American Cultural Studies

An Introduction to American Culture

Neil Campbell, Alasdair Kean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317297307
• Edition: 4
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Exploring the central themes in modern American cultural studies and discussing how these themes can be interpreted, American Cultural Studies offers a wide-ranging overview of different aspects of American cultural life such as religion, gender and sexuality, regionalism, and ethnicity and immigration.

The fourth edition has been revised throughout to take into account the developments of the last four years. Updates and revisions include:

• discussion of Barack Obama's time in the White House
• consideration of 'Hemispheric American Studies' and the increasing debates about globalisation and the international role of the USA
• long-form television and American Studies
• up-to-date case studies, such as Girls, The Wire and Orange is the New Black
• more material on Detroit, the Mexican border, same-sex relationships and Islam in America
• updated further reading lists and new follow-up work.

Illustrated throughout, containing follow-up questions and further reading at the end of each chapter, and accompanied by a companion website ( www.routledge.com/cw/campbell ) providing further study resources, American Cultural Studies is a core text and an accessible guide to the interdisciplinary study of American culture.

Chapter 1
New beginnings

American culture and identity

Identity marks the conjuncture of our past with the social, cultural and economic relations we live within.

(Rutherford 1990: 19)

Stuart Hall has written that cultural identity is not a ‘fixed essence … lying unchanged outside history and culture’, and is ‘not [a] once-and-for-all … to which we can make some final and absolute Return’, but is ‘constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth … made within the discourse of history and culture’ and hence cannot be simply defined or ‘recovered’ like some lost, authentic being (in Rutherford 1990: 226). To grapple with the idea of cultural identity, therefore, is to examine the lines and discourses of its construction and to recognise the existence within it of many meanings. As the introduction suggested, the USA is a place where different identities mix and collide, an assemblage, a multiplicity, constantly producing and reproducing new selves and transforming old ones and, therefore, cannot claim to possess a single, closed identity with a specific set of values. Some Americans, however, prefer the notion of identity to be hegemonic, fixed and clearly surrounded by distinct boundaries and definitions. For example, some would care to think of white, male and heterosexual as the standard measure of ‘Americanness’, with a deep respect for the flag and a strong sense of regional identity, say, to the South or to Louisiana or Boston. However, these are ideological positions that are not shared by or representative of the nation as a whole; indeed, no set of beliefs or values can be, and this is precisely the point. Instead, America has to be interpreted or ‘read’ as a complex, multifaceted text with a rich array of different characters and events, within which exist many contesting voices telling various and different stories. And as with any such text, there are internal tensions, dramas and contradictions which contribute to, indeed constitute, what might be called its identity.

Postmodern and poststructuralist thought has recognised these kinds of knowledges and approaches, and began from the point of distrusting any ‘meta-’ or ‘grand narratives’ – that is, those totalising stories that claim to speak for all and explain all. For example, to argue that America is exceptional and that its history was divinely ordained and destined to follow a set course is to read America as a limited and ‘closed’ text through a controlling meta-narrative or ‘master-story’. Rather than seek out the controlling, organising single meaning, it is more important to follow the different stories, however disjunctive they might be, that constitute the threads of the text – its texture, to persist with the metaphor. America is constructed from these threads which are diverse, divergent, coherent, contrary and competing, crossing and separating, clashing and merging, weaving in and out of one another, forming and de-forming, gathering and fraying all at the same time.

Of course, these metaphors are helpful only up to a point, for we must recognise the nature of the historical and political realm in which this American ‘text’ has formed. Certain stories are preferred and achieve greater status and power, while others are derided or erased. Traditionally in America, male, white heterosexual stories and versions of history have emerged as prominent and have therefore formed what we might term the dominant regime of representation or dominant ideological culture. These have tended to define American ‘national identity’. Kristen Silva Gruesz asks a series of key questions that help us move closer to the issues in this chapter:

Who gets to define what ‘America’ means? What institutions support or undermine a particular definition? Under what historical conditions does one’s group’s definition have more or less power than another’s? How does the continued repetition of such ideological statements have real, material effects on the ways people are able to live their lives?

