Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism

by Scott-Childress,Reynolds J.

• ISBN13: 9780815320166
• ISBN10: 0815320167
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781317777557
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-12-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This important book addresses the ways race has both helped and hindered Americans in determining national identity. Contributors consider race and American nationalism from a variety of historical and disciplinary vantage points. Beginning with the aftermath of the Civil War and unfolding chronologically through to the present, the essays examine a multitude of different groups-Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, whites, Jews, Irish Americans, German Americans-by examining race and nationalism represented in public memorials, photography, film, classic and minor literature, gender issues, legal studies, and more. The book offers rereadings of some of the pivotal figures in American culture and politics, including Herman Melville, Frances Harper, William James, Frederic Remington, Charles Francis Adams, W. E. B. DuBois, George Creel, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Chu, and others. In the course of these essays, readers will learn how Americans in different periods andcircumstances have grappled with the changing issues of defining race and of defining "American" as a race, as a nationality, or as both.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Reynolds J. Scott-Childress
Race, Nation, and the Rhetoric of Color: Locating Japan and China, 1870-1907	3	(18)
Kirk Savage
"Freedom's Memorial": Manumission and Black Masculinity in a Monument to Lincoln	21	(22)
Cynthia J. Davis
Nation's Nature: "Billy Budd, Sailor," Anglo-Saxonism, and the Canon	43	(24)
Jon-Christian Suggs
Romanticism, Law, and the Suppression of African-American Citizenship	67	(30)
Maria DeGuzman
Consolidating Anglo-American Imperial Identity Around the Spanish-American War (1898)	97	(30)
Kelvin Santiago-Valles
The Sexual Appeal of Racial Differences: U.S. Travel Writing and Anxious American-ness in Turn-of-the-Century Puerto Rico	127	(22)
Russell A. Kazal
Irish "Race" and German "Nationality": Catholic Languages of Ethnic Difference in Turn-of-the-Century Philadelphia	149	(20)
Michael P. Kramer
W.E.B. Du Bois, American Nationalism, and the Jewish Question	169	(26)
Anne Classen Knutson
The Enemy Imaged: Visual Configurations of Race and Ethnicity in World War I Propaganda Posters	195	(26)
Heidi Kenaga
"America Is Developing a Distinct Type of Man": Stark Love, Eugenics, and Nativist Discourses of the 1920s	221	(26)
Char Miller
Go Down, Moses: Zora Neale Hurston and Sigmund Freud on Race, Nation, and Political Representation	247	(26)
Scott A. Sandage
A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939-1963	273	(40)
Holly Allen
The Citizen-Soldier and the Citizen-Internee: Military Fraternity, Race, and American Nationhood, 1942-1946	313	(22)
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Rescripting Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea: A Chinese[/]American Authentic?	335	(24)
Laura Wexler
Techniques of the Imaginary Nation: Engendering Family Photography	359	(24)
Index	383