After American Studies

After American Studies is a timely critique of national and transna-

tional approaches to community, and their forms of belonging and trans/
patriotisms. Using reports in multicultural psychology and cultural neu-
roscience to interpret an array of cultural forms—including literature, art,
film, advertising, search engines, urban planning, museum artifacts, visa
policy, public education, and ostensibly non-state media—the argument fills
a gap in contemporary criticism by a focus on what makes cultural canons
symbolically effective (or not) for an individual exposed to them. The book
makes important points about the limits of transnationalism as a paradigm,
evidencing how such approaches often reiterate presumptive and essential-
ized notions of identity that function as new dimensions of exceptionalism.
In response to the shortcomings in trans/national criticism, the final chapter
initiates a theoretical consideration of a postgeographic and postcultural
form of community (and of cultural analysis).

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is an associate professor in the Department of Hu-

manities at the University of Puerto Rico.
Routledge Advances in American History

1 The Origin of Organized Crime in America

The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931
David Critchley

2 Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia,

1780s–1890s
Gregory D. Smithers

3 Public Health and the US Military

A History of the Army Medical Department, 1818–1917
Bobby A. Wintermute

4 Exploring the Next Frontier

Vietnam, NASA, Star Trek and Utopia in 1960s and 70s
American Myth and History
Matthew Wilhelm Kapell

5 America’s Vietnam War and Its French Connection

Frank Cain

6 Famine Irish and the American Racial State

Peter D. O’Neill

7 The Disinformation Age
The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States
Eric Cheyfitz

8 After American Studies

Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
After American Studies
Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational
Exceptionalism

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
First published 2018
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
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Para Santiago
Contents

List of Tables viii

Preface: Prefixes and the Limits of Rhetorical Distanciation ix

Introduction: A Critique of Transnational Approaches

to Community 1

1 The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity 20

2 Place-Making 31

3 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation 52

4 A Coda to Literary Canons 73

5 Art and Power 96

6 Forced Acculturation 115

7 Transmedia Storytelling 135

8 Colonial Problems, Transnational American Studies 149

9 Imagining New Communities 171

Index 187
Tables

1.1 Phases of Conquest 24

6.1 Commodified Citizenships: US Visa Waiver Program’s
National-Origin Discrimination 123
Preface
Prefixes and the Limits of
Rhetorical Distanciation

Without a doubt, the ‘transnational turn’ (a term coined by Shelley Fisher Fish-
kin) is here, and here to stay: the field of ‘transnational American Study’ is
growing with breathtaking rapidity. . .
—Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar, and Johannes Voelz (2013, vii)1

The rise of the transnational American label has been posited as an encour-
aging phenomenon. But like other normative modes of cultural reasoning,
instead of engaging new latitudes for human relations, the hybridities may
only repeat the a priori positions embedded in their terms. Even so, Ameri-
can Studies as a field has generally embraced relational, hybrid, multi-,
globalized, temporalized, or worlded transnationalisms as methods of rhe-
torical and investigative distanciation from the colonial controls of pure
national mythos. But the framework fails to surmount a lingering problem:
hybrid essences engage new and preexistent exceptionalisms as constituent
components of analysis. The prefix trans– suggests (and, in fact, requires)
the existence of discrete cultural groups; borders—sometimes metaphorical,
sometimes geographic—that function to separate and offer a center to judge
the mixing of “this” culture and the “that” culture. The prescriptions that
the transnational turn enforces require that communities and individuals be
examined through narrow (albeit hybrid) essentialized categories that have
considerable—and often undesirable—sociopolitical end points.
After American Studies maintains that the legitimacy of the transnational
turn must remain in question: its substance is being (and has been) appro-
priated into scaled forms of “difference” and “diversity” that operate as
neoliberal commodities. The argument in this book is grounded in the social
accountabilities that critical scholars must assume: the responsibility to con-
sider what subject positions might emerge from contemporary paradigms,
to reflect on the limitations of present methodological approaches (and,
more broadly, to take on the complexities of reading physical spaces and
presumed origins as nexi of social and cultural meanings), and to address
the coloniality embedded in transnational vocabularies and contemporary
cultural institutions.2
x Preface
In consideration of the limitations of conventional terms, this book engages
“spaces claimed by the political body” and “residents of spaces claimed by
the political body” in order to offer a more sensitive and attuned descrip-
tion (rather than prescription) of the regions, critical artifacts, communities,
and individuals in question, one that is less charged with the ambiguities
and colonial ties that weigh down the traditional disciplinary nomenclatures
(i.e., “America” or “United States” and “[trans/hyphenated-] American”).3

Notes
1. The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies After the Transnational Turn.
Dartmouth: UPNE.
2. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, whose work influenced the seminal elements of
this book, notes that such a circumstance requires “the recasting not only human
relations but also the very notion of what it means to be human” (2012, abstract.
“Decolonization and the Pedagogy of Solidarity.” Decolonization: Indigeneity,
Education & Society 1.1: 41–67).
3. This book includes from material that previously appeared in MFS: Modern
Fiction Studies (part of Chapter 4), University World News (part of Chapter 6),
European Journal of American Studies (a section of Chapter 1) and Interna-
tional Journal of Cultural Studies (parts of Chapter 2), and the author would
like to acknowledge the editors for their feedback and permission to reprint the
work.
Introduction
A Critique of Transnational
Approaches to Community

