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40 CreatingtheMulticulturalNation Creating the Multicultural Nation Adventures in Post-Nationalist American Studies in the 1990s George J. Sánchez Mankind—that word should have more meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests . Perhaps it is fate that today is the Fourth of July and you will once again be fighting for our freedom—not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation . We are fighting for our right to live, to exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight.” We are going to live on. We are going to survive. Today we celebrate our Independence Day! Actor Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore in the 1996 movie, Independence Day In the summer of 1996, the movie blockbuster Independence Day reflected many of the attractions, contradictions, and ironies of post-nationalism in the United States embodied in both popular culture and academic discourse .1 On one level, the previews for that movie enticed us to the theaters by depicting the explosion of virtually every important architectural symbol of nationalism in the United States: the White House and Capitol in Washington , D.C., the Empire State Building in New York (and in the movie a fallen Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor), and even Capitol Records Tower in Los Angeles—that odd mixture of national pride, phallic symbolism , and international capitalism embedded in popular culture. Once in the theaters, audiences were treated to the vicarious pleasure of watching the outer space invaders defeated by a polyglot team of U.S. citizens, most conspicuously headed by an African-American fighter pilot (played by actor /rapper Will Smith) and a Jewish electronics/mathematical genius (played by actor Jeff Goldblum), while the rest of the world’s fighting forces combine across all historical and socio-political divides to back up the American charge. It was in battle against alien invaders that, through the voice of the actor playing the President of the United States, July CREATING THE MULTICULTURAL NATION 41 Fourth became everyone’s independence day. As audiences cheered, nationalism , it seemed, had given way to a global internationalism in the wake of invasion from extraterrestrial aliens. In truth, however, this film reflected a new-fashioned nationalism, one now ripe in its confidence of a multicultural future for the United States and America’s lone role as a military and cultural superpower that could export its diverse, yet unified, values across all national boundaries.2 Multiculturalism seemed to have emerged as a quintessential American value, marking the United States as a unique society among nations, while giving it alone the status to lead all nations to a new future devoid of interethnic strife. This cinematic fantasy—ahistoric as it may be—is also a central vision of some leading Americanists in this country and, just as importantly, the rationale behind several new versions of American Studies on various campuses. This essay intends to critically examine the relationship between the fields of Ethnic Studies, as it has developed in the United States since the 1960s, and a newly revamped American Studies, which hopes to cast aside older notions of American exceptionalism and contribute to a newfound examination of multicultural U.S. society. In an attempt to fully investigate the multiple meanings behind the movement toward a “post-national” American Studies, I will explore one particular ideological focus of much recent work in American Studies that purports to be “post-ethnic” in analysis and motivation.3 I argue that current discussions regarding the place of the two fields of American Studies and Ethnic Studies in academia and on specific U.S. campuses reflect the deep ambivalence toward difference and unity in discussions of nationalism among liberal/left thinkers in the United States struggling with how to conceptualize a new, progressive multicultural agenda for the nation. In a recent review of the institutional changes toward diversity in the national American Studies Association, 1997 President Mary Helen Washington reported, None of these changes happened of its own accord, but at each critical moment in the history of the ASA, an individual has pushed for change, and the organization, with support from the presidents and executive boards...

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