... Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of ... to a nonexistent nation magnif
ALH Online Review, Series X 1 J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 472 pp. Reviewed by Elizabeth Fenton, University of Vermont In his inaugural address, President Donald Trump began by announcing, “We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people.” This opening, perhaps unsurprisingly, evokes a capacious unity while simultaneously delineating clear limits around the promise to be restored. The “we” in question, the speech announces immediately, is comprised exclusively of “citizens,” those occupying a legal status distinct from that of residents, immigrants, guest workers, refugees, tourists, visitors, and all manner of other short- and long-term inhabitants of the US. The “effort” imagined will further strictly national, as opposed to global or regional, interests. And the “America” conjured by this President certainly does not encompass a hemisphere. “We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny,” Trump declared, but again, and throughout the speech, the solidarity suggested by that “we” operated in concert with the enmity embedded in his calls for an “America First” policy order. In just a few sentences, the US president offered a clear reminder that even now—or, perhaps, especially now—there is no “us” without a “notus,” and every expression of “we the people” contains within it a cost that someone, somewhere, must bear. There was perhaps no better book to be reading during the past few months than J. Gerald Kennedy’s Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe. At once a wide-ranging and detailed study of antebellum US literature’s myriad engagements with the pitfalls of nationalism, Strange Nation examines how US writers struggled to reconcile the lofty promises of unity with the hard realities of difference. The study focuses mainly on works produced between 1820 and 1850—in the aftermath of the War of 1812 but before the period that later would be called the “American Renaissance.” This period has attracted the attention of scholars in recent years, but, overshadowed by the Civil War, it occupies faint space in public memory. Part of Strange Nation’s project, then, is to remember a history many readers don’t realize they’ve forgotten. “So much of what Americans now understand about themselves and their country,” Kennedy notes, “assumed shape and substance in antebellum narratives now seldom read” (33). Situating an admirably wide variety of texts within a cluster of historical challenges to national cohesion, this book addresses a significant gap in literary history and offers new insights into the ongoing and ever-fraught project of US nationalism. Although the temporal focus of this book is relatively narrow, its broad treatment of nationalism makes it an invaluable source for any scholar of US literature and culture. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
[email protected]
2 ALH Online Review, Series X Strange Nation’s Introduction is a carefully assembled and beautifully written primer on recent theoretical treatments of nationalism—it will be of particular use to graduate students working in the field (or, really, anyone wishing to begin the study of this issue). Kennedy notes that this era’s calls for the development of a distinctly “American culture” reached their most fevered pitch during moments of crisis. US nationalism, he argues, emerges not as a reflection of civic pride but rather as an effort to paper over fissures within a populace that could claim neither a communal past nor a mutually beneficial future. For Kennedy, “the massive effort to invent American traditions and to elaborate a national culture replicated the act of denial inherent in the Declaration, which ascribed to a nonexistent nation magnificent attributes—enlightened rights and principles—that hardly corresponded to the realities of America experience” (30). Framing his readings of the era’s literature around this dissonance, Kennedy amply demonstrates that calls for national unity go hand in hand with the threat of national collapse. Strange Nation’s chapters address different flashpoints in the era’s history, particularly highlighting issues and events that posed widespread challenges to nationalist efforts. The book’s organization is thematic rather than chronological, which allows Kennedy to highlight the recursive nature of nationalism itself. Authors such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catherine Sedgwick appear in several chapters, returning over and over to the problem of national identity in the face of uncertainty. Through meditations on everything from European relations to immigration, slavery, expansionism, Indian removal, and financial systems, Kennedy takes readers through the troubled and never fully complete transformation of colonies into country. I particularly enjoyed the book’s third chapter, an assessment of what Kennedy calls “minority reports,” patriotic critiques of US nationalism produced by Sedgwick, Margaret Fuller, and William Wells Brown from the vantage point of other nations. Fuller returns in the book’s eighth chapter, a study of the West’s status as a fantasy space that simultaneously absorbs and produces the violent divisions that threaten easy narratives of national identity. As a whole, these chapters cover a lot of ground, and readers concerned with a variety of topics will discover new insights in Strange Nation. Poe looms large in this study—indeed, he is the only author to appear in the title—and it is clear that this is partly because the project grew out of this scholar’s longstanding engagement with Poe’s writings. It certainly is true that Poe’s opposition to literary nationalism makes him a perfect touchstone for a project of this kind. In a book full of compelling analyses of literary texts, the readings of Poe stand out for their comprehensive sweep and incisive clarity. Strange Nation’s final chapter, for example, reads Poe’s varied engagements with “American incidents” (374) within the context of the frenzied jingoism that characterized the presidential campaign of 1844. Kennedy’s reading of “Some Words with a Mummy” is especially good. Linking that story’s
ALH Online Review, Series X 3 warnings about the dangers housed within democracy itself—mob rule, chauvinism, violent imperialism—to James K. Polk’s unabashed espousal of American exceptionalism, he shows how its “dark-skinned embodiment of ancient learning [the mummy] defies an emerging myth of American supremacy, his exquisite ‘corpse’ a reproach to the fantasy of national destiny and racial dominance” (386). This is a terrific reconsideration of Poe. In the end, though, I wasn’t sure if Strange Nation really needed to assert so forcefully the importance of this single author. Kennedy’s book is an extensive study of the literature of this period, and, while its origins lie in the author’s work on Poe, its actual scope is much wider than its subtitle suggests. “At the bedrock of our politics,” President Trump announced at his inauguration, “will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.” Listening to this in January, I couldn’t help thinking of Strange Nation. The assertion of a need for uncompromising nationalism seemed to rise straight out of the pages of Kennedy’s study. So, too, did the couching of that assertion in the promise that national pride could efface demographic differences. “When you open your heart to patriotism,” Trump asserted, “there is no room for prejudice.” But as Strange Nation reminds us, patriotism is not the same thing as nationalism: if the latter demands “fanatical devotion to the nation,” the former requires continuous critical assessment of the nation’s practical relationship to its lofty ideals (9899). What Trump labeled “patriotism” was indeed nationalism in disguise, and nationalism, Kennedy reminds us, is a prejudice of the first order. In its critical reassessment of nationalism and its discontents, Strange Nation stands not only as an excellent study of its subject but also as a timely reminder that US nationalism remains a strange commodity, most especially in the moments when it is deemed an urgent necessity.
