America: Defining a Nation PDF

practices, and even consumer products are readily 3 made to symbolize the nation’s essence (“baseball, hot...

practices, and even consumer products are readily 3 made to symbolize the nation’s essence (“baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet,” as a highly effective America advertising campaign put it in the 1970s). Such Kirsten Silva Gruesz metonyms gesture, in turn, at more abstract notions: Freedom, Liberty, Democracy. Whether implicit or “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” begins the explicit, responses to the enigma of Americanness main body of the Declaration of Independence, and tend to obscure the conditions under which they the definition of “America” may likewise seem utterly were formulated. Who gets to define what “America” self-evident: the short form of the nation’s official means? What institutions help enforce or undermine a name. Yet the meaning of this well-worn term becomes particular definition? Under what historical conditions more elusive the closer we scrutinize it. Since “America” does one group’s definition have more or less power names the entire hemisphere from the Yukon to than another’s? Without looking critically at these Patagonia, its common use as a synonym for the United questions of nomenclature, “American” studies cannot States of America is technically a misnomer, as Latin claim self-awareness about its premises or its practices. Americans and Canadians continually (if resignedly) Because the meaning of “America” and its point out. Given the nearly universal intelligibility of c o r o l l a r i e s — “A m e r i c a n ,” “A m e r i c a n i z a t i o n ,” this usage, their objection may seem a small question of “Americanism,” and “Americanness”—seems so self- geographical semantics. But “America” carries multiple evident but is in fact so imprecise, using the term in connotations that go far beyond the literal referent conversation or debate tends to reinforce certain ways of the nation-state. In the statement “As Americans, of thinking while repressing others. In the slyly comic we prize freedom,” “American” may at first seem to Devil’s Dictionary (1911), pundit Ambrose Bierce includes refer simply to U.S. citizens, but the context of the the term only in the form of its opposite: “un-American, sentence strongly implies a consensual understanding adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.” If using the of shared values, not just shared passports; the literal adjective “un-American” shuts down genuine argument and figurative meanings tend to collapse into each by impugning your opponent’s values, as Bierce implies, Copyright © 2014. New York University Press. All rights reserved. other. The self-evidence of “America” is thus troubled then the power to define what does count as “American” from the start by multiple ambiguities about the extent is a considerable one. of the territory it delineates, as well as about its deeper By the time Bierce penned this undefinition, the connotations. use of “America” as a synonym for “the United States” Seeking out the meaning of America might be said to was a habit already deeply ingrained, thanks in part to be a national characteristic, if that proposition were not nationalistic writers of the nineteenth century, such as in itself tautological. The question prompts responses Walt Whitman. Whitman’s original preface to Leaves of representing every conceivable point of view, from the Grass tries to get at the essence of the nation by using documentary series packaged as Ken Burns’s America both terms in rapid-fire succession: “The genius of (1996) to prize-winning essays by schoolchildren the United States is not best or most in its executives invited to tackle this hoary topic. Foodways, cultural or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or 21 Burget_1p.indd Keywords 21 for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition, edited by Bruce Burgett, and Glenn Hendler, New York University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, 9/29/14 11:37 AM http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umbc/detail.action?docID=1853975. Created from umbc on 2024-01-29 03:58:18.  colleges or churches or parlors,... but always most the root word derives from Phoenician, Hebrew, or in the common people.” “America is the race of races,” Hindu terms, suggesting that one of these groups he continues. “The Americans of all nations at any encountered America before Europeans did. Similar time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical etymological evidence has been interpreted to show nature. The United States themselves are essentially the that the term ultimately stems from a word for Moors greatest poem” (1855/1999, 4–5). Whitman’s vision of or Africans, so that “America” really means “land of America / the United States celebrates “the common the blacks.” “America” is thus a product of the same people,” the heterogeneous mixing of immigrants into misunderstanding that gave us the term “Indian.” a “race of races,” and everyday, vernacular speech as the Given this similarity, one final theory about the term’s stuff of poetry. Yet Whitman also includes scenes from origins is particularly provocative. An indigenous group Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean in his