Turning from the National to the Multilingual

Americanist Ed White points to the title under which Cathy Davidson and I republished a special issue of American Literature—Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill—as a "simple but telling example" of the way nation had, by the early 1990s, joined "an analytical 'Holy Trinity' of Race, Class, and Gender"—and, indeed, "threatened to displace" the category of class.¹ White goes on to relate this "turn to the nation" to such global events as the end of the Cold War and the rise of Eastern European nationalisms and, more specifically, to trace "its literary and cultural branch" to the timely reissue in 1991 of Benedict Anderson's massively influential 1983 book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism ("EAN," 49).

Although it seems true enough that the subtitle of Subjects and Citizens was indicative of a "turn to the nation" in literary and cultural studies of the time, I would supplement White's account slightly by mentioning two other titles that had appeared a year or two before and had led the turn: the English Institute's Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text edited by Hortense J. Spillers (1991) and Nationalisms and Sexualities edited by Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (1992). In both instances, new work in sexuality studies was a powerfully reorienting addition to the mix of analytical concerns and categories ("Queer Theory" had just emerged in 1990–91, in a special issue of the feminist journal differences edited by Teresa de Lauretis). Benedict Anderson had been a key participant in the conference on which Nationalisms and Sexualities had been based, as had historian of fascism George Mosse, whose Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (1985) had, along with Anderson's work, been a primary stimulant for the convening of the conference and for the "turn to the nation" in sexuality studies in general that it had signaled.

Throughout the 1990s, the categorical trio nation, race, and gender continued to appear in the titles and subtitles of academic books in the humanities and social sciences, sometimes with the temporarily displaced category of class restored.² By 2001, the combination had become sufficiently mainstream to show up in a striking new permutation in the subtitle of the revisionist royal biography Diana, a Cultural History: Gender, Race, Nation, and the People's Princess by Jude Davies.

What seems exemplary to me in White's analysis of the "turn to the nation" is his taking the term back to the eighteenth century and observing it in that historical context: "[W]e can fairly say that [the word's] dominant practical association at the time was with Native Americans—that is, with the nation as 'the Other.'" "In this sense," he writes, "the first national literature of the American colonies century explored the question of indigenous collectives, trying to classify such polities—nations—in a broader imperial context" ("EAN," 64). White takes as an example of this crucial early phase in the conceptualization of nation Cadwallader Colden's History of the Five Indian Nations (1727–47). Recent work by Lauren Berlant (such as "The Queen of America Goes to Washington City," which first appeared in the September 1993 issue of American Literature) and others has made us aware of the intricate ties between various modes of intimacy and a restricted set of modes of national and citizenly identity. By returning the term to a much earlier moment in its formation, White shows how nation emerged not out of a supposed concern with matters of close social proximity and common bonds but, rather, out of a strong sense of cultural and political distance and difference, the kind of "cultural distance . . . from which a cultural and ethnic unity" could be "perceived and granted." In Colden's history, White writes, "can be read . . . the transition from the folk, or ethnic, understanding of the...