After American Studies is a critique of national and transnational ap-

proaches to community, their forms of belonging and patriation, and initi-
ates a theoretical gesture toward new considerations of postgeographic and
postcultural communities. A significant shortcoming to the patria, nation,
and its transnational imaginaries is that such frames relate knowledge from
group-based ties that generally rely on presumed affiliations: they often as-
sign meanings to the lives of people as a function of the geography of where
they reside, coupled with a presumed cultural demography. A significant
part of this book examines how these presumptive cultural demographies
are imagined; constructed, iterated, and supposedly performed; and ques-
tions their prominence as identity indexes.
In many senses, transnational readings limit the interpretation of mate-
rial culture and other performances (which, in these approaches, are often
understood as codifications of emotion and/or collective spirit) to a preex-
istent structure that is external to the individual; they also charge certain
spaces, communities, and collective groups with cultural categorizations
that are posited as stable, existent conditions. A significant shortcoming
to such approaches is that the ontology of these pluralized mythic essences
(and thus their fragilities) rarely comes into the critical purview. While the
transnational employs a multicultural geography that balances and in a
sense destabilizes pure national essences, the trend yet relies on the same
bases of cultural knowledge (which is to say presumptions) about social
affiliation and identity.1
A critical trajectory that has become somewhat embedded in the trans-
national turn in American Studies employs a dialectical approach, one that
often utilizes a variation on one (or several) of three distinct paths of inquiry:
(1) that of the presumed dominant culture of the space, (2) that of the pre-
sumed subordinate system immersed in surroundings controlled by a domi-
nant culture, and (3) that of a hybrid, third path that supposedly integrates
elements from both or multiple registers. In this way, many studies in this
critical subfield direct their focus away from how exposure to cultural can-
ons may influence (or not influence or influence circumstantially) a person’s
2 Introduction
behavior—understanding art, literature, and other cultural production and
performance as behaviors—and instead rely on the implicitly other-oriented
interactions between and among communities and individuals for their
implications on material culture and cultural value (Doyle 2009, 1–5). As
these modes rely on the preexistence of stable cultural groups to make infer-
ences about their relational value to one another, the transnational requires
a critical leap—one that relegates and controls individual action (or controls
the interpretation of individual action) by pre-categorization toward these
supposedly stable, often plural or hybrid conceptualizations. The looming
problematic in play here is that psychological studies of multicultural com-
munities and individuals, including reports on identities and emotions of
selfhood, do not generally correspond to the identity assertions that are
necessary to maintain transnational inquiry.
As the cultural knowledge unpacked in traditional transnational
approaches often depends upon a hybrid set of presumed social affiliations,
it is important to examine the ontology, composition, and limits of the sup-
posed cultural groups in question. The argument in this monograph orients
the nature of this relationship (i.e., the tie between the individual and her
or his presumed culture) through a focus on patriation, or the construction/
acquisition of collective identity spheres that occurs over time and ostensi-
bly results in a form of (sometimes hybrid) patriotism; this multivariate and
ongoing phenomenon is fomented by nonrepresentative cultural canons that
are often financed by the US political body. After American Studies main-
tains that the US political body unpacks a form of cultural violence on the
residents (citizens and non) of the spaces it claims by enacting specific social
devices—such as the of promotion English as the representative language,
regardless of the linguistic characteristics of the population—that intend to
influence the behavior of the people exposed to them. This somewhat uni-
form and ongoing process of attempted cultural appropriation in the spaces
claimed (including states, territories, reservations, and so on) could be
described as an endeavor to implement and maintain a cultural system (one
engaging physical and metaphorical spaces—i.e., “place-making”) that is
purposed to forge an imagined unity among individuals subordinated to it.

Place-Making
“In the game of ‘place making,’ ” notes Mark Goldman, “nothing is more
important than the past” (2007, 388). In a sense, place-making involves
constructing specific cultural narratives and saturating spaces with them
such that other narratives about the same spaces have been obfuscated to
a degree that they appear illogical. The words George Washington, for in-
stance, translate as “Town Destroyer” in the Seneca language; he ordered
his generals to bring “terror” to the local people of western New York
(Goldman 2007, 343). That a murderous colonizer who, in his own words,
engaged in terrorism (making him, thus, a “terrorist”) is all but an illogical
 Introduction  3
idea in the present system—especially in the context of the “War on Terror”
waged by the government he once led. The myth that this man’s actions
should be understood as positive has been monumentalized on currency,
roads, plazas—and even cities, states, and holidays have been named in his
honor. The purpose of these physical and metaphoric structures about this
man is, precisely, to make his crimes against the Seneca unimportant and to
give agency to the community producing (and acknowledging) the Washing-
ton monuments.
The myths that uphold the image of figures like Washington are a lan-
guage. They must be repeated through various media so that they exist.
The spaces conquered and claimed by the US political body have been
employed (monumentalized, in a sense) as a forum for such forms of collec-
tive storytelling, mythmaking, and the implementation of cultural norms.
The transnational, patriotic story is one that is interpellated with the geog-
raphy of conquered regions, a process that attempts to embed the stories
of the invading group into the spaces themselves: a principal aim of these
appropriation programs is to influence the cultures of people who reside in
those spaces. The discussion here examines how myths (such as appropri-
ate language, employment practices, and leisure activities) are constructed
in the conquered spaces and how social norming processes (such as legal
measures that authorize specific practices) are utilized to codify those ideas
into cultural practices; the practice of interpellating people, places, and arti-
facts with specific, targeted myths (regardless if individuals exposed to these
forms of cultural violence self-identify with their message or not) is a source
of significant power—and is termed here “patriation.”
This process of “patriation”—or calibrated enculturation—may be
understood as systemized attempts to shape the first (or native) culture
of individuals who reside in the spaces claimed by the US political body.
A particular focus on these social and cultural devices and their outcomes
is imperative, as both national and transnational critical studies often
relate, directly or indirectly, to the canonic prescriptions embedded in the
patriation process: they presume that [trans/hyphenated-] American cul-
tural material indeed relates in some dimension, directly or relationally,
to the unhyphenated-American base. This use of soft cultural power (or
cultural patriation) is enacted through control of public (and supposedly
representative) symbols, languages, and daily schedules as well as through
management of the cultural composition of compulsory public education,
city-planning programs, holidays, and so on. These forms of social engineer-
ing intend to simultaneously de-culturate and neo-culturate the individuals
exposed to them in a way that harmonizes and complements the politi-
cal claims the government has made on the annexed, conquered, or sup-
posedly integrated spaces (including protectorates, territories, states, and
districts). Such cultural exigencies are not unique to the US political body:
the dissemination of non-native cultures as natural in conquered spaces has
occurred—and yet occurs—in similar forms in many polities; the process of
4 Introduction
patriation (now a multiculturalized one) could indeed be necessary to main-
tain the existence of capitalist national and transnational states, particularly
in diverse societies.2
While the composition of cultural groups has been examined comprehen-
sively by scholars like Homi Bhabha, Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson,
and others, the existing body of scholarship generally involves broad theo-
retical takes on entire communities: what is missing in this field is a focus on
what makes cultural canons symbolically effective (or not) for an individual.
The discussion here examines recent reports in multicultural psychology and
cultural neuroscience in order to offer an apposite and empirical backdrop
of inquiry about how identity is manifest in the mind; the flexibility of iden-
tity for individuals in communities with diverse peoples; and how identity
and selfhood are malleable and change over time. This backdrop will be a
comparative element in the analyses of how state management of physical
and metaphorical spaces functions as a mechanism of social engineering,
striving to construct communities with specific cultural qualities. It will also
make evident that the identity and cultural bases on which transnational
approaches generally hinge are particular to specific circumstances and thus
lack the ongoingness that is often presumed in criticism.

