This Violent Empire
The Birth of an American National Identity
Published on 30. August 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
512 pages
978-0-8078-7271-0 (ISBN)
Description
This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self.
Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of ""Others"" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These ""Others,"" dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.
Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of ""Others"" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These ""Others,"" dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.
Reviews / Votes
In this much anticipated work, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg takes up Crevecoeur's challenge 'What then is the American, this new man?' and boldly answers: A deeply divided subject of This Violent Empire, this United States. In exposing republican citizens' desires and fears, she not only opens up new realms of thought and inquiry--she makes clear that no genuine understanding of the new nation can overlook the profoundly confounded and contested cultural construction of 'the American, this new man.'--Michael Meranze, University of California, Los Angeles|""Smith-Rosenberg maps the genesis of a historical dilemma, how the United States' vaunted diversity and emphasis on unity often function in bitter opposition. Historically rich and theoretically sophisticated, This Violent Empire studies the social, material, urban, intercultural, and international contexts through which an impossibly unified American identity was imagined in the magazines, literature, and art of the early United States.""--Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University|""Scholars of the new nation and its culture have been waiting twenty years for this book--and it is well worth the wait. We will no longer hear that the most powerful actors of the 'founding' did not think or talk creatively about Indians, or slaves, or women. This Violent Empire reaches deep into the national psyche and broadly into the cultural practices that defined Americans and their 'Others' in a formative period; it is a tour de force of political and cultural analysis that informs us all.""--David Waldstreicher, Temple UniversityMore details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Chapel Hill
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Edition type
New edition
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
860 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8078-7271-0 (9780807872710)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
12/2012
1st Edition
Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
from
€67.99
Available for download
Person
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor, Emeritus, University of Michigan, is author of numerous books, including Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America.