In Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, Walter Benn Michaels traces a set of conceptual shifts between the Progressive era at the end of the 19th century and the rise of literary modernism in the 1920s. Through a series of readings of texts, literary and non-literary, prose and poetry, Michaels finds that "America would mean something different in 1925 from what it had meant at, say, the turn of the century; indeed, the very idea of national identity would be altered" (2). Michaels maps a conceptual shift from a citizenship-based theory of "American" and a hierarchical account of race and culture to a nativist account of "American" and a pluralistic account of race and culture.

Michaels maps the ways that writers of the Progressive era focused on a nationalism that, in large part, was of the melting-pot variety. To be an "American" was to be a citizen, and immigrants, at least of the European variety, were theoretically assimilable -- they became Americans by wanting to be Americans, by taking "American" values and by becoming legal American citizens. What were not assimilable to most Progressive-era writers were black Americans; the melting powers of the melting pot only went so far. Many Progressive-era writers, especially racists like Thomas Dixon (who plays a large role in Our America), tended to see the "Americanization" of European immigrants as a means of forming a white national coalition to battle an antithetical black minority. The conceptual movement away from this concept of nationality comes over the first few decades of the twentieth century, when "American" is remade to mean only a certain type of white American: those of northern European, Nordic descent who have been born citizens. Assimilation of immigrants becomes less and less acceptable as a theory of nation-making and the melting pot loses power as a national metaphor. By the time of literary modernism there exists what Michaels calls a nativist logic. According to Michaels, by the modernist period "the idea of the American and the idea of the melting pot are coming to seem mutually exclusive. Nativism generalizes the hostility to miscegenation between black and white; it is now the unassimilability of 'dark blood' rather than the heretofore easy assimilation of the 'European races' that will emerge as paradigmatic" (61). The truly "American" is no longer any white person who is a citizen, but rather a certain type of European person who counts as "native." Others cannot become American, because they are not truly American at their essence.

At the same time that Michaels traces the shift from Progressive-era assimilation to modernist-era nativism, he traces an intimately related shift in conceptions of race and culture between Progressive-era hierarchy and modernist-era pluralism. In the Progressive era, he finds a strict hierarchy of race whereby Progressive-era racists saw blacks as less than human. Nativist modernism engages in a rhetoric of pluralism, whereby other races are viewed not as any worse, but merely as somehow different. Michaels argues that we are still using this logic of pluralism today, and he is at pains to show that its rhetoric of "Difference not Inferiority" (64) is as dangerous as if not more dangerous than Progressive-era racism. Michaels states of modernist pluralism that "the commitment to difference itself represents a theoretical intensification rather than diminution of racism, an intensification that has nothing to do with feelings of tolerance or intolerance toward other races and everything to do with the conceptual apparatus of pluralist racism" (65). Pluralist racism, Michaels argues, removes any universal criteria of right or wrong, and thus leads necessarily to "the emergence of an unmeasurable and hence incomparable racial essence" (66). If there is no common scale on which to measure all peoples, then one's racial, ethnic, or cultural identity becomes something absolute, referring only to itself; it becomes essentialized. Michaels argues that present-day identity politics are saddled with this essentialist logic.

Reading Our America can be quite fascinating; it can also be frustrating, and the frustration is made worse by Michaels's refusal to clearly stake out some sort of critical preferences. One gathers two ideas about Michaels's own biases from reading Our America. In the first place, he seems to have an unspoken preference (given the choice between what he sets up as two evils) for the Progressive-era concept of citizenship, perhaps because it is simply more honest about its direct racism. In the second place, Michaels would like us to stop talking about race altogether: he argues that if supposedly cultural, pluralistic accounts of race inevitably return to biologic essentialism in order to trace the passage of culture and the supposed need for certain groups to recover their culture, then race as a category must be dropped. The great bugbear of Michaels's account is the essential -- it is always and forever to be avoided, at all costs.

Michaels offers some often fascinating analyses that might well be of use to students in this course. His close readings, however brief, are illuminating if only for the way that his overall project offers such a sharp contrast to many standard readings. Michaels reads Charles Chestnutt, but studies The House Behind the Cedars rather than any of the Conjure Woman tales; he briefly discusses James's Daisy Miller; he refers to The Red Badge of Courage; he studies Dreiser but deals mostly with Dreiser in general or with An American Tragedy rather than analyzing Sister Carrie. When he reaches the modern period, Michaels discusses T. S. Eliot and W. C. Williams, placing them in opposition, arguing that Williams fulfills the nativist/pluralist role while Eliot's interest in European culture makes him more of a universalist. He also makes extensive use of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, discusses the logic of texts like Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and analyzes Wright's Native Son.

Despite all these often interesting close readings, Our America suffers from what feels like a lack of intellectual curiosity: it is so enamored with its own brand of archaeology, with unearthing the "how does the logic work?" beneath the Progressive and modernist conceptions of identity, that it never stops to ask the potentially more interesting question of "why did it happen that way?". Of course, Michaels does not feel that these questions have been missed. Historical and political pressures that were exerted on identity formation are not at issue here and neither are the very identity-formations of the authors investigated by Michaels. In the end, the text as a whole, like some of Michaels's readings, feels half-completed: missing some of the complications, not asking some of the questions. Of course, Michaels does not view these aspects as missed -- his whole aim is to convince us that the questions that he does not ask need not be asked at all.