Transnational America
Cultural Pluralist Thought in the Twentieth Century
Published on 20. August 2002
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-0-7425-2197-1 (ISBN)
Description
In Transnational America, Everett Akam brilliantly addresses one of the most fundamental issues of our time-how Americans might achieve a sense of racial and ethnic identity while simultaneously retaining the common ground of shared traditions and citizenship. Akam's study transcends the current debates over multiculturalism and cultural pluralism by retrieving the tradition of cultural pluralist thought neglected since the first half of the twentieth century. He argues that thinkers such as Randolph Bourne, John Collier, Horace Kallen, and Alain Locke sought to reconcile diversity and community by challenging the cults of individualism, universal reason, and assimilation typical of their age. Akam goes on to demonstrate how cultural pluralist thought was eclipsed during the second half of the twentieth century by an intellectual mainstream that both discounted pluralists' emphasis on culture and heralded interest-group pluralism as a model for racial and ethnic relations. Transnational America is an engaging look at the difficulty of achieving the delicate synthesis between identity and community that will be of interest to sociologists, political theorists, and historians alike.
Reviews / Votes
Well organized. Recommended. . . . Excellent for graduate students and above. * CHOICE * Looking to a neglected past, Everett Akam offers a richer perspective on the tensions between diversity and community than that afforded by contemporary 'identity politics' and its critics. Carefully recovering the insights of an earlier generation of 'cultural pluralists,' he evokes a compelling vision of difference within unity which promised an American identity that averted the perils of both stifling homogeneity and divisive separatism. -- Robert Westbrook, professor of history, University of Rochester; author of John Dewey and American Democracy Akam weaves a fascinating thesis from the diverse strands of thought in our European/colonial/frontier development. Questioning why we have not created a transnational culture and insist on some form of isolation or absorption, he clarifies some of the major conceptual problems we share today. A brilliant analysis of our society as a quasi-culture. -- Vine Deloria Jr., author of Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact, God is Red: A Native View of Religion, and many others Confounding the standard academic division of labor, Akam blends the intellectual histories of pragmatism, ethnicity and race into a highly original synthesis organized around the concept of cultural pluralism. Rejecting both tribalism and universalism, he calls for an ideal of diversity in unity that respects the irreducible particularity of distinct cultures while still maintaining a common national culture capable of uniting people across their local cultural communities. Akam's powerful, concluding tribute to the Civil Rights Movement as the most significant, if short-lived, historical embodiment of this pluralist ideal should serve as the starting point for all future discussions of multiculturalism in America. -- Christopher Shannon, author of A World Made Safe For Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity This book is most valuable for its examination of Locke in context. * Journal of American History * Akam's Transnational America captures better than any previous work the philosophical aspirations of the early-twentieth century cultural pluralists. Bourne, Kallen, Collier, and Locke emerge here not only as critics of the 'melting-pot ideal,' but as thinkers engaged with the most vital issues of modernity. Their inquiry into the nature of truth, values, selfhood, and community in a pluralistic universe has much to offer the contemporary debate about ethno-racial diversity and U.S. national identity. There's wisdom in this book. -- Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia UniversityMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 160 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
426 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-7425-2197-1 (9780742521971)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Everett Helmut Akam is professor of history at Casper College.
Content
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Truth and Consequences Chapter 3 Transnational America versus the Melting Pot Chapter 4 Horace Kallen and the Community of Consumption Chapter 5 John Collier and the Red Atlantis Chapter 6 Merger without Fusion: Alain Locke's Cosmopolitan Pluralism Chapter 7 The Eclipse of Cultural Pluralist Thought Chapter 8 Epilogue: The Civil Rights Movement as Beloved Community