December 8, 2011: So What 3

Over a year ago, in one of my earliest posts here, I wrote about African American slaves who, in the first years after the Declaration of Independence, brought petitions before the newly formed state legislatures to argue for their freedom, using the language and ideas of the Declaration and of the American Revolution more broadly in support of their cause. As I wrote in that post, those petitions explicitly blur, and thus complicate, two of our most prominent and usually contrasted narratives of the Revolution: those that focus on the Founding Fathers and their inspiring arguments for liberty and democracy and a new form of government and nation; and those that note, as did Edmund Wilson in his magisterial American Slavery, American Freedom, the abiding irony of American slavery alongside—and in fact for many of the Founders as a financial and social base for—these central arguments for liberty and equality.

Similarly blurring those two narratives are many of the Revolutionary-era poems of Phyllis Wheatley. As I noted in the later paragraphs of this post on Wheatley, there were few if any American literary works—creative works, that is, rather than more overtly political ones like Tom Paine’s pamphlets—that made the case for the Revolution with more power than her “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth”; and while in a subsequent pro-Revolution poem like her ode to General Washington Wheatley mostly mutes her own identity as an African American slave, in “Dartmouth” she makes that experience of slavery the explicit grounding for her embrace of liberty and support of the Revolutionary cause. So is it possible to read the whole of the Revolution as, in a partly symbolic but also partly literal sense, descending from a figure like Crispus Attucks, the mixed-race, Wampanoag and African American dockworker whose death at the hands of British soldiers helped define the “Boston Massacre” and hasten the Revolution? Can we read this event, which would come to be so prominently led by and connected to a group of landed and relatively privileged white men, as instead profoundly connected to some of America’s most overtly and crucially cross-cultural individuals and communities? And what would that shift mean for our images of the Revolution and the nation it created?

There are of course many different possible answers to those questions, but there are also prominent and significant recent works of AmericanStudies scholarship that have begun fleshing out such images of the Revolution. At the top of that list would have to be Douglas Egerton’s Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America, a book that analyzes at length key figures such as Quok Walker (one of the first and most famous of the slave petitioners) and Thomas Jefferson’s servant Richard (with whom Jefferson explicitly argued over slavery and its meanings and effects) in order to understand the Revolution through the lens of this American community. Egerton’s conclusions mostly focus on how the Revolution’s promise did not ultimately play out for African Americans, but such failures should not mask the significantly different images of the Revolution that he creates through this new viewpoint and framework. And adding another, even more centrally cross-cultural and transnational layer to such ideas is Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, one of the most seminal works of cultural studies and a text that seeks (very compellingly) to illustrate core elements of modern, post-Enlightenment identity through the experiences of the African, Caribbean, American, and British Atlantic, not as distinct worlds but as one continuous, interconnected, cross-culturally transformative and transforming space. Through Gilroy’s lens, the Revolution no more simply oppressed African Americans than it ultimately separated America from England—each might have been a political outcome, but the cross-cultural connections between these communities would only deepen as a result of the Revolutionary era’s events and changes.

More tomorrow, one more period and exemplary work,

Ben

PS. Any events, images, figures, or texts from the Revolutionary era that you’d add to our understanding and histories of it?

December 7, 2011: So What 2

For my second post in this series on how our narratives and images of particular historical periods would change through an emphasis on cross-cultural diversity (and on exemplary recent AmericanStudies scholarship that can help with such re-visions), I’ll move about a century forward in our national history, but keep one of yesterday’s focal communities in my revisionist crosshairs. Yesterday’s post focused on the first couple centuries of post-contact and post-Columbian history, the 16^th and early 17^th centuries, and more exactly on both the European explorers and the Puritan settlers who constituted two of the central such arriving communities. Today’s post will focus on the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, what we might call the settlement and colonial periods; while of course every American culture and community continued to evolve and (I would argue) deepen its cross-cultural connections and influence over those years, my specific subject today remains Puritan New England.

