July 9-10, 2016: Crowd-sourced Critical Patriotisms

[I’ve written a good deal in the last few months about the topic of critical patriotism, a central focus of my recently completed fourth book. So for this year’s 4^th of July series I wanted to highlight a handful of distinct examples of perspectives and visions of such critical patriotism. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and nominations of fellow PatriotismStudiers—add yours in comments!]

First, I’d like to highlight once again the wonderful work being done by Ed Simon and Wade Linebaugh at ‘Merica magazine, an online public scholarly journal dedicated to advancing precisely such critical patriotisms.

And also to share this quote by James Baldwin: “I love American more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

And and to add that the man who shared that quote on Twitter, Jose Antonio Vargas, is consistently modeling (in his Define American project and elsewhere) such critical patriotisms.

Other nominations for models of critical patriotism:

Lara Schwartz nominates “Thurgood Marshall’s bicentennial speech.”

Andrew Lipsett shares a “most recent great one: Obama’s speech at Selma on last year’s anniversary.”

Matt Chambers nominates, “Ellsberg, Manning, Snowden, et al.”

Rachel Weeks Bright highlights, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton's ‘Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,’ a revision of the Declaration of the Independence,” or “‘This Land Is Your Land,’ which Guthrie wrote as a piece of critical patriotism, but is often presented as uncritical patriotism (simply by expunging later verses).”

Emily Lauer Tweets, “Emma Lazarus was constructive with her critical patriotism, and ditto Jon Stewart, I think.”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Critical patriots you’d nominate?