The Divided States

Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-0-299-33880-0
Verlag: University of Wisconsin Press

Buch, Englisch, 328 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography

What is an “American” identity? The tension between populism and pluralism, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, has marked the United States since its inception. In The Divided States, leading scholars and critics argue that the US is, and has always been, a site where multiple national identities intersect in productive and challenging ways. Scrutinizing conflicting nationalisms and national identities, the authors ask, Whose stories get told and whose do not? Who or what promotes the idea of a unified national identity in the United States? How is the notion of a unified national identity disrupted? What myths and stories bind the US together? How representative are these stories? What are the counternarratives? And, if the idea of national homogeneity is a fallacy, what does tie us together as a nation?

Working across auto/biography studies, American studies, and human geography—all of which deal with the current interest in competing narratives, “alternative facts,” and accountability—the essays engage in and contribute to critical conversations in classrooms, scholarship, and the public sphere. The authors draw from a variety of fields, including anthropology; class analysis; critical race theory; diasporic, refugee, and immigration studies; disability studies; gender studies; graphic and comix studies; Indigenous studies; linguistics; literary studies; sociology; and visual culture. And the genres under scrutiny include diary, epistolary communication, digital narratives, graphic narratives, literary narratives, medical narratives, memoir, oral history, and testimony.

This fresh and theoretically engaged volume will be relevant to anyone interested in the multiplicity of voices that make up the US national narrative.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Regional- & Stadtgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Contested Lives, Contesting Lives
- Ricia Anne Chansky and Laura J. Beard
- Section One: Tracing Patterns 
- Dakobijigaade mii miinawaa Aaba’igaade Gichimookomaanakiing: Tied and Untied in America
- Margaret Noodin
- Negotiating National Identity and Well-Being in US Black Women’s Diaries
- Joycelyn K. Moody
- The Legacy of Conquest in Comics: Texas History Movies, Jack Jackson, and Revision
- Daniel Worden
- “Strange Juxtapositions”: Elliott Erwitt’s Visual Diary of Cold War America
- Steven Hoelscher
- We Have Never Been a Nation of Immigrants: Refugee Temporality as American Identity
- Elizabeth Rodrigues
- “A small flashlight in a great dark space”: Elizabeth Warren, Autobiography, and Populism
- Rachael McLennan
- Indians in Monumental Places: Heid Erdich and Jeff Thomas
- Laura J. Beard
- Juneteenth
- Angela Ards
- Archival Intervention: Surviving the “Savage Splintering” in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians
- Hertha D. Sweet Wong
- Section Two: Facing Forward 
- Moving Beyond the Urban/Rural Divide in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
- Katie Hogan
- White Privilege and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy
- Stephanie Li)
- Getting Schooled: Responses to Education as Neoliberal Identity-Formation in US Life Narratives
- Megan Brown
- Disabling Birth: Prognostic Certainty and the Gestating Citizen of the Contemporary Midwifery Movement
- Ally Day
- Afterword
- Days of Reckoning: Prospects for Life Narrative 2020
- Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
- Contributors
- Index