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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... means for refashioning the dominant narrative of American exceptionalism for a new century : the United States is at the forefront of a new global order precisely because it is able to adapt to the perceived fluidity and heterogeneity ...
... means that all differences cannot be accepted and that a radical - democratic project has also to be distinguished from other forms of ' postmodern ' politics which emphasize heterogeneity , dissemination and incommensurabil- ity " ( 13 ) ...
... means as naturalized at the turn of the century as it is today . In this earlier period , terms such as " diversity " were highly unsettling , destabilizing , and contested . For some , these words sug- gested entropic chaos , the ...
... 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 Americanism in modern terms , as the ...
... means stagnation , —death " ( 152 ) . Whereas the rhetoric of " vari- ety " allows Giddings and others to bracket off race in order to discuss European ethnicities , Cooper uses the same principle — that difference makes the United ...
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 | |