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National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus of belonging established for the national community, the national narrative has represented other peoples (women, blacks, "foreigners", the homeless) from whom the property of nationness has been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of their norms. Dismantling this opposition has become the task of post-national (Post-Americanist) narratives, bent on changing the assumptions that found the "national identity."
This volume, originally published as a special issue of bounrary 2, focuses on the process of assembling and dismantling the American national narrative(s), sketching its inception and demolition. The contributors examine various cultural, political, and historical sources--colonial literature, mass movements, epidemics of disease, mass spectacle, transnational corporations, super-weapons, popular magazines, literary texts--out of which this narrative was constructed, and propose different understandings of nationality and identity following in its wake. Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Lauren Berlant, Robert J. Corber, Elizabeth Freeman, Kathryn V. Lingberg, Jack Matthews, Alan Nadel, Patrick O'Donnell, Daniel O'Hara, Donald E. Pease, Ross Posnock, John Carlos Rowe, Rob Wilson
List of contents
Preface vii
National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives / Donald E. Pease 1
Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn / Jonathan Arac 14
The Politics of Nonidentity: A Genealogy / Ross Posnock 34
As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age / John T. Matthews 69
Failed Cultural Narratives: America in the Postwar Era and the Story of Democracy / Alan Nadel 95
Resisting History: Rear Window and the Limits of the Postwar Settlement / Robert J. Corber 121
Queer Nationality / Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman 149
Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative / Patrick O'Donnell 181
Techno-euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime / Rob WIlson 205
On Becoming Oneself in Frank Lentricchia / Daniel O'Hara 230
Melville's Typee: U.S. Imperialism at Home and Abroad / John Carlos Rowe 255
Mass Circulation versus The Masses: Covering the Modern Magazine Scene / Kathryne V. Lindberg 279
Contributors 312
Index 315
About the author
Donald E. Pease