If, as I argued yesterday, many of our dominant narratives of the Pilgrims and the first Puritan arrivals emphasize their ideal and inspiring qualities, their mission and faith and “city on a hill” vision and so on, it’s fair to say that our narratives of the subsequent generations of Puritans substantially shift those emphases and tones. None of those narratives are as prominent in our national conversations as the Pilgrims or the Mayflower or the city on a hill, but I’d say we have some sense of these subsequent Puritans, and that it’s a sense of them (thanks in part to later writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and H.L. Mencken [the source of the famous “somebody somewhere having a good time” definition of Puritanism]) as intolerant and exclusionary and entirely unwilling to entertain even the slightest challenge to the orthodoxy of their beliefs; these are the Puritans who destroyed Thomas Morton’s maypole (as immortalized in Hawthorne’s “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”), who banished Anne Hutchinson for her antinomian heresies, who forced even a quite zealous and impressive theologian and leader like Roger Williams into exile (well, into Rhode Island, but potato, potahto). Even a genuinely progressive and complex and inspiring spiritual thinker and American writer such as Jonathan Edwards has been, as I argued in this post, folded into those images of a fiery faith that accepts no deviations from its precepts, thanks to the heavily anthologized sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

I’m not going to try to turn the late 17^th and 18^th century Puritans into the typological predecessors of the hippies or anything, but the more accurate perspective on Edwards would indicate that neither were they quite as intolerant or absolutist as the dominant narratives suggest. Even had they wanted to be, their communities continued to experience complex American cultural encounters, and thus to undergo cross-cultural transformations, throughout these years. And it just so happens that a Fitchburg State English and AmericanStudies colleague of mine, Michael Hoberman, has recently published a hugely exemplary book (his third) that unearths, narrates compellingly, and analyzes a series of such transformations. In the book, New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America, Hoberman highlights the small but meaningful presence of Jewish religious and business figures in New England’s churches, universities, and cities over this century and a half post-Mayflower, and uses their relationships and conversations with a number of prominent Puritan thinkers and leaders to analyze the men’s joint influences and changes, their shared cross-cultural transformations. More broadly and even more significantly, his book makes a compelling case that we can best understand the evolving Puritan identities and communities not by focusing on their insular qualities, but instead by recognizing these kinds of external (yet interconnected and, I would argue, inseparable and profoundly American) presences and influences. We still have a lot to learn about the Puritans through a lens like this, as Hoberman’s book proves very successfully and impressively.

More tomorrow, on another period and exemplary work,

Ben

PS. Any suggestions for new ways to look at historical periods or communities?

UPDATE: Michael adds that one of the preeminent scholars of Puritanism, Francis Bremer, has recently argued that there is not much archival evidence that the Mass Bay Puritans were as stringent in their demands for a full confession pre-church membership as has often been believed. Also, check out this forthcoming anthology of early American Jewish writing, co-edited by Michael!

December 6, 2011: So What 1

If you’ve been well trained by a literary analyzer like this AmericanStudier, one of your main responses to the new definition of cross-cultural American diversity I advanced in yesterday’s post might be “So what?” I tried to address some of the broadest national narratives that could be transformed by my ideas back in the “What would change” series of posts (written the week that the book in which I make this argument was released), and certainly I would still emphasize such broad topics (language, mixture, the melting pot, and a phrase like “All-American”) in response to your hypothetical analytical query. But within that book, each main chapter focused on a particular century in American post-contact history and culture, and along those lines I would also argue that a definition of American identity and diversity focused on cross-cultural transformation would allow—in fact require—us to rethink some of our dominant images (both positive and negative) of different time periods. For the rest of this week’s posts I’ll address one particular period and what would change, relying in part on an exemplary recent work of AmericanStudies scholarship to help me make my case.

For a long time, our national narratives of the first European arrivals to the Americas have focused on two distinct, in many ways opposed, but each in their own way oversimplifying stories. Some of the most defining national narratives have of course focused on the Puritans, and most especially on the Mayflower Pilgrims; those narratives have tended to be largely positive and celebratory, as exemplified by the recurring “city on a hill” imagery which leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have used both to describe the Pilgrims and to carry forward their idealizing visions of their mission and community. In the dominant Pilgrim narrative, Native Americans tend to figure mostly just as friendly helpers (a la Squanto) who help the Pilgrims survive and then, well, more or less vanish from the story. On the other hand, another defining national narrative emphasizes Christopher Columbus and 1492 as key origin points; for at least the last few decades, driven by multicultural historical revisions and the rise of disciplines like ethnic and Native American studies, that narrative has tended to be largely negative and critical, as illustrated by the many protests that met the 1992 Columbus quincentenary and sought to turn the conversations both to the many cultures that constituted the Pre-Columbian Americas and to the often horrifically violent and destructive aftermaths of Columbus’s “discovery” for those cultures.

