{"product_id":"a-forgetful-nation-9780822336068","title":"A Forgetful Nation","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTakes on an idea central to American national mythology that the US is 'a nation of immigrants', open-armed and welcoming to foreigners. This work argues that Americans' treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility and that this ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of US national identity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“By way of valuable new readings of Jefferson, Hamilton, Tocqueville, Crèvecoeur, and others, Ali Behdad has found a new way into established terrain. Neither pro- nor anti-immigration per se, this book traces the cultural workings and productions of immigration politics, an angle explored by few contributors to the immigration literature. \u003ci\u003eA Forgetful Nation\u003c\/i\u003e should be required reading for all those interested in the long and often hidden history of nation-building in the United States.”—Bonnie Honig, author of \u003ci\u003eDemocracy and the Foreigner\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This book offers a deeply relevant argument in the wake of 9\/11 and counter-terror. Ali Behdad provides psychological depth to immigration discourse with a nuanced examination of ‘forgetting’ as a mode of negation that both denies and acknowledges a past built on the exclusion of otherness.”—Russ Castronovo, author of \u003ci\u003eNecro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eA Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States \u003c\/i\u003eis an extraordinary work of cultural memory and an important contribution to critical historiography. In writing it, Ali Behdad has established a heretofore unrecognized connection between the culture’s mythical representation of itself as an ‘Immigrant Nation’ and the negation of the history of the violence inflicted against immigrants that this self-forgetful representation necessitated.” -- Donald E. Pease * Nations and Nationalism *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePreface ix\u003cbr\u003e Introduction: \u003ci\u003eNation and Immigration\u003c\/i\u003e 1\u003cbr\u003e Imagining America: \u003ci\u003eForgeful Fathers and the Founding Myths of the Nation\u003c\/i\u003e 23\u003cbr\u003e Historicizing America: \u003ci\u003eTocqueville and the Ideology of Exceptionalism\u003c\/i\u003e 48\u003cbr\u003e Immigrant America: \u003ci\u003eLiberal Discourse of Immigration and the Ritual of Self-Renewal \u003c\/i\u003e 76\u003cbr\u003e Discourses of Exclusion: \u003ci\u003eNativism and the Imaginging of a “White Nation” \u003c\/i\u003e 111\u003cbr\u003e Practices of Exclusion: \u003ci\u003eNational Borders and the Disciplining of Aliens\u003c\/i\u003e 143\u003cbr\u003e Conclusion: \u003ci\u003eRemembering 9\/11\u003c\/i\u003e 169\u003cbr\u003e Notes 117\u003cbr\u003e Bibliography 193\u003cbr\u003e Index 205","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49406039163223,"sku":"9780822336068","price":76.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/a-forgetful-nation-9780822336068","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}