Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  17. To quote George Orwell in “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” in his Such, Such Were the Joys (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1945), pp. 141–42.

  18. For a good exponent of these views, see Ishmael Reed, introduction, in Ishmael Reed, ed., MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (New York: Viking, 1997), pp. xv–xxviii. All the quotes here come from Reed’s essay. See also Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” who also argues that immigrants were “coerced” into assimilation.

  19. Quoted in Chronicle of Higher Education, February 9, 1994, B2.

  20. As philosopher Philip Selznick has noted critically, for years the “fluid” watchword has been “contingency.” See Selznick’s insightful The Moral Commonwealth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 15.

  21. On the Jewish contribution to modern academic cosmopolitanism, see David Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. chapter 2, “Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century,” pp. 17–42. For the liberal Protestant contribution to academic cosmopolitanism, see George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Marsden demonstrates (brilliantly) that at nearly all the major universities, liberal Protestants, with their secular, pro-science point of view, had managed, after 1920, to marginalize competing religious adversaries as backward, bringing to the fore a non-Christian cosmopolitan point of view. By the 1950s most university managers came from this group. And, on social science’s position on “place,” see economic geographer John Agnew (“The Devaluation of Place in Social Science,” in J. A. Agnew and James S. Duncan, eds., The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations [Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989]), who has shown that most social scientists today still look at all place-rooted societies as provincial and backward, while approaching larger “place-transcending” entities, such as national “communities” or states, as more civilized and enlightened. “Thus, has orthodox social science effectively and systematically devalued place as a concept relevant to our time,” Agnew writes. “The association [of place] in the academic mind with localism and parochialism has become so rooted that the idea of place as a structuring … context for social relations seems strange and out of temper with the national-society focus of most contemporary social science” (pp. 9–11). On the same pattern, see Michael Sandel, Liberalism and Its Critics (New York: New York University Press, 1984), pp. 142–43.

  22. To see the connection between the countercultural age and this one, one need only read Robert Jay Lifton’s Boundaries (New York: Vintage, 1970) written when he was forty-five, which in almost every way resembles the book he was to write twenty-five years later, The Protean Man. Here, too, Lifton invokes the “Protean man” as the wonderful new figure, the man “who breaks down boundaries, the walls” (p. xii). In the late sixties, Lifton sees a big trend toward “fluidity … emerging everywhere” (pp. 39, 99–100). “What this means is that more and more people are at last blurring perceptions of where self begins and ends.” A new “polymorphous style” now stands poised against the “anti-Protean fixities,” “the simple purities,” “the absolutized boundaries of ‘law and order,’ ” the “narrow nationalism” and “personal rectitude” of the past (pp. 112–13). Boundaries not only prefigured Protean Man, but it is that book in almost all essential respects.

  Out of the 1960s, moreover, came hybrids of fluidity, major thinkers such as Harvey Cox, liberal Protestant theologian at the Harvard Divinity School whose widely read 1965 book, The Secular City (New York: Collier Books, 1965, 1996), blended countercultural thought with secular religiosity. Writing at a time of race riots, when many whites were fleeing the major cities, Cox stated—sincerely—that “mobility is always the weapon of the underdog. The desire to combat mobility, to encourage residential and occupational immobility, is a romantic distortion which springs from a reactionary mentality.” Self-inventing “people on the move spatially,” he said, “are usually on the move intellectually, financially, or psychologically.” Cox also claimed that place-based thinking was not even religious; he argued instead that Christianity was indebted to “rootlessness,” that “Yahweh was a nomad,” and that Jesus was “mobile” and “despatialized.” “An advanced industrial society,” he also said, “strangles without mobility. People must be ready to move. Only during the miserable Middle Ages did Christianity undergo a ‘fatal respatialization’ ” (pp. 45–51).

  23. David Thelen, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 1993, A44.

  24. José David Saldivár, Border Matters, Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 9.

  25. Mary Ellen Wolf, “Out of Frame: Border(line) Images,” Critical Inquiry (winter 1997), 494–508.

  26. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). This book, whose arguments I mostly share, appeared too late (in October 1998) for me to incorporate completely into my own analysis.

  27. Ibid., pp. 30–31, 47, 85–87, 122, 133, 146–47.

  28. Sennett does nothing in The Corrosion of Character to reconcile these opposing approaches to the same kind of behavior.

  29. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 28–30, 127–29, 136–37, 200–202, 225.

  30. Ibid., p. 197.

  31. It should be noted that the notion that pond or wood edges are more intense, active, or social contradicts the modern ecological approach to edges and centers, which argues that ecosystems with weak (or destroyed) centers and active edges (where weeds, opportunist interlopers, and predators congregate) are destined to decline or die out. Today, scientists define the “edge effect” as “the negative influence of the habitat edge on interior conditions of habitat or on the species that use the interior habitat.” It is the big central systems that contain the core of the rarest species; these species, in turn, abhor any disturbance; all edges disturb them. Moreover, while it is true that centers and edges often function fruitfully together, it is never true that edges are more “socially active,” more “diverse,” or more critical to the life of an eco-system than centers. See, for quotations, Gary Meffe and Ronald Carroll, Principles of Conservation Biology (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates Inc., 1994), chapter 9, “Habitat Fragmentation,” pp. 237–64; and see also, John Terborgh, Where Have All the Birds Gone: Essays on the Biology and Ecology of Birds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). I would like to thank Alison Beall, curator of the Marshlands Conservancy, Westchester County, New York, for directing me to these sources.

