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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... common pecuniary desires . With the exception of Appiah , even the critics of multiculturalism , such as Jacoby , leave unscathed the image of the nation as ethnically and racially diverse . American diversity is treated as a fact ...
... common ground bringing diverse people together : " One day 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 ...
... common sense . How and for what purposes did the seemingly benign discourse of variety come to signify national exceptionalism ? I argue that neither ho- mogeneity nor heterogeneity can claim a privileged relation to the natu- ral ...
... common pattern , though by no means the only pattern , of American exceptionalism . At the turn of the nineteenth century , the rhetoric of variety ( and domesticated heterogeneity ) pro- vided an important means of refashioning ...
... common impulse of pas- sion or of interest , adverse to the rights of other citizens , or to the per- manent and aggregate interests of the community " ( 759 ) . The most " common " and the most dangerous factions are produced from ...
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 | |