America: An Area Study
The idea of a unified people in modernity commands a particularly power-
ful metanarrative and a public subordinated by other status; the immigrant
and conquered nature of the societies resident in regions claimed by the
US political body has provided both. While “America” has many disparate
meanings that are embedded in various forms, the presumed aesthetic ideol-
ogy is codified through an imaginary unity (sometimes a hybrid and subor-
dinate relation thereto), and thus, in order to locate the source of cultural
hegemony and the nature of its imposition, it is important to examine the
concepts expressed as natural, perpetual, and supposedly in existence in all
spaces and communities, regardless of their demography. This scope of top-
ics has been called the “field imaginary” by Donald Pease and described as a
set of myths which “constitutes the background of generally inarticulate yet
efficacious metaphors and affects that provide the conceptual orientation
and unconsciously held beliefs and representations through which norma-
tive understandings get produced within the field” (1989, 28). Some of the
fetishizations in the cultural system disseminated by the US political body
involve the propagation of an iconic member: this is often characterized
through an apparently English-speaking, Christian monogamist in a nuclear
family (including a marriage) who interacts and participates in an indus-
trialized, capitalist form of life; this racist and racialized, politicized, and
Eurocentric myth is often propagated as the appropriate (and thus natural)3
one for the residents of the spaces in question and is codified across human-
istic disciplines as an unhyphenated-American performance, a category for
 Introduction  5
which many, because of their demography, are disallowed from carrying
out; other performances are thus dialecticized through hyphenation or other
subordinating measures. This unhyphenated form of life is also rewarded by
tax breaks and other codified legislation—and is generally employed as the
ostensible representative (i.e., unhyphenated) American icon in literary and
artistic canons, national prizes, and cultural study.
Area Studies tracts are often interdisciplinary approaches that concern
geographical, national (or state-claimed) regions. While ostensibly external
to cultural agendas and political interests, as Nathan J. Brown observes,
“US area studies programs have been essential for both US policy and
beyond American shores. A recent study of the relevance of political science
to policymakers found that area studies were the form of academic research
that policymakers most valued” (2014).4 Until the middle of the twentieth
century American Studies was demarcated by a sweeping Eurocentricity, its
nationalisms, and the projection of generally nonrepresentative characteris-
tics as universal (or dominant) emotional markers for residents of the spaces
claimed by the political body. In the late twentieth century, as the apparent
democratization of Humanistic tracts moved toward institutionalization,
the inherent complications with conventional American Studies reached a
tipping point, and the academy shifted toward the—in some ways equally
problematic—age of transnational, worlded, temporalized, and “minor-
ity” (but, in fact, majorities in many regions) discourses and the associ-
ated hybridized critical approaches. Despite these transitions, the mythic
national bent remains as the center of study—and a looming postnational
articulation of belonging, one that supplants or balances the traditional
transnational takes, has yet to be comprehensively articulated.
American Studies enjoys the sustaining power of an agenda-setting entity;5
it has supported Exceptionalism and the Frontier Thesis, the approaching
conclusion of both theories, as well as the rise and ongoing promotion of
the Transnational. The discipline offers a structural perspective on how
the cultures of the residents of the continent may be studied (categorized
and delimited) and institutionalizes those ideas. The more recent transna-
tional and border studies movements have opened a new series of contin-
gent spaces of inquiry, many of which were, until recently, unrecognized as
loci of cultural production. Even in these transnational turns, however, the
unhyphenated-American phenomenon tends to have colonial characteris-
tics: English-language texts and their authors are promoted as representa-
tive; a piece of cultural material may be understood as unhyphenated—and
thus archetypal—only when authors meet certain demographic criteria; any
deviation from these demographic or cultural prescriptions are subordi-
nated to hyphenated status. The institutional and canonic recognition of
tracts with these characteristics as unhyphenated-American in some ways
relegates even the most progressive transnational ideas into the traditional
colonial hierarchy. This tendency normalizes, with intentionality or not,
these unhyphenated groups as representative—and thereby establishes the
6 Introduction
center of the cultural system, the point from which all others are to be mea-
sured, compared, and hyphenated.
A fundamental deficiency with the recent attempts to liberate inquiry
and democratize cultural value is the transnational’s reliance on a presump-
tive supra-organizational structure as the base of inquiry. For scholars who
work in these fields, the nation and thus its exceptionalisms (even in trans–
forms) remain an important influence on inaugurating what are to be under-
stood as apposite questions, aesthetics, ideas, norms, and avenues of inquiry
about the individuals who reside within and beyond the regions claimed by
the US political body; they thus remain central to the critical conclusions
concerning the supposed nature of the individuals, communities, and their
cultural production. As a case example, National and Transnational Cul-
tural prizes—many funded by public monies—often align very closely with
the definitions laid out in these hybrid inquiries and occasionally illuminate
their theoretical shortcomings: Spanish-language films produced by citizens
of the political body (who reside therein) are categorized as “Foreign Lan-
guage” at the Oscars, and unhyphenated-American literary awards, such
as the National Book Award, are granted exclusively to texts in English.
Such ideas closely intersect with the transnational critical maps that strive to
trans-ize (and thus subordinate—sometimes unintentionally) the existence
of Spanish-language cultural material (and that of other non-English lan-
guages) in spaces claimed by the US political body.
Transnational American Studies inquiries regularly begin with the pre-
supposition that “America” (and its transnationalisms) can be understood
as cohesive units, or series of communities with contiguous and rela-
tional characteristics, that can be categorized. Thus, each of the subse-
quent dimensions of transnational American Studies (in a cultural sense)
are predicated on the idea that “America” exists as a unified concept and
should be studied as though the people who reside in spaces claimed by
the US political body have some sense of being that is dependent or oth-
erwise relational to the promulgated set of cultural myths—and that the
aesthetics of those individuals function in correspondence to the canonic
cultural prescriptions of their surroundings. What is important to empha-
size here is that even the most recent antiexceptionalist, transnational, and
heterotopian models that seek to replace heteropatriarchal exceptionalism
of past norms, the discipline as a whole continues to address the nation as
a subject.