(Gruesz in Burgett and Hendler 2007: 17)

Thus the rapid growth of industrialisation and urbanisation – the outward signs of modernity – encouraged the articulation of the nation as whole, unified, and progressive in order that production and economic growth could develop around common goals, shared beliefs and a sense of cohesion. These ideas formed examples of Gruesz’s ‘continued repetition of … ideological statements’ that solidified a particular vision of nation with its emphasis upon the ‘melting pot’ as a way of bringing people together into the American nation. However, with the questioning of modernity and its values and the increasing rediscovery of ethnic, marginalised and minority histories in America, this semblance of unity has had to be revised. E pluribus unum – out of many, one – is a more controversial slogan for America today, for it suggests, on one level, the possibility of integration, of melting the parts into a universal whole, when in fact the parts may prefer to remain distinct and unmelted or multiply attached to different cultures, such as Mexican and American (see Chapter 2). There exists a tension between the conventional discourses of American identity – a complex set of statements, myths and ways of seeing that constitutes a core of values that equal ‘America’ to the people and the world – and a series of counter-discourses that question and resist the neatness and stability of such a view of national identity.

The following chapter will explore some of the key elements of the myth of national identity and suggest other, counter-discourses at work in American culture which propose a sense of the nation as always relationally defined. In particular, the following examples, deliberately drawn from diverse sources, offer differing perspectives on America’s concern with beginnings and the ‘dream’ and how these have been used by both the right and left in creating persistent and competing notions of identity. Lauren Berlant has coined the phrase ‘cruel optimism’ to suggest the paradoxes of American aspiration and dreaming (‘the fantasy of the good life’, she calls it); defining it as ‘when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (2011: 1). This chapter charts the movements of dreaming and dis appointment in the USA and the complex relations between them.

Reading Columbus

One means by which America has unified itself is through an imagined communal mythology that all could share and that provided a cluster of beliefs through which the nation could be articulated, both to itself and to the world. The issue of how the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage of 1492 was commemorated is revealing here. Traditional mythology about Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the New World and the way in which it led to the republican and democratic values embedded in the history of the United States may be traced back to Joel Barlow’s epic Columbiad (1807) and Washington Irving’s A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). In the nineteenth century Columbus became widely adopted as the basis of many American place names, and Columbus Day became part of the litany of national days of celebration. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, marking the 400th anniversary of the first voyage, reinforced the narrative link between discovery and the power and progress of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.

Columbus thus became integrated into Manifest Destiny, the belief that America’s progress was divinely ordained. As part of this process the Columbian myth became anglicised, but it could also act as a symbol for immigrant groups like Italians as to the role they could play in contributing to America’s historic mission. What became clear by the 1980s, however, as preparations were made for the ‘Quincentenary Jubilee’, was that many Americans found it hard, if not impossible, to see the anniversary as a ‘jubilee’. There was nothing to celebrate in the legacy of Columbus. According to many of his critics, he had been the harbinger not of progress and civilisation, but genocide, slavery and the reckless exploitation of the environment. Leading the accusations were those minority groups who felt that the coming of the Spanish to America had brought an imperial project which had delivered not civilisation but catastrophe.

This reversal of the nineteenth-century myth of Columbus is revealing because it shows how the revival of concern for the interests of racial and ethnic minorities is closely linked to the reading and rewriting of American history. It is also significant in that it brings into focus some of the problems which emerge when one myth is discredited only to be replaced by another. At issue here, to some extent, is a debate about the functions of history. Some of the participants in the Columbus controversy assumed either that rewriting the Columbus myth would allow the ‘truth’ to emerge, as if there was a correct version of his life and its aftermath, once distortions had been cast aside. Others argued that older versions of the Columbus story were simply reflections of who held power at the time they were propagated. Historical truth from this perspective was determined by those who had the authority to make it seem convincing. Emotions ran so high over the issue in Berkeley, California, that 12 October 1992 was declared ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’ instead of celebrating Columbus.

Many argued that historical enquiry must involve the constant re-examination and reassessment of evidence and argument using reason and intelligence, not skin colour and emotion, in coming to terms with controversial themes of the past. In an interview during the making of When Worlds Collide: The Untold Story of the Americas After Columbus for PBS, the writer Rubén Martinez (see Chapter 2), standing beside Columbus’s tomb in Seville’s massive cathedral, was torn between cursing or blessing the bones interred inside: ‘It’s kind of like that classic mestizo dilemma… . He’s my dad. I’m a bastard kid. I hate him, I love him’ (Martinez, 2010: n.p.). His language suggests how America is still struggling with its own identity in relation to Columbus and that an important part of its image is constructed through persistent myths that must be continually rethought and redefined from a variety of perspectives.

