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[3] the new americanists and the violence of identity The New Americanists and the Debate over Identity in chapter 1, I showed that the New Americanists’ understanding of representation is influenced most importantly by Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation. According to Althusser, the individual becomes a subject in the act of being hailed, or interpellated, by ideology. Representation itself is thus modeled after a performative speech act. These performative acts are conducted by what Althusser calls “Ideological State Apparatuses” (such as the church and the school), each of which contributes to the continuous interpellation of the subject. While performative speech acts may be seen as the model for the act of interpellation, ideological hailing is conducted not only through language but also through various kinds of material practices. While interpellation ushers in the individual’s mistaken sense of being an autonomous being, a proper understanding of interpellation, so the argument goes, highlights the fact that language and other means of representation create and form the subject. Thus, interpellation is more than a theory of representation; it is first and foremost a theory of the subject. In other words, interpellation gives us an important clue as to what the New Americanists ’ understanding of identity is. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that the New Americanists’ constructions of Emerson are prefigured by their theory of identity. As the theory of interpellation was first formulated in response to both Marxist and liberal humanisms, it is hardly surprising that it has moved New Americanists to criticize Emerson for being a major architect of American liberalism, or, to put it the other way around, that it has served New Americanists well in the formulation of a critique of liberalism. By the same logic, those of the New Americanists who have defended Emerson have interpreted him as undermining the hegemony of the liberal order. As I will argue, however, the way in which New Americanists have appropriated the idea of identity construction from Althusserian theory has led them to make implicit, normative 108 emerson and identity claims that are themselves ultimately liberal. One might be perturbed or relieved by this insight, depending on one’s view of liberalism. The problem arises from the fact that the New Americanists’ liberal norms remain disavowed . This results in blind spots in their work—incongruities between what their tacit liberal norms require and what their theoretical assumptions provide. The particular blind spot on which I will focus in this chapter concerns the way in which New Americanists conceptualize recognition. Recognition is a term that attempts to account for the social genesis of identity. Liberal theory has worked out the intricacies of the process of recognition , which, from Hegel onward, has most often been described as a struggle. Yet the New Americanists, informed by Althusser’s theory of interpellation , have not sufficiently grappled with the processual and unstable character of recognition. They tend to assume that the individual either is or is not recognized. This absolutist view explains why they deem problematic both being and not being recognized. Coming to terms with the unstable dynamic that marks the process of recognition would require them to move beyond a theory of identity based on the idea of the unilateral construction of identities by cultural practices and discourses. Moreover, as I will show in chapter 4, a more nuanced perspective on identity formation through recognition would allow New Americanists to address a dimension in Emerson’s work that has largely escaped them because of their theoretical framework. As I will argue, Emerson’s notion of self-reliance was concerned with recognition much more centrally than has hitherto been noted. To understand the New Americanists’ theory of identity more fully, it is helpful to place it within the larger debate on identity that evolved in the context of feminism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism across the humanities beginning in the 1980s. Most New Americanists, especially those who openly identify themselves with the label, tend to eschew this contextualization when providing a genealogy of their movement. Most of them describe their emergence by emphasizing differences with prior paradigms within American Studies.1 They typically point to their differences with the Myth and Symbol school, which they portray as complicit with the Cold War consensus. Moreover, they usually distance themselves from the more recent ideology critique presented by Sacvan Bercovitch, who describes the co-optation of dissent by a national consensus. There are obvious reasons why this intradisciplinary lineage is emphasized . From an institutional perspective, an important...

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