Myths that Remain: The National (and Transnational)

as Object
The transnational turn has positioned American Studies in a nationalist
rut. Despite a concerted effort in the 1990s to detach the critical modes
from such approaches, the discipline yet finds itself bounded to the short-
comings of national myths.6 “The meaning of the transnational,” notes
 Introduction  7
Donald Pease, “is specifically a function of the contexts articulating the
term to representations within national imaginaries” (2011, 5). The nation
won’t go away, even in an academy that has, to a great extent, renounced
patriotism as an interpretative container; in many senses the myths have
been recycled and revived into contemporary transnational and border
treatments, which employ similar centers of discourse. In “Next Times:
The Futures of American Studies Today,” Carlos Rowe reviews sixteen
in-progress manuscripts from junior faculty or recently promoted profes-
sors whom he feels represent the future of the discipline. Rowe observes
how many scholars yet structure their approaches in accordance with na-
tional myths: though all the authors consider their approaches postex-
ceptionalist, nearly every argument functions “primarily in terms of US
national knowledge” (2013, 260). Rowe goes on to remark that this ob-
servation is “not intended to invalidate the importance of their respective
projects, but merely to note how hard it is for us to overcome the boundar-
ies of national knowledge.” As the self-perpetuating myths of nation-as-
subject remain as central theoretical components, the project to examine
post or non-national frames that are less problematic has been largely
abandoned. Donald Pease has noted that recent approaches provide “a
change in mentality but not in institutions or structures” and that the
“transnational American studies scholars left extant structures of power
intact” (2011, 16). In this context, limited by the broader tendencies of
contemporary academic inquiry, dissenting voices are often left protesting
the capitalist, neoliberal prescriptions of transnational cultural belonging
instead of wholly displacing them.
Some of the most established icons of the American Studies field have
neglected the postnational frame in favor of transnational approaches.
“Today,” Rowe notes, “we often hear colleagues declare that ‘transnational’
won, perhaps because ‘postnational’ poses so many conceptual and theo-
retical problems” (2013). Indeed, despite the short-lived vacillation toward
the postnational, the nationalist base (so central to the transnational turn)
has been internalized and even defended by some in the academy. Janice
Radway, former president of the American Studies Association, underscores
that “the US nation or American nationalism” should remain “at the heart
of American Studies.” Her solution is to keep the idea of the US nation and
American nationalism intact as a foundational center but with nuance so
that the national and transnational “be understood as relational concepts”
(1998).

“Relational” Transnationalism: New Imperialism,

New Hyphens
The transnational turn attempts to elude strictly nationalist restrictions
through a comparative dimension, one that strives to disengage the direct
imperialism of the nation into more organic and representative critical tracts.
8 Introduction
The shift has had an important theoretical dimension, one that employs hy-
brid and amalgamative approaches to examine how communities and their
cultures develop and change over time. This is often realized through case
study treatments that use material culture as purveyor of social values, senti-
ment, emotion, and affiliation. Such studies strive to reconfigure the nature
of the inquiry on how material culture is manifest in circumstances inflected
by multiple cultural registers (also multiple political, economic, and social
indexes). Some ominous questions arise from the new spaces of interpreta-
tion: Does the trans– modifier rehash nationalist ideas and engage previous
essentialisms under new labels?
As the transnational frame is one of relational nationalisms, the national
myths (and supposed relational ties thereto) remain the principal axis of
inquiry. Furthermore, the terms American, national, and transnational
are often unpacked in humanistic treatments without clarification of their
reaches, origins or ontologies, or the consequences of how such grouping
mechanisms inform the studies—and thus place limits on them. As a result,
the institutionalization of the concept of “[trans/hyphenated-] American”
or “United States” cultures, even for scholars who question the composi-
tion and articulation of those ideas, causes the inquiries themselves to be
restricted to an iteration of the group fictions—either directly, as support
of the mythos, or by using the myth as a center of supposed relational
opposition. Like the pure nationalist treatments of generations ago, the
narratives produced by transnational mythographies suffer from a nar-
row range of usable experience that relates being. Thus, the transnational
locates knowledge within relational geographic and cultural assumptions,
conjectures that obstruct and reduce the scope of comprehension. After
American Studies challenges the self-evidence of the transnational base,
its presumptive ontologies, and its prescriptions and aims to reinvigorate
cultural studies toward a more universal and non-national based form of
inquiry.7
Perhaps the most serious weakness in the theoretical tendencies thus far
mentioned here is their emphasis on the group model. The cultural (in this
case, transnational) group is mired by assumptions about the nature of the
relationships among individuals and habitually reads material cultural as
markers of these community dynamics; thus, the theoretical regrouping
is structured in large part on a priori supposition about the community’s
members and their relationships to one another. As Mario Blaser questions,
“What happens if we cross-check these emphases?” A presumed group
composition (based on imagined shared cultural or social histories, demo-
graphics, or group experience) is often necessary to sustain transnational
theory and any subsequent inferences, but the group dimension deleteri-
ously limits the latitude of transnational and transcultural inquiries and,
as Blaser observes, seems “to leave no way out for the people described:
those [terms of categorization] are not necessarily the terms with which they
would describe themselves” (2014).
 Introduction  9
Psychological and Neurological Bases of Multicultural
Identity Performance
Multicultural psychology examines behavior and identity through their
cultural contextualizations. As Paul Pederson has noted, “we are moving
toward a generic theory of multiculturalism that recognizes the psychologi-
cal consequences of each cultural context, where each behavior has been
learned and is displayed” (2013, xxii). The field as a whole “challenges us to
acknowledge that (a) all behavior is learned and occurs in a cultural context;
(b) until recently, this fact has virtually been ignored by the field; and (c)
once we understand the nature and contribution of culture, this understand-
ing will dramatically alter and expand the way we study and understand be-
havior” (Mio et al. 2008, 14). Cultural neuroscience is a nascent field that,
in correspondence with multicultural psychology, has begun mapping the
physical responses in the brain to different cultural stimuli; when contex-
tualized through reports from these fields, the presumptive bases unpacked
in transnational inquiry become muddled by the conditional nature of how
multicultural identity is performed.
An overarching reflection from studies in these disciplines underscores that
many relationships, collective sentiments, and feelings of cultural association
(the fundamental components of cultural groups) are expressly dependent
on circumstance. The recent work in these fields maintains that the identities
a person may suppose or perform, and the relative importance which might
be attached to them, are in continual flux.8 (These reports are interpreted
in greater depth in Chapter 8.) In this sense, identities have shifting and
even different meanings in different contexts, a verity that destabilizes some
of the foundations of group-based conceptualizations of individual action.
The self-perception of a person, moreover, is negotiated over time—and
some aspects of that construction are only available at certain times and in
certain surroundings. The places and diverse peoples in each location are
also imbued with meaning—meaning that is also notionally shifting and
transient. Because of these circumstances, the interactional and negotiated
nature of the self is generally rebellious to external labels that are often
binding signifiers (such as unhyphenated or hyphenated-American identities
and the critical approaches that rely on them).9