There’s certainly both historical accuracy and contemporary relevance to the positive and the negative narratives of European arrival, but my definition requires a different vision: one that emphasizes not arrival itself, not the cultures doing the arriving, and not those already here and affected by the arrivals, but instead the relationships and interconnections between and ultimately mutual transformations of all of those cultures. And to that end, I can’t recommend highly enough Cynthia Van Zandt’s Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America,1580-1660. Van Zandt’s book is exemplary as historical scholarship, utilizing archival primary sources in consistently clear and complex ways, and refusing to settle for anything less than a fully rounded analysis of the multiple cultures and moments and encounters on which she focuses. But it’s just as exemplary, to my mind, in its fundamental purpose, in Van Zandt’s desire to examine aspects of the arrival era that are centrally defined neither by European success nor by cultural oppression or violence; instead, she argues convincingly throughout, many of this period’s central interactions were hesitant, tentative, partial, and most significantly cross-cultural in every sense. If they did not always extend into the remainder of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, that does not mean that they are not crucially defining American interactions, both because future cultures and communities would likely not have existed without them and because, through a more 21^st century lens, they provide inspiring evidence that separation, hierarchy, and violence were far from the only options available to early American cultures.

More tomorrow, another time period that needs reexamining and another great recent work that can help us to do just that,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any aspects or stories of the arrival and exploration era you’d highlight?

December 5, 2011: Defining Diversity

I ended Friday’s post with a series of questions that I’ll repeat here and then take up, one per paragraph: “So did the Immigration Act of 1965 not really change anything? Was America always just as diverse as it is in the 21^st century? Have we not lost any unifying elements?” One the first question, I’d have to be a pretty terrible AmericanStudier not to note that the 1965 Act represented a hugely significant change, first and foremost as the first immigration law (since the initial such law, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act) that expanded rather than limited the communities and individuals who could immigrate under its aegis. Similarly, the Act’s move away from explicit restrictions in national origin (especially for all Asian nations, but also for various Latin, Caribbean, and African ones) and to other kinds of preferences (skills, family relationships with current Americans) made it significantly more possible for immigrants from places like Taiwan, South Korea, Egypt, Kenya, Jamaica, and South America (among many others) to come to the US in meaningful numbers, and new communities of immigrants from these nations sprang up in major American cities (and around the country) as a result of the change. While I refuse to see as anything other than rank bigotry arguments like Buchanan’s about the negative effects of these changes, they most certainly were made possible by the Act.

Yet to address my second question, I would nonetheless describe America’s late 20^th and early 21^st century diversity as different in degree rather than in kind from our earlier eras and identities. I would argue that in part because I want to define America in a significantly more inclusive way from its origin points—to see, for example, early 17^th century American identity as including not only the English in colonies such as Massachusetts and Virginia but also the African slaves in Virginia, the Dutch in New Amsterdam, the Spanish in Florida and the Southwest and California, the French in the upper Midwest, the Russians in what would become Alaska, and the countless numbers of Native American nations and tribes throughout those areas and the rest of the continent. Through that lens, diversity has always been one of the most central elements of our national identity, and adding more nations to the mix only amplifies that longstanding reality. And yet even if we focus on the particular nationalities and communities that were most affected by the 1965 Act, a more accurate understanding of American history and identity recognizes that they too had often been part of our national community for more than a century (if not much longer): from early 19^th century Chinese Americans like those at the heart of my still-favorite blog post to the multi-century Creolized interconnections between the Caribbean, the Hispanic Americas, and the US about which Edouard Glissant has written so powerfully, and even to the ways in which nations whose inhabitants had been stolen into slavery could now send voluntary immigrants much more easily, the reality is that the 1965 Act just made it easier for core American communities to build on those longstanding historical identities.

On the third and final question, of whether we as a nation have lost any unifying qualities—to respond directly to the narrative of decline that truly defines arguments like Buchanan’s and Ferguson’s—my own argument, the idea at the heart of my second book, is quite literally the exact opposite of theirs. To my mind, the most fundamental origin point for America is not only diversity but hybridity, not only the significant number of distinct cultures and communities that have always inhabited this land but the idea that America itself is constituted out of the cross-cultural, transformed product of the encounters and conversations and intersections between those initially different but ultimately inseparable cultures and communities. While Buchanan and Ferguson have a certain culture in mind for their “us,” and while multiculturalists might argue that there have always been many different “us”-es that have combined to form the larger American “us” (e pluribus unum, after all), I would agree with the latter position but also and most significantly argue that there has in fact always been a unifying “us,” one that is comprised out of exactly the kinds of hybrid and cross-cultural identities that Buchanan and Ferguson worry have eaten away at their mythic founding community. It’s pretty ironic, I’ll admit, to find a defining national unity in precisely what the purveyors of our most traditional national narratives see as a threat to national unity—but on the other hand, if we could all come to understand just how cross-cultural America has always been, it’d take the threat of contemporary (or post-1965, or whatever) hybridization and turn it into a promise fulfilled.

