An Introduction to Neonativist Collectives: Place, Not Race, in Cather's The Professor's House and Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent

I.

This essay offers a critical introduction to neonativism, a term I use to describe authorial refusals of the racially essentialist and "retrogressive" tendencies of political nativism in early-twentieth-century American literature. "Nativism," as we encounter the term most frequently in literary and cultural studies, describes racialized political xenophobia, often, but certainly not only, in America. The mid-nineteenth-century Know-Nothing Party, discriminatory anti-immigration acts (such as the Immigration Act of 1924), and present-day debates concerning "amnesty" for "illegals" all share a certain nativist agenda, be it explicit (as with the Know-Nothings) or implicit (as it informs today's immigration debates). Nativists nostalgically prefer an (imaginarily homogenous) "previous America" to the polyglot, heterogeneous America that actually exists. Thus, nativism is marked by "retrogression," as I term it, an active and ideological nostalgia for a mythic past of racial uniformity. Nativists, as nativism's foremost analyst John Higham has noted, are fearful that America will become a messy amalgam of indistinct peoples. Nativists are hostile to change, particularly concerning the complexion of the national people. These two attributes, fear and hostility, as Higham makes clear, convert what might be a simple distaste for a certain ethnic group into the particular national phenomenon that is nativism.¹

Higham writes of three incarnations of nativism: anti-Catholic nativism, anti-radical nativism, and racial nativism. The focus of this paper is on the last of these, the instance of nativism concerned mostly with race but also with foggier categories of culture, particularly as this type of nativism does—or does not—inhabit selected works of "American" literature.² Many scholars see, and certainly not incorrectly, a pervasive and particularly nativist obsession with race in early-twentieth-century American literature. This paper takes as one central focus Walter Benn Michaels's identifications of such nativism, which he develops in his Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995). However, I contend that many of these so-called nativist writers were at least as concerned with place-based constructions of "nativeness" in America as they were with race-based ones. The two authors I will discuss here—Willa Cather and D. H. Lawrence—undeniably grapple with the relationship between race and national identity, but these authors were, I argue, at least as concerned with the energies and identities that emerged from specific American places (both national and continental) as they were with dead-end logics of race. Lawrence and Cather were both inspired to write the particular novels that I discuss here (Cather's 1925 The Professor's House and D. H. Lawrence's 1926 The Plumed Serpent) because of their engagement with evocative American places—specifically the high deserts and rugged expanses of the American southwest. The collision and confluence of people and place, this hybrid collectivity, motivated these two authors, however differently, to write novels that can only mistakenly be called "nativist." Such a branding, I argue, forecloses any understanding of these novels as in fact doing something else, something other than parroting, or rehearsing, the nativism dominant in their day. These novels, as but two examples of novels that do such work, reveal to us alternatives to nativism, and thus we might envision them as beyond, or more than, nativist, as what I call neonativist.

En route to a declaration that The Professor's House and The Plumed Serpent can be read productively as neonativist texts that "assemble hybrids" (to introduce Bruno Latour's phrasing), I will focus frequently in this essay on the readings of these novels proposed by Michaels in Our America, readings in which Michaels focuses on race-based "nativist modernism." As Michaels writes, nativism "is simultaneously a modern and a modernist phenomenon" and, indeed, nativism and modernism can both be conceived of as "efforts to work out the meaning of the commitment" to constructed national identities, which are in Michaels's reading "linguistic, national, cultural, racial" (2-3). At the outset of his Our America, Michaels positions the texts he will discuss as engaged simultaneously...