When Is an (-)American? Or Positing “American” and its

Trans-Hyphenations as Conditional/Provisional Adjectives
In the context of the ways we perform and perceive identity, any “Ameri-
can” characteristics or trans-hyphenations thereof, should be understood
as fluid, individual conditions that exist in function to exposure to cultural
canons and local circumstances, rather than as fixed traits (essential or oth-
erwise).10 The term [trans/hyphenated-] American, then, should be under-
stood as a conditional and provisional adjective instead of the traditional
10 Introduction
demographic group markers, which are often nouns or nontemporal adjec-
tives designating enduring attributes. A cultural identity is not a stable state
or “thing” but a condition that is impermanent, fleeting, and dependent on
circumstance. Such a shift in terms would unlink the foundational theory
in play from the myth that identity performances are dependent on a dia-
lectical relationship to a dominant social system and a presumed cultural
demography.
Exposure to a cultural system does not create demography. While the
transnational state and its cultural directives are powerful entities, the lit-
erature in social psychology and neurology emphasizes that the cultures of
an individual tend to be highly contextual and therefore lacking in an ongo-
ingness that patriotic or (trans)national sentiments command. The empiri-
cal reports on cultural relationships, moreover, demonstrate that affiliation
tends to derive from contingent bases, which are ephemeral, situational,
significantly dependent on circumstances, and generally dissimilar from
the exigencies of stable identity as it is often conceptualized in national
and transnational frames. Thus, despite exposure to the cultural canons
described here, and the power of the transnational state to implement them,
individuals tend to have identity structures that are considerably more vari-
able and inconsistent than what traditional national myths (and the trans-
national subnarratives) allow.
In this sense, culture is not something one “has” and [trans/hyphenated-]
American is not something a person “is” as the consequence of being situ-
ated at a particular geographic location or born to a specific family in a spe-
cific region. In this approach, discussions of culture as permanent become
unremarkable because the logic of alterity (i.e., one cultural identity as
opposed to another) is produced through an emphasis on the fleetingness of
social contextuality and the interdependencies that result from a transitory
circumstance. At best cultural relations and identities may be understood
as temporary sensations: therefore, the articulations of these states in criti-
cism should move toward collectivizing [trans/hyphenated-] American and
other similar terms as conditional adjectives rather than collective or proper
nouns, or their adjectival equivalents.

Chapter Précis and Argument Structure

Bearing these concepts in mind, After American Studies reexamines the over-
determined cultural myths in the US political space, including their com-
position and implementation, and also reflects on their success or failure
in maintaining any representation of collective spirit (or relational cultural
tie thereto). After American Studies questions whether the cultural myths
that saturate the US political space have appropriated the individuals (and,
subsequently, communities) into participatory, self-identifying members of
the metropolitan—or into hybrid/dialectic or oppositional divisions thereof.
Using the scope of these findings in psychology and cultural neurology, the
 Introduction  11
monograph argues that cultural study of the residents of the spaces claimed
by the US political body (and elsewhere) should shift in emphasis away from
collective takes on communities—and toward a focus on how individuals
respond to and interact with cultural canons. In order to orient an examina-
tion away from cultural groups, this book argues that the object of study
should be atomized and extracted from supposedly already-amalgamated
collectivities: a renewed emphasis on how individuals respond to the stimuli
of cultural canons, moreover, allows the case study chapters of this book
to scrutinize the comprehensiveness of the supposed [trans/hyphenated-]
Americanization of the peoples exposed to the canons in question.
Cultural criticism that relies on group dynamics (even transnational
ones) interprets individual action as a function of collective myths, and in
relation to this circumstance, a significant section of this book concerns
how individuals act in response to edifying social structures that surround
them. By reducing the critical focus from broad and abstract communi-
ties (such as unhyphenated-American, Latin-American, Asian-American,
Italian-American, and so on or any assumed ethno-regional ties) to single
vessels of being, the individual person, we can better specify how the norma-
tive conceptualizations of culture relate to identities and how they develop
over time. In this sense, After American Studies gestures toward a form
of inquiry that transcends a collective posture and, in accordance with the
reports on identity, emphasizes that any form of [trans/hyphenated-] Ameri-
can should be understood as a temporal condition, not a demographic base.

Chapters 1 and 2: The Ontology of Cultural Groups

in Modernity: Mapping Unhyphenated-American
Performances
Chapters 1 and 2 offer a comprehensive map of the implementation of cul-
tural canons that strive to enact specific behaviors in the individuals ex-
posed to them. These canons, After American Studies argues, are part of the
cultural appropriation program financed in large part by the US political
body. In the context of recent dialogues in American Studies, particularly
the recent swell deconstructing and reconstructing Exceptionalism, the on-
going practice of cultural appropriation occurring in the US political space
and elsewhere has been comparatively absent. The concept of who or what
is “American” (and its relational subaltern hyphenations) is often left un-
touched or is mentioned in passing, and “when” is almost never engaged.
Donald Pease’s The New American Exceptionalism is something of an ex-
ception to that tendency in relation to who and what, as his argument is ori-
ented around several questions posed by Jacqueline Rose: “Whom and why
do men obey? Upon what inner justification and upon what external means
does this domination rest?” (qtd. in Pease 2009, 79). Pease articulates a re-
sponse around the concept of “state fantasy”—an idea which, as he terms it,
“supplies the horizon of expectations” and orients their significance (2009, 2).
12 Introduction
While Pease’s text, which is mainly aimed at the post-9/11 period, deftly
historicizes the conceptualization and articulation of state fantasy—or, as
he terms it, “the ideological and cultural work required to convince Ameri-
cans to surrender their civil liberties”—his discussion and that of the field
more generally lack a theoretical grounding in precisely what makes these
cultural canons symbolically effective (or not). A result of this tendency,
terms like [trans/hyphenated-] American are sometimes used without ap-
propriate amplification—and the employment of the terms (in relation to
identity or material tracts) in this way belies the inherent instability of such
an idea.
Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 examine this gap, allowing that unhyphenated-
Americans in this case refers to the cultures of those who meet demographic
exigencies and have ostensibly internalized national or transnational
myth—or to use Pease’s term, state fantasy (or dialectic relations thereto).
What is the state fantasy? How is it implemented? What is the source of
its power? When the term [trans/hyphenated-] American (as an adjec-
tive or noun) is unpacked, to whom or what does it refer? How has this
idea been iterated and, supposedly, stabilized? It is important to note that
transpatriot-formation should be understood a plastic and ongoing process,
not precisely as a static concept or occurrence. The threshold at which the
myths may be identificational, or partially identificational, does not imply
that they are absolute or ongoing.11
A significant portion of Chapter 1 and 2, then, examines the cultural con-
quest: how are normative cultural devices like obligatory language, political
systems, social narratives, and other mores, implemented in spaces subse-
quent to military invasion, land seizure, or other annexation? Even amidst
the rise of multiculturalism, one of the principal missions of United States
is to sponsor and project a monocultural universalism that functions as a
legitimating apparatus for state power (to conscript, create borders, collect
taxes, enforce law, and so on), all of which occurs subsequent to military
invasion or annexation of a geographic area. A principal aim of the cultural
conquest is to group peoples in those spaces so that their individual action
may be appropriated; this grouping is often based on (or in relation to)
an imagined monoculture that is implemented through state’s devices of
social power. In practical terms, cultural myths (and thus manifestations of
material culture) function as power ancillaries that accompany and follow
the military conquest. This process involves three distinct and sequential
phases:

Group in conquered/annexed space:   Objectives:

Merchants (“explorers”)    Find resources to exploit
Military    Invasion/control resources
Politicians    Cultural engineering
 Introduction  13
After American Studies discusses mainly the third phase: the attempted con-
struction of “we”—through a set of cultural canons that intend to set the
implicit horizon of social action and thus cause people to become certain
kinds of human beings. The structures, conceivably, function to construct
and iterate [trans/hyphenated-] American as a quality of a person, action,
space, or piece of material culture. They outline the physical and metaphoric
surroundings that intend to unite many peoples, communities, and tradi-
tions under a specific set of conventions and perceived values. Conceptually,
an individual’s isolation within these culturally engineered spaces produces
a set of behaviors that are defined as “American” (or a subiteration thereof)
and the use of such a notion that has been broadly applied as a register in
cultural criticism and other social organizing action. These myths also func-
tion as the relational base for many transnational tracts.
Imbuing cultural meaning to a conquered region, or attempts thereat, is a
systematized and closely controlled process. Donald Pease has argued that
“[s]paces acquire identity as territorial places through acts of bounding and
naming” (2011, 26), concepts that attempt to interpellate “the individuals
to their mandated identities” (2011, 28). These cultural initiatives are struc-
tured through the canonic prescription of symbol, time, language, holidays,
and other social devices, which are often legislated and thus implemented
through supposedly democratic initiatives. The argument concerning the
supposed interpellation of the communities to these identities is oriented as
a function of Cultivation Theory, or the idea that when a person is exposed
to a systemized cultural reality, such as those constructed by the US political
body, he or she is likely “to believe [in the] social reality portrayed” (Cohen
and Weimann 2000, 99).12 State cultural canons strive to misrepresent the
social and cultural community for their own interests—and these perver-
sions are organized so that they be, ostensibly, imperceptible and natural in
appearance, though always in direct support the discourses of the dominant
group (which publishes the images). The ontology of the cultural group
relies on the control of these canons, and the US political body strives to
make these symbols emotionally potent such that they establish the bound-
aries of identity and community, and the range of what may be understood
as pleasure itself. (Whether such a systematized cultural program is effective
is, also, a central part of the analysis in this monograph.)
The cultural canons that saturate the US political space attempt to influ-
ence the way the residents exposed to them think and interact with one
another. Such cultural interventions have been be described as “a centralized
system of story-telling,” one that strives to normalize specific behaviors,
interests, and emotions as appropriate (Gerbner 1998, 177). The system
attempts to enculturate, or shape the first/native culture of, those who
reside within its reaches, which includes any person resident in the spaces
claimed by the US political body. The state saturates its conquered spaces
with symbols and representations, obligates the residents to be exposed to
them in public (and sometimes in private), and thereby strives—ultimately,
14 Introduction
over many generations—to shape the aesthetics of those individuals and
communities. The system also appropriates and synthesizes the iconogra-
phy, ritual, and cultural histories of conquered and immigrant peoples—but
with constraint and always in relation to the dominant discourses. The ulti-
mate objective of these cultural systems is to effect a change in the emotions
experienced by those exposed to them: creativity, or improvisation, within
the constraints expressed by the system (English-language literature, for
instance) are often awarded and promoted while other performances with
characteristics that are only relationally tied to dominant discourses (e.g.,
non-English-language literature) are subordinated through hyphenation and
other mechanisms that enact “other” status. On a comprehensive base of
these edifying cultural constructs, the second section of the book unpacks a
series of case studies.