More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 3-4, 2011: Heidi Kim's Guest Post

[Heidi Kim is many things—an Assistant Prof of English and Comparative Literature at UNC; the author of a really great dissertation and future book on race and identity in 20^th century American literature; a former scientific researcher and consultant who will bring that knowledge and perspective into her next project on genetics, identity, and literature; a hard-core opera and tennis buff who has written online about those passions—but as this post proves, she’s also an exemplary AmericanStudier, both in her ability to analyze history, culture, pop culture, media, and literature in complex and illuminating combinations and in her even more crucial ability to bring those interests and topics into her classrooms.]

A 1962 Raleigh News and Observer article, revisiting the life of Chang and Eng Bunker, finally dubbed them not just the world-famous Siamese twins, but Siamese Tar Heels.  The story of these twins—ethnic Chinese, Barnum exhibits, world travelers, gentlemen farmers, Buddhist-to-Christian converts, American citizens, fathers of ten and eleven children respectively—often does not include their regionality, but here in North Carolina, Eng and Chang are proud pieces of Carolina history and are as much a part (if a smaller part) of Mount Airy as Andy Griffith! 

Chang and Eng, as many historians, including my friend Gary Okihiro, have remarked, are striking figures of American identity, confounding expectations about class, race, religion, and citizenship in the 19^th century.  Their public career began in the 1820s, and though they eventually took over management of their own careers (in one notable incident running away from their managers in England and being tracked down in the city of Bath—if only Jane Austen could have met them), they settled down to farming life in North Carolina.  They brought new ideas, such as scientific and technological advances to farming, but also adopted old ones, such as slavery; each brother owned several enslaved African Americans, and the consequent downturn in their fortunes after the Civil War was a large factor in pushing them back out on the road again in the 1860s.  As two of my students, Mary Cooper and Lily Roberts, observed, Chang and Eng forced Americans and Europeans to confront their own conceptions of humanity, modernity and identity that were being reshaped in relation to new outsiders and new imperial ventures.  Cultural critic David Palumbo-Liu has argued powerfully that the Asian within and without American borders was essential to the formation of American national identity as an international industrial power; Chang and Eng’s journeys and their own personal struggles form part of that dialogue.

Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda (http://www.philipkangotanda.com), so foundational to Asian American theatre, has gone back to this foundational era to reflect on these issues through his new play I Dream of Chang and Eng.  By a fortunate coincidence, I was having dinner with Philip the day that I received an offer of employment from UNC Chapel Hill, and he told me about his play and the Carolina connection.  When I saw that Wilson Library at UNC had Bunker archives (http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/bunkers/bibliography.html)  in the North Carolina Collection and Gallery and the Southern Historical Collection, I knew I had the makings of a great experience for students, Philip, and the public.  My English 265 Honors class on ethnic American literature and history has tackled an ambitious syllabus of literary readings, independent archival and historical research, and event planning in collaboration with Philip.

Pedagogically, this has been an interesting and potentially dangerous experiment.  With so many different people, from archivists to publicity managers, to coordinate with at Wilson Library, and with everyone concerned unfamiliar with doing a student public presentation of archival work on this scale, a lot of deadlines and needs were not clear from the outset.  This distraction occasionally spilled over slightly into other areas of the class (for both students and myself), as our attention was divided.  But we all somehow stayed miraculously good-spirited and tolerant (or at least grumbled privately).

I gave the students ownership of the event to the maximum that I could, but since I perforce have to grade them, they still felt the need to get my approval, and of course, they also needed information and guidance at times.  They tackled event organization ranging from the blog to the curation of exhibition cases to the painting of a student publicity “cube” (done just yesterday).  What this required was not just an intellectual engagement, but a collaborative spirit and willingness to be social that is more associated with a club than a classroom.   This, as all instructors know, can vary extremely by the particular group of students, but also varies by campus; at my previous institution, I would never have done this, but UNC students are much more community-minded and, in a word, kinder.  With a team spirit fostered by our lively discussions all term, my class has done wonders.  (But I don’t know if I would venture this again with a different group; next semester, I’ll be doing another student archival project and event with Wilson Library (no doubt there will be another guest post) but it will be scaled back to avoid some of the coordination problems.)