The American Dream of Identity: The Great Gatsby (1925)

The Columbus myths enabled white Americans to find a beginning, to declare a courageous opening to their ‘creation story’. It was part of the influential dream myth of origin so prevalent in America. ‘America, said the founding documents, was the living incarnation of the search for a common humanity … America declared itself as a dream … the microcosm, or prefiguration of humanity’ (Calhoun 1994: 159). F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is aware both of the power of American dreams and the problems of seeking them out in lived experience. The ideals of endless progress, self-creation, achievement and success – the mythicised dream incorporated in the spirit of Columbus – are played out in the figure of Jay Gatsby as seen through the eyes of Nick Carraway. The novel concerns itself with issues of identity and in particular with the temptation to believe in a ‘dream’ which is manifested in Gatsby’s yearning for Daisy Buchanan, a woman he almost married in the past, who encompasses ‘the endless desire to return to “lost origins”, to be one again with the mother, to go back to the beginning’ (Rutherford 1990: 236), and yet proves to be beyond his reach and unattainable as all such dreams are.

‘You can’t repeat the past.’

‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’

(Fitzgerald 1974: 117)

In Nick Carraway’s story of Jay Gatsby one can uncover much about the contradictions of identity and how these are central to any conception of ‘America’. In the same way that Nick constructs a history of Gatsby through the telling of his narrative, so too has America been invented and reinvented by each generation. On one level, Nick’s story amplifies one of the founding myths of American culture, the belief in the fresh start, the new beginning. In the case of Gatsby, Nick tells us, he ‘sprang from his Platonic conception of himself’ (ibid.: 105), that is, a self-making process in which ‘he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent’, full of hope and ‘romantic readiness’ (ibid.: 8). In 1980, Ronald Reagan spoke too of how ‘we built a new breed of human called an American’ (quoted in Bercovitch and Jehlen 1986: 26), as if to invoke the idea of self-creation as a core myth of American identity. Gatsby comes to embody similar American ideological principles for Nick and through him he records his own ‘history’ of America. It is a story, however, marked by its contradictions, its ambiguities and its complexities. As we read Nick’s story, what emerges are some of the necessary doubts and queries we bring to any consideration of America and American identity.

At the close of the narrative, Nick returns to Gatsby’s empty house refusing to listen to the taxi driver’s ‘story’ of his friend and erasing an obscene word scratched on the steps by a boy, as if to remind us that it is only Nick’s story we will hear. The exclusion of other voices at the end of the novel perpetuates the control that Nick has exercised throughout the story. This history, this Gatsby, is one funnelled through Nick’s eyes, tempered by a total belief in what Nick wants to see in him – the Dream. In the moonlight, a characteristic time of romance and uncertain vision, Nick returns in his mind to another age when the houses of West Egg are replaced by a fresh vision of possibility, ‘the old island that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world’ when ‘the last and greatest of all human dreams’ still seemed feasible (Fitzgerald 1974: 187). This dream, for Nick, links Gatsby with adventurers like Columbus and represents the ‘last time in history’ when mankind faced ‘something commensurate to his capacity for wonder’ – the moment in which mankind physically arrived at a place big enough to hold its dreams and allow it to invent new selves and new beginnings. For Nick – and this was also Gatsby’s quest – there was a belief that all things were possible still and that the sense of the past was not lost but could be repeated and recovered. And yet, at the very moment that Nick reveals this equation to us, it is brought into question because the dream as a tangible achievement ‘was already behind him’ (ibid.: 188). What remains is the spirit of the quest, the indefatigable urge to go on looking and searching, ‘boats against the current’, for something in the future that is only held in the memory of the past.

‘Past’ is the last word of The Great Gatsby, and serves to remind us of the ambivalence of the novel’s sense of time and history. Nick preserves a story of Gatsby by controlling what we are allowed to know about him, and yet there is still a sense of ‘the foul dust’ that surrounds his dream in the ...