panoramic in Nicaragua had referred to one gold-rich district vision of America, revealing not only the expansionist in their territory as “Amerrique” since before the beliefs Whitman held at the time but the extraordinary Conquest, and Mayan languages of tribes further north persistence of this older sense of America as the name use a similar-sounding word (Jonathan Cohen 2004). for the whole of the New World (another misnomer These discoveries have led to the radical proposition sanctified by the passage of time, since millions of that the name “America” comes from within the New indigenous inhabitants neither saw it as new nor World rather than being imposed on it. The continuing imagined it on the abstract scale of the Europeans). life of this debate suggests that what is really at stake is Against Columbus’s insistence that the landmass not some ultimate etymological truth but a narrative of he had “discovered” was Asia, the Italian explorer shared origins; each claim grants primacy and symbolic Amerigo Vespucci first dubbed it a “New World” in his (if not literal) ancestry of the Americas to a different treatise by that name. It was not Vespucci himself but group. a contemporary mapmaker, Martin Waldseemuller, The fact that only one of these fables of the origin who then christened the region “America,” originally of the word “America” involves an indigenous name is referring only to the southern continent. Later revealing. Throughout the colonies, settlers tended not cartographers broadened the designation to include to refer to themselves as “Americans,” since the term Copyright © 2014. New York University Press. All rights reserved. the lesser-known north—a further irony of history. then conveyed an indigenous ancestry—or at least the To this day, alternative theories of the naming of the associated taint of barbarism and backwardness—that hemisphere flourish, finding new devotees on the they were (with certain romanticizing exceptions) eager Internet. Solid evidence links a British merchant named to avoid. Instead, they nostalgically called their home Richard Ameryk to John Cabot’s voyages along the spaces “New-England,” “Nieuw-Amsterdam,” and North Atlantic coast, leading to speculation that Cabot “Nueva España,” reflecting the fact that, for most people, named “America” for his patron a decade or so before local identities took precedence over larger, abstract Waldseemuller’s map. Others have argued that the name ones: a problem that the architects of nationhood comes from Vikings who called their Newfoundland eventually had to solve. There were some exceptions, settlement “Mark” or “Maruk”—“Land of Darkness.” however. The sixteenth-century Dominican priest Still others have claimed, more circumstantially, that Bartolomé de las Casas initiated an argument that 22 America Kirsten Silva Gruesz Burget_1p.indd Keywords 22 for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition, edited by Bruce Burgett, and Glenn Hendler, New York University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, 9/29/14 11:37 AM http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umbc/detail.action?docID=1853975. Created from umbc on 2024-01-29 03:58:18.  raged across both Americas over whether Vespucci had America”—comprising not just the continent of South usurped an honor rightly due Columbus; he proposed America but a hefty portion of North America as well— rechristening the region “Columba,” and many place- is a product of cultural practices rather than any innate names in Latin America pay homage accordingly. Las geophysical reality: in the nineteenth century, Spanish- Casas gained a considerable following in the English- speaking elites began using the term to defend and speaking world, and two of the most powerful writers distinguish Franco-Iberian Catholic values from Anglo- of the later Puritan period, Samuel Sewall and Cotton Saxon Protestant ones. As Walter Mignolo writes, “Once Mather, recorded their wish to evangelize the whole of America was named as such in the sixteenth century the New World so that it would “deserve the significant and Latin America named as such in the nineteenth, it name of Columbina” (Sewall 1697/1997, 59). Mather appeared as if they had been there forever” (2005, 2). even went so far as to describe himself as an “American” The associations that Europeans projected onto in the introduction to his historical chronicle Magnalia this “new” hemisphere were not always positive, even Christi Americana in 1702, well before the national sense though the wealth of the American colonies was of the term was even imaginable. Until the beginning of absolutely vital to the historical shifts we associate the nineteenth century, then, “America” and its analogs with modernization. The common representation of a in Spanish, French, and other European languages “virgin land” waiting to be explored, dominated, and designated the whole of the New World. Of the many domesticated relegates the natural world to the passive, figurative meanings that the American hemisphere has inferior position then associated with the feminine. The acquired over time, most involve notions of novelty, French naturalist George Louis Leclerc de Buffon even new beginnings, and utopian promise. argued in 1789 that since the region was geologically The Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman (1961) newer, its very flora and fauna were less developed than influentially wrote that America was “invented” before Europe’s—a claim Thomas Jefferson (1787/1984) took it was “discovered,” demonstrating that Europeans had pains to refute, using examples from South as well as long imagined a mythical land of marvels and riches North America. Nonetheless, the notion of the novelty that they then projected onto the unfamiliar terrain. of the Americas persisted, extending to the supposedly After Columbus, earlier Christian models of a three- immature culture of its inhabitants as well. Copyright © 2014. New York University Press. All rights reserved. continent globe were amended to include America as Early debates over literature and fine arts in the the fourth. To create two-dimensional representations English, Spanish, and French Americas all focused on of a world now known to be round, Renaissance the question of whether the residents of a land without mapmakers split the globe visually into distinct history could cultivate a genuine or original aesthetic. hemispheres—Europe, Africa, and Asia as the Eastern, Some Romantic writers tried on Indian themes, while and the Americas isolated into the Western. This others spun this “historylessness” in America’s favor. geographical convenience has become so naturalized The philosopher G. W. F. Hegel delivered an influential that it remains difficult for us to envision, for instance, address in 1830 that claimed, “America is therefore the interlinked world of the Pacific Rim or the proximity the land of the future, where, in all the ages that lie of the points on the transatlantic triangle trade of before us, the burden of the World’s History shall slaves, sugar, and rum. Similarly, the idea of “Latin reveal itself—perhaps in a contest between North and America Kirsten Silva Gruesz 23 Burget_1p.indd Keywords 23 for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition, edited by Bruce Burgett, and Glenn Hendler, New York University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, 9/29/14 11:37 AM http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umbc/detail.action?docID=1853975. Created from umbc on 2024-01-29 03:58:18.  South America. It is a land of desire for all those who Americanness at the time. It remains to be seen whether are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe” the “Americanization” of immigrants can absorb new (1837/1956, 86). (Note that Hegel still uses “America” to meanings beyond this model of one-way assimilation. indicate the whole region, not just the United States.) Given the long-standing tendency to define America Claims about the New World’s salvational role in global in mythic terms, we must be skeptical of the common history, then, gestated from without as well as from boast that the United States is the only modern nation within. Sewall and Mather’s wish to elevate Columbus founded on an idea—democratic equality—rather over Vespucci was revived after the Revolutionary War than on a shared tribal or racial ancestry. Such a claim in the iconographic figure of the goddess Columbia. In to exceptionalism has been particularly appealing to the hands of artists and poets, this imaginary female intellectuals, who traffic in ideas. In the early years of figure lent a tinge of classical refinement to the nation- American studies as an academic discipline in the 1950s, building project; the African American Phillis Wheatley the field’s foundational texts located the essential (1775/2001) penned one of the very first poems to meaning of “America” variously in the history of deploy this image. The figure of Columbia was quite westward movement, in philosophical and economic popular during the century that followed, prompting individualism, or in the privileging of the future patriotic musings on “the Columbian ideal” as well as oriented and the new. As the discipline has evolved, it events such as the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition has increasingly attempted to show how such mythic in Chicago, calculated to draw international attention definitions arise in response to historically specific to a nation that increasingly celebrated modernity and needs and conditions. When we go in search of what progress. Voluptuous Columbia continued to appear on is most profoundly American, scholars now insist, we coins into the early twentieth century, but there is no blinker our sights to the ways in which the actual contemporary visual icon that corresponds allegorically history of U.S. actions and policies may have diverged to the name “America.” from those expectations. Moreover, any single response It was perhaps inevitable that the hazy ideas to the prompt to define “America” (meaning the nation- projected so persistently onto the name of the state, not the continent) tends to imply that this larger hemisphere and, subsequently, the U.S. nation would idea or ideal has remained essentially unchanged over Copyright © 2014. New York University Press. All rights reserved. spawn other coinages to describe dynamic social time, transcending ethnic and racial differences. From processes. “Americanism” and “Americanization” the nineteenth century forward, “America” and its had entered common usage by the beginning of the derivations have generally