Case-Study Chapters 3 through 7: Literature, Art,

Immigration, and Media
The case-study sections of After American Studies examine material culture
from several disciplines, with particular focus on the institutionalization of
specific cultural ideas as representative. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the role
of literature and narrative as supposed codifications of collective sentiment
for authors who were ostensibly immersed in and influenced by the cultural
canons of the US political body, including María Amparo Ruiz de Burton,
Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and Cormac McCarthy, among others.
Together with a discussion of the role of literature and canonization as a
component in the broader cultural conquest, the argument places particular
emphasis on the promotion of English as a representative language, inter-
action and repression of trans/hyphenated-American (in particular, Native
American) peoples, and movement west as a thematic device. Particular im-
portance is given to the rise of literary studies as a complement to the politi-
cal mythos, intentionally or not, through the recognition of certain cultural
manifestations as representative (which, concomitantly, represses others) by
scholars, critics, and teachers. A significant part of this chapter looks into
how literary criticism is often based on selective readings—selective to the
point that criticism and canonization are occasionally in diametric opposi-
tion to the collective values expressed by the writers and texts being insti-
tutionalized: the readings that are promoted in classrooms and by cultural
prizes regularly elide very important characteristics of the literature—and
these artfully overlooked qualities are often those that do not coordinate
with the collective mythos being propagated.
Chapter 5 is an examination of visual art as a mechanism of soft cul-
tural power, both by state implementation (commissioned art including
architecture, monuments, uniforms, and so on) and from presumably
independent artists—that is, those who do not work from state commis-
sions. The analyses treat the three distinct phases of the cultural conquest
 Introduction  15
as it has been expressed in visual art. A section interprets the psychol-
ogy of awe, color, and symmetry in state-commissioned art, and the pres-
ence of specific conquered communities (often, though not always, Native
Americans), which are sometimes utilized as a device to promote subor-
dination and control in works financed by the political body. The pres-
ence of feral affiliates of the US political body (occasionally termed, an
“American Adam”) in recently conquered spaces is also discussed in the
context of state-commissioned museums and other academic spheres, with
attention to their function as legitimating apparatuses in contemporary
state cultural expenditures.
Chapter 6 interprets the cultural patriation programs from an immigrant
perspective; while “patriation” has been described here as attempted encul-
turation, or first-culture manipulation, newcomers to the political space are
presumed, by the political body, to have other collective and cultural affili-
ations. Thus, much of the cultural legislation aimed at immigrant peoples
involves compulsory acculturation, or second-culture learning. Part of the
discussion examines how the political body universally promotes accultura-
tion as a positive phenomenon (despite a large body of empirical studies that
link acculturation to negative health and social outcomes). The argument
examines that way the government obligates newcomers to the political
space to subordinate their cultural behavior to myths of the political body
in order to participate in the affairs of the civic body (that is, the cultural
dimensions of the naturalization process). The inquiry examines how the
US political body has different legal policies for noncitizens based on their
nation of origin; the visa system, more so than other legislation, allows the
government to construct illegal status for some noncitizens. (As Europeans,
Canadians, and citizens of a few other nations do not need a visa to be pres-
ent in spaces claimed by the US political body, those nationals cannot be
“illegally” present in the US unless a felony is committed.) The argument
interprets the consequences of the legal stratification of non-US citizens by
nationality, and examines the visa interview process, with particular atten-
tion to the cultural power of these laws.
Chapter 7 delves into nontraditional art that is often described as “nonfic-
tional” cultural material, such as the communiqués from network and other
media; the cultural patriation programs as they exist on websites (particu-
larly, Google and its prominence in e-colonial theory); and the use of trans-
national myth in commercial tracts. The discussion considers digital media
and their ostensibly liberating platforms in the context of language and
commercial controls, IP address regulations, and the continued suppression
of non-systemic ideas in these new spaces. A significant section of the chap-
ter interprets how public campaigns that promote consumer goods, such
as flavored-water beverages and automobiles, often seize the transnational
mythos for its emotive power and, like a great deal of state-commissioned
arts, generally misrepresent the communities resident in the US political
space.
16 Introduction
Chapters 8 and 9: A Transnational Coda
The final section of After American Studies is a coda to transnational ap-
proaches. Chapter 8 considers the theoretical conclusion of the patria/
patriot concept and its trans– and hyphenated subdivisions. The discus-
sion lays out the shortcomings of the widespread utilization of geographic
and cultural assumptions as bases for community and cultural inquiry and
looks into how the structure of the corporate university has shaped and
in a sense restricted the development of American Studies as a field. By
examining empirical reports in cultural neuroscience and multicultural psy-
chology, the argument refocuses attention on the constant, though often
unintentional, reiteration of presumptive bases in transnational American
Studies (and Area Studies, in general), inquiring if scholarship should be yet
structured in these forms. In many senses, a focus on transnational realities
rehashes the cultural imperialism of the past and re-institutionalizes it, nu-
ancing its implementation—but yet relating all discourse through the center
of unhyphenated-American nationalism. Transnational American Study is
particularly problematic, as reinterpreting the national myths in such aca-
demic forms a sense relegitimizes them and at the same time subordinates
all “new” inquiry in the field not only to the colonial nomenclature but also
to its theoretical inaccuracies.
Patriation is cultural violence. While a powerful and overdetermined
force, patriotism and its transnational divisions are also ephemeral and
highly contextual, which render them imprecise and sometimes inaccu-
rate, particularly when discussing individuals: cultural criticism that relies
on these group dynamics (even those between communities and nations)
interpret individual work as a function of the myths of the collective, and
in doing so lose an important dimension of meaning. This circumstance
calls for a robust metacritique of those tendencies, and, in light of the great
problems that are inherent to national and transnational takes on culture
and identity, gestures toward a renewed look at the promise of post and
non-national tracts.
Chapter 9 argues that Age should be considered as a center of cultural
study. Abandoning the group model of inquiry, this novel approach has
the potential to open new theoretical arenas that are more closely attuned
to the human condition and how it is expressed through art, literature and
thought; such an adjusted, unamalgamated take would be comparatively
released from the hierarchical entanglements and the troubling theoretical
assumptions that are inherent to the use of cultural groups as interpretative
material. This final chapter is an overture toward a new form of thinking
about humanity, culture, and community, a noncultural system that univer-
salizes the civic body around the globe. Thinking in such scales has only
recently been possible or feasible—but now our digitized realities command
such new modes of being and reflection. In using Age as a register of iden-
tity, humanity would reconceptualize the ways in which we interact, pos-
sibly resulting in new fraternities, equalities, and liberties.
 Introduction  17
In a sense, After American Studies examines what is assumed when the
term [trans/hyphenated-] American (employed as an adjective or noun) is
applied to people and communities, and scrutinizes how such concepts are
constructed and promoted. As the studies referenced in the text demon-
strate, these conventional modes of inquiry are unstable and occasionally
counterintuitive: it is reasonable to begin a comprehensive, collective reflec-
tion on what paradigms should replace the contemporary social and cultural
geographies. A future social map engaging a noncultural and nongeographic
form of community could offer a superior degree of equality, stronger and
more meaningful affiliations, and enhanced democratic representation. Per-
haps the problem may not be with American or TransAmerican cultures as
a group measure but with the use of geography as a metric of their supposed
relations.

Notes
1. A significant amount of transnational and national criticism understands iden-
tity as a phenomenon that is generally contingent upon an individual’s interac-
tion with his or her cultural surroundings, which is entangled with a supposed,
preexistent demography.
2. The control of cultural symbol, language, and other social devices is particu-
larly important in multicultural communities, and the metaphoric control of the
spaces themselves is generally communicated through the saturation of those
spaces with the structures of soft cultural power.
3. Matthew Wolf-Meyer has called this bioprocess “denaturalization” and argues
that the in the process, scientific and social realms can become entangled: “what
we take to be natural [in a scientific sense] is the result of a history of human
action that has moved something from being understood as social to natural”
(2012).
4. In part for these reasons, area, national, and transnational inquiries are common
in federal grants and publicly funded cultural studies departments.
5. It is also comparatively well funded.
6. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a concerted effort to detach criticism
from the theoretical shortcomings of national approaches, including studies like
“The End of ‘American’ Literature” (1991) by Gregory Jay; “National Iden-
tities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives” (1992) by Donald
Pease; Nations without Nationalism (1993) by Julia Kisteva; Limits of Citizen-
ship (1994) by Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal; “The Myth of Postnational Identity”
(1996) by M Deflem and FC Pampel; Post-Nationalist American Studies (2000)
by John Carlos Rowe; The Postnational Constellation (2001) edited by Jürgen
Habermas; and The Postnational Self (2002) by Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort.
These approaches could be more generally characterized as postnationalist
(rather than strictly postnational) as a common theme involves the challenges of
positing new political entities and social institutions that are based on egalitarian
multiculturalism. More recently, NP Soler and ME Abraca (2013), in Rethinking
Chicana/o Literature Through Food: Postnational Appetites, locate consump-
tion of food as a linking signifier; language has also emerged as a non-national
community dynamic in QE Williams and C Stroud’s (2015) “Linguistic citizen-
ship: Language and politics in Postnational Modernities”; and JW Lee’s (2014)
The Sovereignty of Global Englishes: Translingual Practices and Postnational
Imaginaries also situates language, in particular translingual Englishes, as a
18 Introduction
center of focus. The move toward postnational articulations of culture and real-
ity expose some of the shortcomings of monocultural approaches, though the
movement has waned, was never fully realized and remains incomplete. The
body of texts mentioned here, however, comprises insightful analyses of mono-
cultural canons, and facilitated the collective critical shift into the hybridiza-
tions (i.e., the transnational) that have become the generally accepted scholarly
approaches of today.
7. The argument in this monograph revisits some of the fundamental positions
articulated by Rathway, and the studies examines by Rowe, and questions the
solidity of this status quo.
8. For more on this topic, see Multicultural Psychology (2009) by Gordon C.
Nagayama; Culture and Psychology (2012) by David Matsumoto et al. Linda
Juang; and Cross-Cultural Psychology: Research and Applications (2011) by
John W. Berry et al.
9. As identity and affiliation have these dynamic qualities, a person’s relationship to
others cannot be assumed; based on demography, gender, language, location, or
even previous statements of union; our cultural criticism, too, should correspond
by locating meaning using devices that do not rely on such group dynamics.
10. An inherent complication with the transnational is the way the theories engage
a hybrid nature of being as though it were a permanent state.
11. In the context of the temporality of cultural and group identities, a significant
emphasis in this examination investigates not who or what but when is a per-
son [trans/hyphenated-] American; that is, what are the contextual circum-
stances that potentially bring about the performance of such identities and their
relational subdivisions. Because of the nature of the categorization itself, this
argument questions the stability and critical value of these relational ideas. An
important base for these concepts is a discussion of the construction of unhy-
phenated “American” identity, and the canons that endeavor to effect such a
concept as a natural reality in the spaces claimed by the US political body.
12. While cultivation theory is often applied to media such as television and film,
this argument expands the conceptualization to the range of state-sponsored
cultural canons (Cohen and Weimann 2000, 99).

