Whose America is Our America: On Walter Benn Michaels's Characterizations of Modernity in America

I find it hard not to see this event as an inversion of the story of the three little pigs: here the three of us huff and puff to blow down the house of the big bad wolf. This pig thought he had a clever way to accomplish that. If I could agree entirely with Walter Benn Michaels there would be no remainder that his brilliant dialectics might subsume: his house would stand but have no visitors. But despite my deep admiration for his intricate arguments and my reluctant concessions to his accounts of cultural pluralism and nativist modernism, I cannot agree with the historical dimensions of Michaels’s argument. Even if one grants that there is a nativist modernism, I doubt that it had the clear general dominance that Michaels seems to be arguing for most of the time. And, more important, I think his attributing such a single synthetic identity across various cultural domains ignores the various efforts to negotiate complex tensions among value systems that are for me the central, dynamic features of modernity. So I will have to make a few historical claims and then try to explain what I find problematic in the theoretical assumptions that seem to underlie Michaels’s argument.

Let me elaborate my complaint about his claims for the dominance of nativist modernism by briefly addressing two issues: first, problems in the scope of his claims and, second, problems in how he deals with the agency of authors in his efforts to establish that scope. On scope, consider the following passage:

The Johnson Act guaranteed that aliens would not become citizens by putting a halt to mass immigration; the Citizenship Act guaranteed that Indians would not become citizens by declaring that they already were citizens. Both acts, that is, participated in a recasting of American citizenship, changing it from a status that could be achieved through one’s own actions (immigrating, becoming “civilized,” getting “naturalized”) to a status that could better be understood as inherited.

[OA,32]

A series of brilliant leaps here establishes a forceful account of how ideas of citizenship changed for some agents. But what about those who were not immigrants, and hence who already experienced citizenship as inherited even (or especially) during ages of heavy immigration? Conversely, what about those immigrants who had received citizenship, or whose children had heard stories about that process? Would they now shift their understanding? And how much in common really is there between the groups of immigrants and American Indians, since they held quite different understandings of what citizenship did and did not afford in economic and cultural terms? Moreover, the very effort to establish commonness on the level of what these pieces of legislation meant for people requires overlooking the economic factors that are central in establishing different experiences of citizenship. ¹So as we pull at the threads of such assertions we find neat equations unravelling into problematic equivocations, and we begin to appreciate how many factors an analysis of general attitudes toward citizenship might have to account for.

Such omissions become more troubling when we turn to Michaels’s dealings with specific authors. He is superb in showing how William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane enter into a discourse of nativist modernism quite different from the transnational modernism maintained by exiles like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. But I wonder how much these writers ultimately share with the overall political concerns Michaels foregrounds. If, for example, Williams insists that to be “‘Indianlike’ the writer must make no likeness to Indians, he must devote himself to ‘WRITING’” (OA,85), then it seems that Williams’s nativism is of a distinctly metaphoric kind, more involved with the republic of letters than with actual citizenship. To insist on the politics of his metaphors is not far from calling for a feline modernism on the basis of the analogies Williams draws between cats and the artist’s constructive intelligence. Michaels could only be convincing here if he could show that Williams based specific political decisions on identifications with the natives he...