Forgetful Nation

Behdad Ali Behdad

Description

In A Forgetful Nation, the renowned postcolonialism scholar Ali Behdad turns his attention to the United States. Offering a timely critique of immigration and nationalism, Behdad takes on an idea central to American national mythology: that the United States is "a nation of immigrants," welcoming and generous to foreigners. He argues that Americans' treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility, and that this deep-seated ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of national identity. Building on the insights of Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, he develops a theory of the historical amnesia that enables the United States to disavow a past and present built on the exclusion of others.Behdad shows how political, cultural, and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known-J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass-and lesser-known-such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country's violent beginnings, including its conquest of Native Americans, brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant "aliens" today, particularly along the Mexican border.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Biological anthropology
• Migration

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 18 juillet 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387039
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

 Forgetful Nation

A Forgetful Nation

li Behdad

n Immigration

and Cultural Identity

in the United States

Duke University Press

Durham & London



©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States

of America on acid-free paper 

Designed by CH Westmoreland

Typeset in Janson

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data

appear on the last printed page

of this book.

Frontispiece photograph by

courtesy of the Ellis Island

Immigration Museum.

or Hassan and Fatimeh

who gave me the courage to leave home,

nd for Juliet, Roxana, and David

who showed me a way home

Practices of Exclusion:National Borders and the Disciplining of Aliens

Historicizing America:Tocqueville and the Ideology of Exceptionalism

Immigrant America:Liberal Discourse of Immigration and the Ritual of Self-Renewal

Introduction:Nation and Immigration

3

4 Discourses of Exclusion:Nativism and the Imagining of a ‘‘White Nation’’

5

Imagining America:Forgetful Fathers and the Founding Myths of the Nation

Contents



Preface ix

Notes

Conclusion:Remembering /



1

Bibliography

Index 

2

Preface

As I was writing this book, those who were familiar with my earlier work on nineteenth-century European travelers in the Middle East sometimes wondered about the disciplinary jump I was taking by writing about immigration and nationalism in the United States. Some were curious about the reason behind what they per- ceived to be a radical shift in my critical interest. Others expressed reservations about my authority, if not ability, to write about such complex and well-worn issues as immigration and national identity. Still others warned that I was committing academic suicide by mov- ing from a familiar field to an unknown territory, and quite possibly perpetrating the crime of superficiality along the way. Disheartening though these queries were in the beginning, they helped me better understand what motivated my interest in the new topic and its con- nection with what I had written before. Above all, what compelled me to pursue this project in spite of all the skepticism was something personal, the often disillusioning ex- periences and traumatic memories of being an Iranian immigrant in America. The topics of nineteenth-century European representations of the Middle East and immigration in the United States may seem un- related critically, but for me they both raise important questions about identity, alterity, and culture. The writing of this book, like that of my first one,Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Disso- lution, was a personal journey to make sense of my own experiences of immigration in the United States. WhileBelated Travelerswas an at- tempt to engage the orientalist discourse that had construed me both as an exotic ‘‘oriental’’ and as a decadent ‘‘other,’’ this book is an at- tempt to better grasp the immigrant history that has made me simul- taneously a ‘‘model minority’’ and a threatening ‘‘alien’’ in America.