The Rise of Mutlicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915 (review)

The aim of Susan L. Mizruchi's ambitiously wide-ranging book, The Rise of Multi-cultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915, can be glimpsed through the theoretical lens of Maurice Charland's classic essay, "Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois," [Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133-50]. Charland examined how then-contemporary rhetoric constituted a collective subjectivity—as a "people"—shared among French provincial separatists, linked them to a salient past for their independence project, and constrained its newly constituted audience to seek secession from Canada as something justified by the very act of rhetorical constitution. In her book, Mizruchi similarly attempts to acknowledge rhetorically, through "a literary-cultural study," current-day American diversity as the essence of national identity with transhistorical roots dating to the period from the Civil War's end to just before the U.S. entry in World War I. "I invoke 'multiculturalism,'" she writes of a mid-twentieth-century term she dubs "deliberately anachronistic," "to underscore continuities between past and present." (3) By proffering a host of antecedents alternately embracing or decrying diversity, she, in short, invites her readers into a rhetorically-constituted subjectivity as an American people with a longstanding multicultural identity too often forgotten in today's culture wars over issues like immigration and racial profiling. Social difference and obsessing about it is nothing new. The possible actions that can follow from Mizruchi's constitutive rhetoric include defending multiculturalism as something traditional against alarmists arguing that it is a historical departure and casting critics of it as predictably persistent, somewhat hackneyed, reactionary figures, almost folkoric landmarks within the landscape of cultural difference—gargoyles atop the American cathedral of diversity.

Mizruchi sees rapid and vibrant economic development as the wedge that opened the nation's gates to cultural others. "An unrivaled expansion of the economy coincided with rising rates of immigration and migration," she claims, "making economic forms and institutions singularly receptive to these mobile populations." (289) A skeptic might argue that other countries had absorbed large labor forces from outside national boundaries or from among subalterns within, yet they maintained a single-dominant-culture hegemony that made the ethnic other virtually invisible while remaining stuck in lower-end occupations. Mizruchi accounts for this seeming American exceptionalism in two ways: 1) by recourse to the "social mobility" whipped dead by the New Social Historians of the 1960s and 1970s (she points to "much productive fusion of ethnic identities and economic aspirations"), and by reliance on a plausible if unproven assumption that "a developing print culture flourished through its incorporation and representation of this diversity." (2, 289) Hence, her subtitle, "economy and print culture," identifies what she sees as the motive forces behind the rise of multicultural America.

That Mizruchi summons "print culture" as a key signifier licenses her to move effortlessly between literature and society, for, as New Literary Historicists are wont, she shuffles together classic texts by Mark Twain or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with subliterary ones like advertisements. The result shows that she more than met "the challenge of this book," which she indicates "is to convey the breadth and complexity of these developments, while at the same time capturing the variety of ways in which American writers responded." As a disciplinary achievement in English literary studies her book admirably succeeds in this. The book could be a very useful text for upper-level literature courses surveying the period, for it gives a robust and lively context for the writing. Moreover, paralleling the customary lecture sequencing of such courses, the book's eight thematic chapters unfold in a rough chronology, from writers' responses to the turmoil of the Civil War and its aftermath to their take on "the largely triumphant story of economic progress" albeit with waves of "human casualties" in its wake. (7)

Viewed interdisciplinarily, however, the book must be approached with some caution. There is slippage here between multiculturalism as a singularly...