Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America

FIFTEEN: American Homelands: A Dissenting View

c h a p t e r f i f t e e n American Homelands A Dissenting View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael P. Conzen Homelands have made a dramatic comeback since 1990, both in the rhetoric of nationalism and as a concept in academic discourse. The reasons are complex , but the multiple effects of four recent changes in contemporary society appear to have encouraged it. The collapse of Soviet hegemony in eastern Europe and central Asia has opened the door to ethnic self-determination for many peoples once subject to Sovietization. They are now reasserting claims to nationhood and to territory, the latter on the basis of attachment to ethnic homelands of varying ancestry and geographical character (e.g., Kaiser 1994). Then, the defeat of apartheid in South Africa has removed the ignominy, if not the problems, of government-enforced “homelands” designated for blacks in that country (Lipton and Simkins 1993). Further, the fifty-year struggle over Jewish and Palestinian homeland rights in the Middle East has once again reached tumultuous proportions in the tortured search for resolution (Herzl et al. 1989, 16–49; Adler 1997). And, last, the rapid inroads made by global corporatization of economic activity, and the uniformity it brings, together with the attack that modernization has made on traditional lifeways, and the centralization that has accompanied both these processes, have produced counterreactions throughout the world (Poche 1992; Nobutaka 1997). Preserving cultural heritage, especially of groups and regions lacking full autonomy , has become a cause célèbre in many places, and in the articulation of 238 strategies for contesting hegemonic control, the identification of ethnic “homelands ” is playing an interesting role. Whatever geopolitical and commercial shifts the United States has had to make in its international position as the surviving superpower, there have been concomitant changes in coping with its own internal social and political fabric , with respect to ethnoracial makeup, immigration and citizenship policy, and a range of social and economic programs. The transfer of many government services to private supply, reduction in government oversight, and devolution of responsibilities from the federal to state or local levels have combined with major changes in business organization, labor practices, and demographic patterns to produce a new era of cultural competition for limited government resources, access to wealth and power, recognition of “minority ” rights, and self-help initiatives in general. The assimilationist model of American society has been seriously challenged for some time, with widespread calls to recognize, celebrate, and sometimes institutionalize on a new scale the nation’s tremendous ethnic diversity. American multiculturalism has entered a period in which the Anglo conformity of the past is not just passively resisted but openly contested (Schlesinger 1992). The traditional consensus about what it means, and what it takes, to be American has frayed at the edges, if not at the core. In such contexts the renewed scholarly interest in homelands, both internationally and domestically, takes on a more than incidental importance. In Europe, the primordial but always socially constructed link between peoples and their ancestral homelands continues to underlie movements for independence or increased political autonomy within the many multinational states of the Continent. In the United States, with a much different ethnographic history , cultural battles and distributional politics appear also to employ strategies and tactics grounded from time to time in group geography. From the land claims of Indian peoples, to the political representational claims of African Americans and the language claims of Hispanics, a diverse set of public issues is bound up with the particular patterns of geographical concentration and dispersion of these and many other groups, mobilized or latent, in the nation’s political life (Sutton 1985; Siegel 1996; Shell 1993). There was a time in America when the idea of homelands, insofar as the term was applied to Americans at all, was generally understood in two senses. american homelands: a dissenting view . . . 239 In the first instance, there were homelands that belonged to American Indians . Everyone understood that the whole territory of the United States had been the Indians’ estate and that over time it was extinguished or reengineered on a smaller scale as formal “reservations,” often in new locations (Bjorklund 1992; Frantz 1999). Besides this, homelands were anywhere else in the world, chiefly in Europe or Africa, whence migrants free and unfree had come (Ames 1939; Drachler 1975). Africans captured and removed from West Africa were soon mixed together in their New World...