Response

Our Americahas two theses, one historical and one theoretical. The historical thesis describes the emergence of a distinctly modern concept of racial identity and its transformation—already implicit and never complete—into the concept of cultural identity. The transformation is never complete because culture, imagined not as our actual beliefs and practices but as the beliefs and practices that are appropriate for us, can never free itself from race; the transformation is always implicit because race presents itself from the start as a kind of ideal, something we must not only embody but live up to. What Our Americacalls nativist modernism is the literature of this transformation and of the dramas of identity it makes possible: the betrayal of your culture and the recovery of your culture, the effort to become yourself and the struggle to remain yourself. Our Americaunderstands both the characteristic thematic ambitions of American modernism (e. g., for “the family” to maintain itself) and its characteristic formal ambitions (e. g., for the poem to be itself) as expressions of these identitarian commitments. The theoretical thesis is that any notion of cultural identity that goes beyond the description of our actual beliefs and practices must rely on race (or something equivalent, say, sex) in order to determine which culture is actually ours. Hence the idea of cultural identity—despite the fact that in recent years it has customarily been presented as an alternative to racial identity—is in fact, not only historically but logically, an extension of racial identity.

Marjorie Perloff, Robert von Hallberg, and Charles Altieri focus most of their attention on the historical thesis. They argue that it is at best only partially true, which is to say, true only of a few major modernist writers and not entirely true even of them. They also think that modernism as a movement is diminished by my account of its social meaning; indeed they think that the value of literature itself is diminished by my account of modernism’s social meaning. Perloff and Altieri also disagree with the theoretical thesis. Perloff defends the idea of racial/cultural identity on the social constructionist grounds that “identity is largely a question of how others perceive us” (103); Altieri defends the idea of cultural heritage (racial/cultural identity in its historicist mode) on the grounds that it can function as a purely “educational” concept without a “racial basis” (111).

Neither of the theoretical objections seems to me to have much force. Perloff apparently thinks that because the critique of identity “cut no ice” with the Nazis we should accept what “the history of our brutal century has taught us, identity is largely a question of how others perceive us” (103). But, even leaving aside the particular question of why the Nazis’ commitment to the primacy of identity should count as an argument in its favor, Perloff’s idealism is both theoretically incoherent (the belief that people belong to races is not in itself evidence that people belong to races) and politically disabling (what grounds would we have for criticizing the Nazis if we didn’t think that their perceptions of Jewish identity were mistaken). Altieri doesn’t think we can save cultural identity simply by validating everyone’s mistakes and accepting Perloff’s criteria (if somebody thinks you are something, then [“largely”] you are the thing they think you are); he thinks we can save it by understanding it neither as racial entitlement nor as shared beliefs but as “shareable competencies” (111). Thus where I argue that Shakespeare’s belonging to our cultural heritage can only be a consequence of rather than a motive for our reading him (if we do, he will; if we don’t, he won’t), Altieri says that, “so long as we teach literature,” “anyone whose interests are directed toward such materials will profit from trying Shakespeare” (111); to encourage people to try Shakespeare, he thinks, is thus to encourage them “to try out identifications with a heritage even if there is no racial basis for the identification” (111). But how does being interested in a subject (literature) get turned into (or equated with) identifying...