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

The Uses of Variety offers a unique cultural and intellectual history, beginning with William James's claim (cited in the book's epigraph) that the quest for "the variety in things" should be as central to philosophy as the quest for "the world's unity." As a genealogy of the pluralism at the heart of one of the dominant ways in which Americans have imagined themselves from surprisingly early on, Carrie Tirado Bramen's work is rich and rewarding. Bramen sets out "to interrogate rather than invoke ‘American diversity': to examine how this exceptionalist rhetoric has been employed to promote conflicting and mutually exclusive notions of national identity" (5).

One of Bramen's most productive insights is that variety and diversity were more destablized terms at the turn of the last century than they often are in our own multiculturalist discourse. By providing a genealogy of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century pluralism, Bramen hopes both to clarify the historical record and to "contribute to a left cultural politics that continues to confront rather than evade the ambiguities of multiculturalism's charged language" (8). She argues persuasively that this turn-of-the-century pluralism has no inherent political persuasion: while variety always stands for an embrace of multiplicity and alterity, historically it has been framed by liberal consensus as often as it has been invoked to challenge and disrupt that consensus.

Presenting a somewhat different James than the one usually invoked by scholars, Bramen focuses on James's late work A Pluralistic Universe. Most commentators have rejected James's attempt in his late writings to formulate a pragmatist metaphysics—roughly speaking, an abstract philosophical account of the relationship between the one and the many. Bramen never engages these critical debates, but her attempt to concentrate on the pluralistic theme in James's late writings is nevertheless welcome, especially since many critics have reductively either celebrated this pluralism for its embrace of diversity and difference or rejected it as empty liberal-consensus rhetoric. In the book's first section, "The Ideological Formation of Pluralism," Bramen isolates a distinctively Jamesian mode of pluralism that seeks to balance relatedness to an encompassing whole with the distinctiveness, particularity, and partiality of the individual, located outside, or marginal to, that whole. The James who emerges here is poised between both modalities of variety, exemplifying the ambiguity of an ideology that functions simultaneously as a new American exceptionalism (liberal pluralism) and as a counternarrative to that exceptionalism (a more conflicted and subversive pluralism).

Where James typically insists on the value and integrity of the marginalized individual, two of his best-known students—Horace Kallen and W. E. B. DuBois—develop the more specifically social and cultural implications of this position. Both apply the Jamesian model to marginalized social groups, Jews and African Americans, respectively. What is most striking about Bramen's exposition of this emerging pluralist sensibility is her demonstration of the shared roots of the liberal and the more radically democratic versions of this variety. The heirs of James are divided between a pluralism that aims for a broad community of shared interests and one that seeks to promote the particular interests of individuals and groups marginalized by any such community. Not surprisingly, Kallen emerges as the more conservative, DuBois the more radical of James's epigones. Throughout her discussion, Bramen effectively isolates the dynamics that make variety both a tool for building consensus and a weapon with which to battle it.

Bramen is at her best when she is disentangling the various threads that constitute the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century uses of variety. In its second section, "The Aesthetics of Diversity," the book includes chapters on American regionalism and the urban picturesque, exploring the ways in which writers stage the conflict between the center and the margins in their representation of socially divided geographic...