been used to consolidate, nineteenth century, referring at first to evolving homogenize, and unify, rather than to invite linguistic differences from the English spoken in Great recognition of difference, dissonance, and plurality. Britain but expanding their connotations into the Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary work in American general realm of culture. “Americanization” became an studies has mainly focused on illustrating the ways in everyday word at the turn of the twentieth century, a which “American national identity is... constructed period of surging immigration, signifying the degree in and through relations of difference,” as one former to which those immigrants altered their customs president of the American Studies Association put it and values in accordance with the dominant view of (Radway 2002, 54). She went so far as to suggest that 24 America Kirsten Silva Gruesz Burget_1p.indd Keywords 24 for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition, edited by Bruce Burgett, and Glenn Hendler, New York University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, 9/29/14 11:37 AM http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umbc/detail.action?docID=1853975. Created from umbc on 2024-01-29 03:58:18.  the organization rename itself in response to challenges wedded together so powerfully has stumbled a bit on the raised around the time of Columbus’s quincentenary by lack of a ready adjectival form in English. A few writers, proponents of an “Americas” or “New World” studies. such as the late Chicano scholar Juan Bruce-Novoa Such a transnational approach would revive the (2004), have recalled into service the neologism that hemispheric scale of America and consider U.S. cultural Frank Lloyd Wright coined in the 1930s to describe his productions and social formations in relation to those nonderivative, middle-class house designs: “Usonian.” of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada. Rather Others, including Chevigny and Laguardia, simply than Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Crèvecoeur, its substitute “U.S.” or “United Statesian” for “American,” canon of commentators on the meaning of “America” arguing that the very awkwardness of such terms has highlights lesser-known figures such as the Cuban José a certain heuristic value, recalling us to a historical Martí—who in an 1891 speech famously distinguished moment before the pressure toward consensus and between “Nuestra” (Our) America, with its mestizo or national unity became as pervasive as it is today. mixed-race origins, and the racist, profit-driven culture Perhaps such consciousness raising about the power he saw dominating the United States. Martí, like the later of “self-evident” terms could indeed begin the slow activist-writers of African origin W. E. B. Du Bois and work of altering social relationships and structures of C. L. R. James, was critical of the growing interventionist political power. Yet the plural form of “Americas” and tendencies of the United States in the Western the seemingly more inclusive geography of North Hemisphere and sought to shift the connotations of the America have found their way into some political term in provocative ways. In addition to recovering such formations that reinforce, rather than challenge, U.S. underappreciated thinkers, comparative Americanist hegemony in the hemisphere—such as the North work often locates its inquiry in spaces once relegated American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the U.S. to the periphery of scholarly attention, such as the Army School of the Americas, a military training center Spanish-speaking borderlands that were formerly part for Latin Americans whose graduates were implicated in of Mexico. As contact zones between North and South, multiple cases of human rights violations in the 1980s Anglo and Latino, such areas produce hybrid cultural and 1990s (and which was subsequently renamed the formations that inflect mainstream U.S. culture with Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). Copyright © 2014. New York University Press. All rights reserved. that of the “other” America. In these examples, the seemingly more inclusive Undoing what most Latin Americans see as an term works opportunistically rather than critically, imperial arrogation of the name of the hemisphere by suggesting that in the future, the usage of “Americas” the most powerful nation in it has been central to the may require the same kind of scrutiny that we have just project of a pluralized, relational Americas studies. Bell brought to “America.” Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia, in the preface to their landmark essay collection Reinventing the Americas, write that “by dismantling the U.S. appropriation of the name ‘America,’ we will better see what the United States is and what it is not” (1986, viii). The work of divorcing the names that Whitman (and others) America Kirsten Silva Gruesz 25 Burget_1p.indd Keywords 25 for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition, edited by Bruce Burgett, and Glenn Hendler, New York University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, 9/29/14 11:37 AM http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umbc/detail.action?docID=1853975. Created from umbc on 2024-01-29 03:58:18.