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

Studies in American Fiction25 1 women's fiction and in 19th-century American literature and culture more broadly will find Baym's latest book stimulating and informative reading. University of OklahomaMelissa J. Homestead Bramen, Carrie Tirado. The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the QuestforNational Distinctiveness. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000. 380 pp. Cloth: $48.95. The Uses of Variety is an accomplished book; its attention to detail, its careful scholarship, and its commitment to the complexity of its thesis across a range of cultural sites give it a rare combination of depth and scope. A study of the turn of the century's fascination with the ideas of diversity, variety , and heterogeneity in the United States, the book is a welcome addition to American studies as well as to a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on questions of multiculturalism. In her introduction, Bramen asserts that she has two audiences in mind for The Uses of Variety. To the first audience of literary and cultural historians of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she provides a thick, integrated cultural history of how the ideas of variety and diversity became central to often-contradictory ideas of the American nation. To the second audience oftheorists of multiculturalism, she offers an intellectual genealogy of some of the late twentieth century's most cherished, if uninterrogated, assumptions about the value and political uses of diversity and culture. Her address to specialists and non-specialists alike may be what is most engaging about Bramen' s work, for while it is extremely useful to scholars in her field, it is also a sharp but balanced intervention into current debates about difference, debates that she ably shows are too often constituted by platitudes and soothing political maxims. The Uses of Variety is directed, even in the midst of its most detailed local arguments , at the larger question of how a history of ideas matters, how recovering the terms of earlier debates about social and ethnic difference can give nuance and texture to contemporary liberal theory. Bramen's thesis, most broadly stated, is that the pressing issues ofrepresentation addressed by multiculturalists are not contemporary inventions. Under the sign of William James' s pragmatic evaluation of variety, philosophers , political theorists, racial spokespersons, and creative writers, among others, were able to imagine ways to synthesize the nation and cultural difference without subordinating one to the other. Bramen argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, legal and social representation for individuals and for ethnic and racial groups was a pressing issue, and that the charge to integrate groups while preserving something of their distinctiveness underwrote that era's best (and least) known writing. Beginning 252Reviews with William James's pluralism, which she styles "a crisis-management guide to modernity," Bramen looks at a number of scenes of intercultural contact in her book, showing how in each instance, the social actors in question tried to work through the tensions of variety and unity in order to preserve their membership in both the nation and the cultures coexisting within it (44). Bramen' s logic not only begins with James, it is indebted to his flexible pragmatism. Beginning with A Pluralistic Universe, the last major book published by William James during his lifetime, Bramen elaborates the relationship between pragmatism and variety, and tracks the use to which two of James's students, Horace Kallen and W. E. B. DuBois, put his ideas. James's pluralism offered DuBois and Kallen a surprising ability to "combine essentialist strategies of race politics with nationalism and internationalism" (72). Her insight that DuBois and Kallen relied on an unexpected combination of essentialism and cosmopolitanism as they argued for subcultural distinctiveness helps Bramen set the stage to recover the strategic uses of a forwardlooking , politically-informed essentialism throughout her book. In later sections, she follows through the dialectics of variety and unity and essentialism and cosmopolitanism by looking at the literary genres of regionalism and the urban picturesque, arguing that they helped to create a dynamic of continual interdependence between the region and the nation. She turns then to the work of racial fiction, arguing against the conventional understanding of that fiction as marked by the trauma...