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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.2 (2002) 316-317



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Book Review

The Uses of Variety:
Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness


The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness. By Carrie Tirado Bramen (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2001) 400 pp. $45.00

This book demonstrates the rewards and hazards of combining history, literature, and cultural criticism. Drawing on a range of early twentieth-century philosophical, literary, and theological texts, Bramen demolishes two shibboleths of current cultural politics: first, that contemporary Americans are more devoted to diversity than their predecessors; second, that cultural politics cannot address relations of power. These misconceptions share a common source, namely, the naiveté pervading multiculturalist discourse. Averse to hegemony and hierarchy, multi- culturalists recoil from substantive political engagement, thereby vitiating multiculturalism's transforming potential while inducing historical myopia. Bramen reminds us that the healthy psyche is fundamentally orderly and society ineluctably hierarchical. Cultural critics should strive to erect hierarchies conducive to inclusiveness and historians to explain how social hierarchies are constructed, contested, and maintained.

Bramen argues that the social order of early twentieth-century America was maintained as much by a commitment to variety as by an imperative for unity. At the core of the book resides philosopher William James, the founder of American pluralism, whose turn-of-the- century oeuvre betrayed the "dialectal tensions" of pluralist thought—the "conflicting desire for 'connection' and 'autonomy'"—at once supportive and subversive of bourgeois hegemony (249). These dialectical tensions (re)surfaced not only in the thought of Horace Kallen and William E. Burghardt Du Bois, James' students, but also in the work of urban journalists, regional and black female novelists, and Christian theologians, who exploited pluralism's amplitude to advance a range of social and political agendas. Some of these genealogies, like those in Chapter 5 on "biracial fiction," are pathbreaking; other treatments, like Chapter 2's discussion of Kallen and Du Bois, though not revolutionary, are marked by a rhetorical tone so evenhanded as to redeem scholarly debate.

Nowhere is Bramen more incisive than when elucidating the "tensions" in pluralist thought. But her focus on what appear to be tensions from a cultural-critical perspective renders her insensitive at times to what must surely have been dilemmas for her historical actors. Succumbing to the sanctimony that she decries among multiculturalists, Bramen evinces wonder that James, for example, did not notice the "patrician biases" "deeply entrenched" in his pluralism (49). Hence, it [End Page 316] comes as no surprise to her that, in opposing American policy in the Philippines, James betrayed a bourgeois tolerance for cultural imperialism. As evidence, she cites a text in which James "recommended" protectorate status for the archipelago (60). But scrupulous attention to the context of this passage belies Bramen's charge and reveals her bending James' thought to suit her argument. Evidently more concerned with retrieving a usable than an accurate James, Bramen reads his oeuvre selectively. An argument based on history ought to get the history right, and a more complete engagement with James' writing on pluralism and the Philippine conflict would complicate Bramen's elegant thesis without in any way diminishing it.

In his essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" (published specifically with the Philippine events in mind), James unequivocally proclaimed his opposition to cultural imperialism. Pluralism, James wrote, "absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own way, however unintelligible they may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer."1 By and large, Bramen proceeds in James' spirit, leaving us a book at once historically illuminating and morally and theoretically engaging.

 



Jonathan M. Hansen
Harvard University

Note

1. James, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," in Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals...

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