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Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. By Walter Benn Michaels. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. ix + 186 pp. $29.95 cloth, $12.95 paper.
During the past decade Walter Benn Michaels has provocatively asked academics and cultural critics to rethink the meanings and implications of terms like race and culture that are currently favored in the multicultural debates in and out of the academy. With Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism he offers a genealogy of multiculturalism that begins in the cultural pluralism of the 1920s. While Michaels distinguishes between his "criticism of cultural identity" and his "history of its nativist origins" (142), Our America chronicles a relentless effort to locate the moment at which a culture, as Michaels says of Anzia Yezierska and Pauline Hopkins, rewrote "the critique of racial identity as the commitment to racial identity" (72). The form of the book-a long essay broken into sections rather than chapters-contributes to its intensity. Michaels compiles short readings of a range of works from the period that illustrate the move from Progressive assimilationism (the assumption that "Americans" can be made) to an essentializing cultural pluralism (the belief, as doctrine expounder Horace Kallen puts it, that people "cannot change their grandfathers").1 The first part of Our America's argument is that the shift in the 1920s from "racial" to "cultural" understandings of identity was never quite complete; cultural identity reaffirmed rather than challenged race as a foundational term. Cultural identity, claims Michaels, is therefore racialist-and racist-in its assumptions.
The second part of the argument is formal and theoretical. Michaels coins the term nativist modernism to describe the intersection of the political and literary developments behind cultural pluralism. Pointedly refusing to offer either nativism or modernism as the context of the other, he insists on their commonalities. The structures of both, he argues, register a turn from the discomfiting sense that identities and signs were arbitrary conventions to a belief in their materiality. "In The Sound and the Fury," claims Michaels in his opening salvo, "the desire to make words into things and the desire to sleep with your sister are inseparable or even, as is the case with Quentin's 'I have committed incest I said' . . ., indistinguishable" (1). The "desire to make words into...