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I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives.
-Fitzgerald, "My Lost City" (31)
Few books have suffered Americanism's presumptions more unremittingly than has The Great Gatsby. This has again become apparent in the recent outpouring of work that draws attention to dynamics of racialization in the novel-to how Fitzgerald's book engages discourses that render racial and ethnic difference recognizable, including how certain characters are made to bear distinguishing racial or ethnic markers. By highhghting the novel's interest in race and its role in the development of discourses that continue to administer the recognition of race and ethnicity in America, this new criticism-most appearing in the last 10 years or so-purports to rescue The Great Gatsby from the sentimental attractions of a universalized, imperial American identity. Like the scholarship it claims to chaUenge, however, this new criticism reveals the enduring hold of the Americanist romance and its confidence that the novel offers a straightforward description of something called "America" or "American" identity. In its attention to representations of raced difference in the novel, much of this new work-as represented by such critics as Michaels, Goldsmith, Thompson, Washington, and Nies-is enabled by an assumption that practices and signs already bear racial meaning. This scholarship thus often ends up reifying a variety of presumably characteristic raced American identities in place of a presumably characteristic unraced (if surreptitiously white) one, reinforcing the very formations whose genealogy it purportedly seeks to unearth.Thus this essentiaUy statist inquiry into American literature and culture presumes, as it is administered by, the self-evidence of "American" history and identity. Foucault, we should remember, indicted just such rightist thinking in Discipline and Punish, where he warned against "writing a history of the past in terms of the present" (31). In this essay I show how The Great Gatsby resists precisely the recognizant expectation upon which historicism, especially in the guise of an analysis of the novel's interest in racialization, is based, and how in doing this it points toward the possibility of a more open and critical form of reading.
By repeating the primal error of assuming coherence between text and nationalized-and racialized-symbohc order, of seeking the national in the individual, recent criticism overlooks the irreducible complexity of the novel's attention to...