To see these wonders, I invite all of Ben’s readers who may be in the area to come to our event on Tuesday, December 6 at 5pm in Wilson Library on the UNC Chapel Hill campus.  It will feature some unstaged readings from the play, a presentation of student research, and a lecture by Philip.  However, those of you who can’t come can still read more about our work on the student blog, The Chang and Eng Bunker Project. (http://changandeng.web.unc.edu)  Video interviews with students about their research are now up; an interview with Philip Gotanda, event photos and videos will go up next week.  We welcome your comments and feedback on the intriguing Bunkers!

Heidi Kim

Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill

heidikim@email.unc.edu

December 2, 2011: Homogenous

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a post on Ben Franklin’s anti-German xenophobia, and included in a supporting role some discussion of “The Dark Side of Diversity,” a truly abhorrent essay by Pat Buchanan that blamed the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre (and just about everything else Pat found wrong with late 20^th and early 21^st century America) on the Immigration Act of 1965. I didn’t link to the Buchanan essay then, as I didn’t want to give it or its host site, Townhall, any traffic; but since I’m going to discuss Buchanan’s ideas at greater length here, and moreover compare another and much more well-respected writer and historian to Buchanan, I feel that it’s important for me to provide that link. So, much as it pains me to subject you to this tripe, I’d suggest that you click on the “Dark Side” link above and get the full sense of Buchanan’s (thankfully pretty short) piece. When you’re done gnashing your teeth and rending your garments and cursing a blue streak (those were and are my responses, anyway), I’ll be here. And I promise never to ask you to read any Buchanan again.

Okay, welcome back, glad you survived. As you now know, there’s hardly a single sentence in Buchanan’s piece that doesn’t cry out to be marked up with a red pen for its logical fallacies, its total lack of evidence and support, its blatant and ugly bigotry, its failure to meet the standards of either the most rudimentary writing course or the barest level of civil decency. But for my purposes here, I’m interested in what is unquestionably the most defining and mythic—and in some ways the most erroneous and destructive—narrative on which Buchanan’s whole premise rests: the idea that “Before 1970, we were a people, a community, a country.” A couple paragraphs later, Buchanan spells out more fully exactly how much he believes “we” shared prior to the changes wrought by the 60s (including the Immigration Act): “the old ties of history, heritage, faith, language, tradition, culture, music, myth, [and] morality.” It’s easy to feel as if Buchanan’s central ideas in this piece are just more evidence of his (well-established) cultural, historical, and racist derangement (see his frequent defenses of Adolf Hitler, for example); certainly (I hope) most Americans wouldn’t agree that the Immigration Act “threw the nation’s doors open to the greatest invasion in history,” or see a similar “correlation between mass migrations and mass murder.” But the truth, to my mind, is that a very significant percentage of Americans do believe that there was once an America in which all those elements were shared, tying “us” all together into “a people, a community, a country”—it’s back to this mythically unified nation, after all, that the Tea Party rallying cry of “I want my country back!” seems so clearly to harken.

Moreover, this mythologized vision of a once-unified, clearly (if almost always slightly indirectly) white European Anglo-Saxon Christian (what else could Buchanan mean by “heritage, faith, language, tradition, culture”?) America, is to my mind the only possible way to specify Niall Ferguson’s concept of America’s declining and perhaps nearly lost form of “Western civilization” (a concept to which I responded in yesterday’s post). So it’s not just bigoted cranks like Buchanan or (predominantly) nostalgic older white Americans like the Tea Partiers who share the belief in this mythologized past—it’s also one of our most prominent and public scholars and historians, one of the voices to whom our contemporary American culture turns to make reasoned, complex sense of our history and identity. Whatever their differences as scholars and people—and I fully accept that they are many and substantial—Ferguson’s new book (as represented in that Newsweek piece at least) is entirely homogenous with Buchanan’s essay in this key way: the premises of both depend entirely on this mythologized narrative of a once culturally/ethnically/religiously/racially unified America that has lost that unity; both see the loss as a bad thing in various ways against which we should push back, which is perhaps an unavoidable corollary to believing in the mythic unity in the first place, but even without that particular follow-up, the belief in the myth is strikingly similar, and, I would argue, renders Ferguson’s core idea just as false, and just as destructive, as Buchanan’s.

