Crossing Borders: Interdisciplinarity, Immigration and the Melting Pot in the American Cultural Imaginary

Canadian Review of American Stud1es/Revue canadtenne d'etudes amencaines Volume 27, Number 2, 1997, pp. 23-43 23 Crossing Borders: Interdisciplinarity, Immigration and the Melting Pot in the American Cultural Imaginary Yasmeen Abu-Laban & Victoria Lamont Introduction Along with the Statue of Liberty, the metaphor of the melting pot has had a profound resonance with respect to images of the United States in both national and international contexts throughout the twentieth century. Alluding to the history of the United States as a settler-colony, the melting pot metaphor (like the Statue of Liberty) refers to processes of immigration, relations of ethnic diversity, and notions of national identity and purpose. The term was largely popularized in a play by Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) entitled The Melting Pot, which premiered in 1908. Both the play and the playwright have generally disappeared from contemporary common knowledge , as well as academic commentary, making the longevity of the melting pot symbol especially intriguing. Disciplinary boundaries can at least partially account for the relatively small amount of attention received by The Melting Pot within the academy. Too political to be literature, and yet too literary for political analysis, The Melting Pot has appealed to neither of the disciplines traditionally assigned to the study of politics and literature-political science and English literary critic1sm.1 Given, however, the increasing acceptance of interdisciplinarity 24 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d' etudes americames within the academy in the late twentieth century, the time is certainly right for a recovery of this play. This article invokes a particular form of interdisciplinarity in its analysis of The Melting Pot by explicitly acknowledging-and challenging-the still tangible boundary between the social sciences and the humanities. While much recent work in the academy may be seen as interdisciplinary in terms of its theoretical appropriations, institutional alliances across the humanities and social sciences tend to be confined to single-authored chapters in edited volumes. 2 Therefore, although various theories drawn from the social sciences have had an impact on textual analysis, and vice-versa, it is still rare to find social scientists and literary critics collaborating as co-authors of the same piece. This article is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving a political scientist and a literary critic. It examines The Melting Pot as a document engaged both in the 'field of cultural production,' to borrow the term exhaustively mapped out by Pierre Bourdieu (1993), and in what we call the field of policy production, enacted within the legal-formal political arena of state institutions, practices, policies and laws.3 Zangwill himself was famous in his day as an active political commentator, writing most extensively on Zionism, woman suffrage, and immigration. 4 While he was subjected to vigorous criticism in the theatre community for the explicitly political content of The Melting Pot, the play was widely admired by the public and policy makers alike, including President Theodore Roosevelt. Our analysis of The Melting Pot addresses conditions within both political and cultural arenas in order to understand not only how the play engaged political debates in a cultural field-a familiar procedure in contemporary cultural studies analysis-but also how the production of state policy on immigration itself engaged decidedly literary practices. Our overall aim is to account for the profound and lasting impact of The Melting Pot with respect to both immigration policy debates and the broader American cultural imaginary. This article takes a threefold approach. The first section supplies an overview and analysis of immigration policy during the Progressive era, with specific attention given to the representation of immigrant bodies-a key site of struggle for immigration policy makers as Yasmeen Abu-Laban & Vtctona Lamont/ 25 well as for Zangwill. This discussion is then followed by an analysis of the discursive tactics Zangwill develops in The Melting Pot in order to address many of the political questions raised in the Progressive-era immigration policy debate. Finally, we examine why the play, and specifically the symbol of the melting pot, has had such profound resonance in the American context. The Field of Policy Production: Immigration Patterns, Policy Debates, and the Introduction of Quotas As a settler-colony, immigration has played, and...