The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National DistinctivenessHarvard University Press, 2000 - 380 من الصفحات The turn of the last century, amid the excesses of the Gilded Age, variety became a key notion for Americans—a sign of national progress and development, reassurance that the modern nation would not fall into monotonous dullness or disorderly chaos. Carrie Tirado Bramen pursues this idea through the works of a wide range of regional and cosmopolitan writers, journalists, theologians, and politicians who rewrote the narrative of American exceptionalism through a celebration of variety. Exploring cultural and institutional spheres ranging from intra-urban walking tours in popular magazines to the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, she shows how the rhetoric of variety became naturalized and nationalized as quintessentially American and inherently democratic. By focusing on the uses of the term in the work of William James, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hamlin Garland, and Wong Chin Foo, among many others, Bramen reveals how the perceived innocence and goodness of variety were used to construct contradictory and mutually exclusive visions of modern Americanism. |
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... African Americans , who have low rates of intermar- riage , will constitute less than one - third of the minority population in 2040.3 Besides this demographic evidence , there has also been a critique of American diversity on the ...
... in a Los Angeles neighborhood which had signs in every other shop in Russian ( with Cy- rillic alphabet ) , I stopped at a taco stand where a number of Asian- American students were also eating . The African - American 6 Introduction.
... African - American waiter wore dreadlocks . No one seemed to notice " ( Striehm 154 ) . This eclectic mon- tage of images — Cyrillic alphabet , tacos , Asian Americans , and dread- locks — is supposed to function metonymically as a ...
... African Americans started to move from the rural South and from New South cities to northern cities . As early as 1903 , W. E. B. Du Bois concluded that " the most significant economic change among Negroes in the last ten or twenty ...
... American farmer , " and moving to the city , where it would become the privileged term of the cosmopolitan flaneur ... African - American writer and educator Anna Julia Cooper . In a strategy that I elaborate in relation to Du Bois in ...
المحتوى
William James and the Modern Federal Republic | 29 |
Identity Culture and Cosmopolitanism | 67 |
The Uneven Development of American Regionalism | 115 |
The Urban Picturesque and Americanization | 156 |
Biracial Fictions and the Mendelist Allegory | 201 |
East Meets West at the Worlds Parliament of Religions | 250 |
In Defense of Partiality | 293 |
Notes | 307 |
337 | |
Acknowledgments | 361 |
365 | |