So did the Immigration Act of 1965 not really change anything? Was America always just as diverse as it is in the 21^st century? Have we not lost any unifying elements? My answers to those questions are, not surprisingly to any long-time readers of this blog, complicated, and the complexity itself is a big part of what’s missing from Buchanan or Ferguson’s accounts. I’ll get to them in Monday's post! More then,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 1, 2011: What’s At Stake

While I’ve moved on to a new book project and with it (and with other new articles and possibilities) many other scholarly questions in the fields of American literature and AmericanStudies, and for good and necessary reasons—most of all because I think all of the best scholars, and certainly all of my models in this profession, have continually turned their attention and interests to new and evolving topics—it’s fair to say that hardly a day goes by that I’m not viscerally reminded of what’s at stake in the questions of how we define American identity on which my second book focused. I identified a number of such issues in the “What Would Change” posts that are collected under the “Book Posts” category here, as well as in parallel Meta-Posts like “Why We’re Here, Still.” That particular post seems especially relevant these days, with Newt Gingrich suddenly the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination—Gingrich has always been particularly willing to talk (with that destructive combination of ignorance and certainty) about sweeping historical issues like what he called, in the speech I quoted there, “what it once meant to be an American”; and that phrase sums up quite precisely the question for which Gingrich’s deeply mythologized and oversimplified narrative (one which would posit details like “European and Christian” as central parts of that founding American identity) continues to provide an answer for far too many Americans.

Gingrich’s goals, whatever his pretensions to scholarly or intellectual rigor, are of course drastically different from mine; he wants political power (and, yes, money), whereas I hope (among many other goals) to contribute something to our national conversations and narratives. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t engage with his ideas publicly—as I’ve argued many times in this space, one central reason why I created this blog was my growing feeling that public AmericanStudies “scholarship” had been ceded for far too long to the Gingriches and Becks and Bartons of the world—but it might make it seem like my ideas line up smoothly with what most of my fellow, more genuinely scholarly AmericanStudies peers might argue. I’ve felt that way at times myself, as when colleagues have highlighted for me prominent, inspiring, and publicly embraced examples of cross-cultural relationships and transformations; at moments like those it can seem as if at least we AmericanStudies scholars are in this together, doing our part to nudge our national narratives toward cross-cultural complexity and conversation. And then I start to read about the most recent work by one of our contemporary moment’s most famous and successful historians, Niall Ferguson, and I’m reminded of what’s at stake in every current arena, scholarly ones very much included.

Ferguson is about as successful as an academic can get, however you want to define success—holds a couple different prominent faculty positions at Harvard, as well as one at Oxford; has published multiple best-selling works of history, particularly on histories of the financial world from the medieval era up to the present; and is a public scholar who writes a column for Newsweek, among other similar venues. I confess to not having read or even prior to this week known much about his most recent book, Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011), which is apparently already slated for an accompanying 2012 PBS series; but at least as distilled into this article for Newsweek, the book’s core arguments are pretty much exactly as mythologizing and oversimplifying as Gingrich’s (and, through Ferguson’s insistence on using tech terms like “app” and “operating system” to describe historical concepts, perhaps even more annoying). For a thorough dismantling of the article’s arguments, I direct you to this exemplary blog post; I’ll just note here, as that blogger and economist Noah Smith also does, that Ferguson’s most significant and salient error is a direct conflation of “Western civilization” with “European white folks.” That might work for the England in which Ferguson grew up (although I’m not saying that it does, only that I don’t know enough about England to disagree), but the central goal of my book’s redefinition of American identity is to make clear just how much of American identity and culture, past and present, such a cultural and racial conflation elides. To cite only one, particularly glaring example from Ferguson’s own essay (one also cited by Smith): Ferguson uses as proof in his argument that America has lost our supremacy in “work ethic” the assertion that “you don’t have to spend too long at any major US university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian Americans.”

I don’t know that it gets much clearer than that. For Ferguson, Asian Americans are non-western, categorically different (presumably no matter how long they or their families have been in America, although that shouldn’t matter in any case) from the culture he’d put at the heart of that description. It’s not enough simply to say in response that Asian Americans are as centrally and constitutively American as, well, Anglo Americans like Ferguson; I believe that to be the case, but would go, as I go in the book, one step further. My boys—the sons of an Anglo and Russian-Jewish American and an Asian American, the products of the kinds of cross-cultural transformations that are at the heart of America’s unique and crucial form of civilization—are the most centrally and constitutively American of all. Ferguson’s ideas and success and public forum only further strengthen my sense of how much that redefinition of America is still needed. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?