Description
Book SynopsisTakes 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.
Trade Review“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.
A Forgetful Nation 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
Democracy and the Foreigner“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
Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States“
A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States is 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 *
Table of ContentsPreface ix
Introduction:
Nation and Immigration 1
Imagining America:
Forgeful Fathers and the Founding Myths of the Nation 23
Historicizing America:
Tocqueville and the Ideology of Exceptionalism 48
Immigrant America:
Liberal Discourse of Immigration and the Ritual of Self-Renewal 76
Discourses of Exclusion:
Nativism and the Imaginging of a “White Nation” 111
Practices of Exclusion:
National Borders and the Disciplining of Aliens 143
Conclusion:
Remembering 9/11 169
Notes 117
Bibliography 193
Index 205
