonites' production of racial knowledge, it would be inaccurate to think of “ordinary Germans” as merely accommodating themselves to racial nationalism. Studies of Mennonite language, nomenclature, genealogy, and disease, for instance, popularized the notion of a racial church while also providing new means of articulating members' relationships to other confessions. As quintessential Aryans, Mennonites simultaneously became understood as “anti-Jews”—an idea denoting their confession as an Aryan version of Judaism as well as an antidote to Jewish degeneracy.Less
This chapter demonstrates how, although historians emphasizing popular consent for the Third Reich have accurately identified the fluidity of racial nationalism, they problematically assume a distinction between Nazism as ideology and Germans as people. Such approaches imply a relatively self-contained German national community, whose continuity was fundamentally interrupted by fascism's arrival. Yet, as demonstrated by some Mennonites' production of racial knowledge, it would be inaccurate to think of “ordinary Germans” as merely accommodating themselves to racial nationalism. Studies of Mennonite language, nomenclature, genealogy, and disease, for instance, popularized the notion of a racial church while also providing new means of articulating members' relationships to other confessions. As quintessential Aryans, Mennonites simultaneously became understood as “anti-Jews”—an idea denoting their confession as an Aryan version of Judaism as well as an antidote to Jewish degeneracy.