  32. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, pp. 198–202. Other exponents of this position include Werner Sollors and Marjorie Garber. Sollors, Harvard professor of comparative literature who has written a history of “the mulatto,” claims that “race” and “ethnicity” have no meaning any more, because they are fixed, inflexible categories; what does have meaning, he argues, is the “transethnic” and the “international”: “The mulatto is the wave of the future” because he/she “reaches across national and racial boundaries.” In the same vein, Marjorie Garber, also of Harvard, writing on gender, insists that the ideal model for gender behavior is the “transvestite” because he/she rejects “binary thinking,” “violates boundaries,” and experiments with the “space of possibility.” See Werner Sollors, introduction to Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. x–xx; and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), pp. 9–11.

  33. David Hollinger, Postethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 4–5. Hollinger, however, is concerned about the direction of this kind of thinking; his views are more complex than those presented by Sennett, Gerstle, and even Walzer. In a piece in the Journal of American Histo
ry (actually a response to an essay by Gerstle) he recognized the necessity of nation-building, warned of the excesses in the multicultural argument, and insisted that “Americans had a shared history.” Hollinger encouraged some kind of immigration restriction and—as he did in Postethnic America—condemned “ethnoracial” groupism; he also pointed to irresponsible “global capitalism” and “diasporic consciousness” as the key threats to “national community.” Still, it seems to me, Hollinger does not do enough justice to the concept of place.

  34. For similar views, see Maurizio Viroli (associate professor of politics at Princeton), For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 2–9, 13, 164–79; and Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Critical Inquiry (spring 1997), 316–39.

  35. Richard Sennett, “Something in the City: The Spectre of Uselessness and the Search for a Place in the World,” Times Literary Supplement (London), September 22, 1995, 15.

  36. Richard Sennett, Boston Review of Books, Oct.–Nov. 1994, 13.

  37. Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” 624.

  38. Quoted in Santayana, “The Philosophy of Travel,” in Robinson, Altogether Elsewhere, p. 44.

  39. Orlando Patterson, “Migration in Caribbean Societies: Socioeconomic and Symbolic Resource,” in William H. McNeill and Ruth S. Adams, eds., Human Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 106–45.

  40. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (New York: New Directions, 1993), pp. 224, 116.

  41. The modern “diaspora” is “celebrated,” because “it flows from the free decision of individuals or of groups,” Harvard professor Kwame Anthony Appiah has written (see his “Cosmopolitan Patriots”).

  42. Roger Cohen, authority on “diasporas,” writes that “all scholars recognize that the Jewish tradition is at the heart of any definition of the concept. Yet if it is necessary to take full account of this tradition, it is also necessary to transcend it.” One reason “is that the word diaspora is now being used, whether purists like it or not, in a variety of new, but interesting and suggestive contexts” (Cohen, Global Diasporas [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997], p. 21). Even as the Jewish diaspora itself has shrunk in size (or perhaps because it has shrunk), more and more groups who had little or no right to it as a defining event, now claim that right. For an account of the shrinking of the European Jewish diaspora, see Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 285–86.

  The new approach to diaspora, with focus on virtually every human group “in motion,” is immensely fashionable in the academy, so much so that the Ford Foundation has funnelled millions of dollars into studying it. According to the foundation, its program, “Crossing Borders,” supports efforts to understand “processes that are at once ‘local’ and ‘global,’ such as diaspora and migration.…” See Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2, 1997, A40; August 15, 1997, A29; and Business Week, May 12, 1997, 39

  43. People from many groups have described themselves as “diasporic,” among them Haitians, Chinese, French-Canadians, West Indians, and Filipinos; even many Irish in this country dare to call themselves “diasporic.” The Pequot Indians, who operate the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, describe themselves as “diasporic.” See Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, eds., The Pequots in Southern New England (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), p. 78. The journal Diaspora, published at the University of Toronto (earlier at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut), has also contributed to the currency of this term. For more on the commonplace use of “diaspora” in a variety of literatures, see Gabriel Sheffer, “Ethnic Diasporas: A Threat to Their Hosts?” in Myron Weiner, ed., International Migration and Security (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 264–84. On the “Filipino diaspora,” see Keith Richburg, “Becoming a ‘Nation of Gypsies,’ ” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, November 13–19, 1995, 14; on the “French-Canadian diaspora,” William Grimes, “A Quiet Power at the Library,” New York Times (hereafter NYT), May 16, 1995, C1; on the “American diaspora” of American “senior executives” working abroad, Barry Newman, “The New Yank Abroad Is the ‘Can-Do’ Player in the Global Village,” Wall Street Journal (hereafter WSJ), December 12, 1995, A1; on the “black diaspora,” Erol Lewis, “To Turn on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review, June 1995, 765–81; on the “Chinese diaspora,” see Migration World 23:4 (1995), 25; Aihwa Ong, “On the Edges of Empire: Flexible Citizenship Among Chinese in Diaspora,” Positions 1:3, 745–78; and R. Waldinger and Y.-E. Tseng, “Divergent Diasporas: The Chinese Communities of New York and Los Angeles,” in Revue Européene Des Migrations Internationales 8:3 (1992), 91–116. On the “Cuban diaspora,” see Bishop Augustin A. Roman, “Cuban Ecclesial Reflection Communities in the Diaspora,” Migration World 21:5 (1993), 27.

