A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States

Ali Behdad

Published by Duke University Press 2005

A Forgetful Nation

On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States

Ali Behdad

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822387039

Overview
Contents

About this book

The cultural workings of immigration and exclusion in U.S. history.

Author / Editor information

Ali Behdad is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

“By way of valuable new readings of Jefferson, Hamilton, Tocqueville, Crèvecoeur, and others, Ali Behdad has found a new way into established terrain. Neither pro- nor anti-immigration per se, this book traces the cultural workings and productions of immigration politics, an angle explored by few contributors to the immigration literature. A Forgetful Nation should be required reading for all those interested in the long and often hidden history of nation-building in the United States.”—Bonnie Honig, author of Democracy and the Foreigner

“This book offers a deeply relevant argument in the wake of 9/11 and counter-terror. Ali Behdad provides psychological depth to immigration discourse with a nuanced examination of ‘forgetting’ as a mode of negation that both denies and acknowledges a past built on the exclusion of otherness.”—Russ Castronovo, author of Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States

“A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States is an extraordinary work of cultural memory and an important contribution to critical historiography. In writing it, Ali Behdad has established a heretofore unrecognized connection between the culture’s mythical representation of itself as an ‘Immigrant Nation’ and the negation of the history of the violence inflicted against immigrants that this self-forgetful representation necessitated.”

-- Donald E. Pease Nations and Nationalism

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Nation and Immigration Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Imagining America: Forgetful Fathers and the Founding Myths of the Nation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2 Historicizing America: Tocqueville and the Ideology of Exceptionalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	48
3 Immigrant America: Liberal Discourse of Immigration and the Ritual of Self-Renewal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
4 Discourses of Exclusion: Nativism and the Imagining of a ‘‘White Nation’’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
5 Practices of Exclusion: National Borders and the Disciplining of Aliens Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143
Conclusion: Remembering 9/11 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 232

eBook

Published: July 18, 2005
ISBN: 9780822387039