A Forgetful Nation

On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States

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by Ali Behdad

Duke University Press

Due/Published September 2005, 232 pages, paper

ISBN 0822336197

In A Forgetful Nation, Ali Behdad turns his attention to the United States. Offering a timely critique of immigration and nationalism, Behdad takes on an idea central to American national mythology: that the United States is "a nation of immigrants," welcoming and generous to foreigners. He argues that Americans' treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility, and that this deep-seated ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of national identity. Building on the insights of Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, he develops a theory of the historical amnesia that enables the United States to disavow a past and present built on the exclusion of others.

Behdad shows how political, cultural, and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known--J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass--and lesser-known--such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country's violent beginnings, including its conquest of Native Americans, brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant "aliens" today, particularly along the Mexican border.

"By way of valuable new readings of Jefferson, Hamilton, Tocqueville, Crevecoeur, and others, Ali Behdad has found a new way into established terrain. Neither pro- nor anti-immigration per se, this book traces the cultural workings and productions of immigration politics, an angle explored by few contributors to the immigration literature. A Forgetful Nation should be required reading for all those interested in the long and often hidden history of nation-building in the United States."--Bonnie Honig, author of Democracy and the Foreigner

"This book offers a deeply relevant argument in the wake of 9/11 and counter-terror. Ali Behdad provides psychological depth to immigration discourse with a nuanced examination of 'forgetting' as a mode of negation that both denies and acknowledges a past built on the exclusion of otherness."--Russ Castronovo, author of Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Contents

Preface
Introduction: Nation and Immigration
Imagining America: Forgeful Fathers and the Founding Myths of the Nation
Historicizing America: Tocqueville and the Ideology of Exceptionalism
Immigrant America: Liberal Discourse of Immigration and the Ritual of Self-Renewal
Discourses of Exclusion: Nativism and the Imaginging of a "White Nation"
Practices of Exclusion: National Borders and the Disciplining of Aliens
Conclusion: Remembering 9/11
Notes
Bibliography
Index