  44. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 158.

  45. Other advocates include immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. At NYU, for instance, a whole group of Third World scholars have come together at a new Africana Institute to examine the “thought and culture of the African diaspora.” A Caribbean poet, Kamau Brathwaite, and a Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o belong to this group; Manthia Diawara, a French-educated native of Mali with a doctorate from Indiana University, leads it. Diawara believes that “New York is fast replacing Paris as the center of the African diaspora.” He wants to develop a “whole-world cultural, analysis approach,” with the “diaspora” at the core, “revolving around black culture and black cosmopolitanism.” See Manthia Diawara, “Building Africana Studies,” University (NYU publication, winter 1996), 11–13; and Craig Smith, “Africana Studies Program, Afro-American Institute Establish Formal Collaboration,” NYU Today, November 13, 1995, 1.

  46. On these Indian scholars as “pacesetters” in the American academy, see Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism” Critical Inquiry (winter 1994).

  47. Dipesh Charakbarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice History,” in Bill Ashcroft et al., eds. The Postcolonial Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 383–88.

  In Rescuing History from the Nation, Prasenjit Duara, professor of Asian history at the University of Chicago, presents a similarly grim critique of the “nation as the subject of History,” which is, he argues, fashioned out of racist theories and determined by false conceptions of development. He sympathizes and identifies with the “subaltern” voices now struggling everywhere to “negotiate” the nation. “Nationalism,” he writes, “is rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather marks the site where different representations of the nation contest and negotiate with each other” (Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], pp. 8–10).

  48. See Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 158–78; and, for background on Appadurai’s antinationalism, see Bidyut Chakrabarty, Subhas Chandra Bose and Middle-Class Radicalism: A Study in Indian Nationalism, 1928–1940 (New York and London: I.B. Tauris and Co., 1990), pp. 38, 21–37.

  49. Phone interview with author, September 12, 1996.

  50. Appadurai, “Patriotism and Its Futures,” in his Modernity at Large. All the quotes in this discussion come from this essay.

  51. This perspective has been adopted by urbanist Saskia Sassen in her Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998). Sassen refers to the “unmooring of identities from what have been traditional sources of identity, such as the nation or the village. This unmooring in the process of identity formation engenders new notions of community, of membership, and of entitlement” (p. xxxii).

  52. “A New Cadre at Chicago,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 22, 1996, pp. A10–A11.

  53. Ibid., 11.

  54. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routled
ge, 1994). The citations in this discussion come from this book. For a recent, updated (but essentially similar) analysis by Bhabha, see his “Editor’s Introduction: Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations,” Critical Inquiry (spring 1997), 33. This essay reaches a level of abstract-theory-speak unrivaled, perhaps, by anyone in the academy.

  55. Bhabha himself embraces the tragic status of the “migrant,” thus offering himself as voice and architect of transnational culture. “I have lived the scattering of people,” he reports, “that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering.” Bhabha has been influenced by kindred postcolonial writers such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, who have argued that “the future belongs to the impure” or that “all cultures are hybrid.” Stuart Hall, quoted by Karen Winkler, “The Significance of Race,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 11, 1994, A10; see also Stuart Hall et al., eds., Modernity and Its Futures (London: Open University, 1992).

  56. David Ricci, The Transformation of American Politics, The New Washington, and the Rise of Think Tanks (New Haven: Yale University, 1993), pp. 233–34.

  57. Author’s visit, August 1996. On Cato, see James A. Smith, The Idea Brokers. Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: Free Press, 1991), pp. 206–21, 275–76; E. J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); and David Boaz (executive vice president, Cato Institute), Libertarianism (New York: Free Press, 1997). For the libertarian impact on Republican leadership, see Stephen Moore (Cato expert), ed., Restoring the Dream: The Bold New Plan by House Republicans, with foreword by Rep. Dick Armey (New York: Times Book, 1995); and Dick Armey, The Freedom Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Press, 1995). “The free market alone,” says Armey, “entrusts each one of us with a leading role” (p. 63). The exemplary cosmopolitan libertarian magazine, published out of Los Angeles, is Reason Magazine; and see Virginia Postrel (editor), “Laissez Fear,” April 1997, for standard line, pp. 4–5.