Our America and Nativist Modernism: A Panel

Now and then a critical book appears that attempts to reorient an entire field; the debates that surround such work are exciting, and the stakes are high. Walter Benn Michaels’sOur America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism is just such a book. He makes three important arguments with stunning lucidity: that American literature of the 1920s followed closely the popular reactions against increased immigration in the first two decades of the century; that American modernism was driven by considerations of race and identity more than of form and representation; that the identitarian and racist views of culture that developed in the 1920s are the same as those advocated in debates about identity in the 1990s. Whether one accepts these arguments or not, Michaels has set new terms in which modern American literature must be discussed.

Versions of the following papers were presented at a panel devoted to this book that I organized for the American Comparative Literature Association meeting at the University of Notre Dame in April 1996. I am grateful to Charles Altieri, Walter Benn Michaels, and Marjorie Perloff for agreeing to meet and argue with each other, and to Krzysztof Ziarek of Notre Dame for giving us the ACLA forum. A number of people contributed questions and comments to the debate we started there, and I would like to thank them for that. I wish that I had found an editorial means for presenting their remarks here. We’ve decided instead to present more formal, extended versions of the comments made at Notre Dame in the spring.

Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralismwas published by Duke University Press in 1995; references to this text will be abbreviated OA.Unidentified parenthetical citations refer to pages in this issue of Modernism / Modernity.