Post-Nationalist American Studies

Foreign Affairs: Women, War, and the Pacific

84 Women,War,andthePacific Foreign Affairs Women, War, and the Pacific Katherine Kinney Near the end of Joan Didion’s novel Democracy, the main character, Inez Victor, the wife of a Kennedyesque senator, is waiting in Hong Kong in April of 1975 while her lover, Jack Lovett, searches for her daughter in Saigon. Lovett tells Inez to listen to the shortwave radio for the final evacuation order from the American embassy in Saigon. “Mother wants you to call home,” the American Service announcer would say and then play Bing Crosby singing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” This secret signal is no less absurd for the way in which it uncannily articulates Inez’s personal desire to find her daughter. But listening to it, she comes to a conclusion which reverses typical expectations. Rather than allowing her concern for her daughter to individualize and privatize her understanding of that convulsive historical moment, Inez comes to realize that after twenty years “she was not particularly interested in” the members of her family. They were definitely connected to her but she could no longer grasp her own or their uniqueness, her own or their difference, genius, special claim. . . . What difference did it make in the long run whether any one person got the word, called home, dreamed of a white Christmas? The world was full that night of people flying from place to place and fading in and out and there was no reason why she or [her husband] Harry or [her son] Adlai or [her daughter] Jessie . . . should be exempted from the general movement. Just because they believed they had a home to call. Just because they were Americans. (208)1 Within the traumatic context of the fall of Saigon, Inez comes to reject both the belief in a home separate from the convulsions of history and her own constitutive place within it as wife and mother. By refusing to accept WOMEN, WAR, AND THE PACIFIC 85 the primacy of domestic, familial relationships, Inez “gives up the American exemption” and comes to see the world and her place within it with new, “post-national” eyes. The sharp demarcation between domestic U.S. history, defined within the boundaries which became the lower forty-eight states, and “foreign affairs” is a key tenet of the exceptionalist conception of American Studies. The boundaries of the continental United States are naturalized as domestic space, and the domestic is naturalized, in turn, as woman’s sphere. The relationship between national and familial conceptions of the domestic becomes particularly acute in times of war; and war, hot and cold, has held a privileged place in the construction of U.S. nationality in the twentieth century. World War II consolidated the primacy of consensus models of American culture, society, and politics, and the Cold War coercively enforced that consensus. Post-nationalist American Studies are more than coincidentally a product of the post–Cold War era, an injunction to re-imagine the nation in a new global narrative. The gendered distinction between the foreign and the domestic and its inscription through war has been mapped across the Pacific with a particular intensity. As one of the oldest and most conspicuous sites of American imperial expansion, the Pacific throws certain features of American exceptionalism into bold relief. In its most basic sense, American exceptionalism testi- fies to (or searches for) the difference of the United States not simply from the nations of Europe but from their history. The absence of feudalism, of class difference, of empire, even of war have all at various times defined the American exception from history. In cultural understanding (and often in the tradition of American Studies) American exceptionalism has functioned in deeply idealized and mythic terms. “The city on the hill” is one of the most resonant expressions of the idealism of American exceptionalism, an image of a nation above borders, separate and inviolate, righteous and exemplary. The Pacific holds an almost irresistibly mythic appeal in this context. It is quite simply the end of the West, a phrase which is so powerful because its claims seem simultaneously literal and mythic. The phrase “post-nationalist American Studies” likewise suggests the end of something, what comes after , the going beyond. In a very real sense, the end of the West is one of the ideas which a post-nationalist American Studies must supersede if its purpose is to re-imagine the United States as something other than the...