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 Introduction  19
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1 The Ontology of Cultural Groups
in Modernity

National and transnational narratives, pedagogies, physical structures, and

academic cultural studies strive to imbue places, images, languages, texts,
and communities with dimensions of meaning: the formation and develop-
ment of meaning involve creation and destruction of symbols and their ref-
erent cultural geographies. Patriation, in this context, may be understood as
the emotion that relates to or derives from exposure to these symbols (and,
thus, the myths to which they refer). The construction of these idea systems
intends to organize a range of cultural possibilities, one that is (according
to the language of contemporary narrative) ostensibly representative and is
organically constructed from the participation of people exposed to them.
The process of patriation in the print-capitalist period, particularly in con-
temporary multicultural systems, could be described as individual responses
to cultural canons that are constructed and iterated to strengthen the social
discourses of the groups publishing the canons. For this reason, the canons
are often, though not universally, constructed in the reflection of the domi-
nant groups’ linguistic, religious, economic, political, and social iconogra-
phies (and thus interests). The process of patriation, then, is closely related
to the saturation of geographic and online spaces with these symbols, and
the promotion of the ontologies they represent as natural, established, and,
sometimes, divinely anointed.1
Many regions presently claimed by the US political body as states, ter-
ritories, protectorates, or by other terms, are recently conquered spaces,
and thus, the presence of much of the dominant cultural symbology (the
English language, a Christian calendar, and so on) in those communities is
comparatively new. As such, the patriation process in these communities
intends to transition non-native cultural materials (e.g., linguistic systems
that privilege English) from “foreign” to “natural/native” status while con-
comitantly endeavoring to elide the possibility of more representative cul-
tural material from maintaining a central location in the cultural hierarchy.
Due in part to this circumstance, the constant hyphenation and subordina-
tion of non-systemic symbology attempts to locate these icons as “other”
or “foreign” or, sometimes “heritage”—despite their dominance (in demo-
cratic and representative senses) in many communities.
 The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity  21
This ongoing redefinition of center-margin subject-positions is a principal
project of multicultural discourses: in a sense, the trans– and hyphenation
movements reemphasize that the dominant system is in power by perpetual
supra-grouping—which, thus, attempts to supplant more representative
local cultural systems by presenting them in the context of broader scopes of
supposed community (this is effected linguistically by use of “American” as
the modifying descriptor in all cases).2 It is, thus, important to examine the
origin of these supposedly dominant and referential mythos, their construc-
tion and iteration, to scrutinize how the US political body attempts to main-
tain a cultural system that constructs “others” who are to be hyphenated,
and to strive to make this subordination appear democratic and natural.
In many senses the power of a patria hinges upon the control of spaces:
the physical spaces are used as mechanisms of cultural engineering, which
some argue has a shaping influence on the behavior and identity of the
individuals who are exposed to them (Cohen and Weimann 2000). Sym-
bols of a specific cultural mythology saturate the spaces; these myths and
their codes are charged with emotions, sentiments that are the fabric of the
colonial project. The intended outcome of the process is the “Americaniza-
tion”—or the emotional manipulation of those who reside in the engineered
spaces; an individual’s supposed patriation could be described as a nuanced,
emotional attachment (or hybrid or dialectical opposition) to a collective
group. Whether these emotions exist (and, if so, their level of profundity) is
a serious concern for cultural critics who link their theoretical approaches
to geography, as does the transnational; however, such critical are seldom
raised—instead, the mythic hybridized relational emotions are presumed to
exist. To that end, this chapter endeavors to offer an amplified perspective
on the construction and iteration of the supposed multicultural patriotisms
in the US political space.

Construction of National Individuals: Usable Experience

and Patriotic Performances
Nationality and patriotism are often about agency and emotion. A sense of
community can influence how a person thinks, acts, experiences reality, and
interacts with others. As patriotism and transnationalisms encode power
and offer maps of exclusion, in a post-Enlightenment reality in which all
are seemingly equal, such divisions and the patterns of segregation inherent
to such groupings could be described as unethical, but the emotion of the
metanarrative is such that in specific cases inequality and disparity can be
understood as conventional.
A case study of such inequality is worthy to note here. In 2005, Hurri-
cane Katrina devastated part of the Gulf Coast and much of the city of New
Orleans. While federal relief was wanting, a broad relocation program and
assistance package eventually allowed many storm refugees to live and work
in other parts of the US political space. Their relocation—provided that
22  The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity
the individuals were members of the political body, that is, citizens—was
financed by the government; undocumented members of the same commu-
nity received little or no federal aid and no relocation assistance (Jurado
2005). Similarly, when an earthquake—an even that was much more debili-
tating than Hurricane Katrina—struck Haiti in 2010, no such relocation
or employment assistance was offered to the people of Haiti because of the
community’s supposed difference from members of the US political body.
One could surmise that if Haiti were not an extra-national collection of
imaginary histories and their politicizations, residents would have received
the same benefits as the Katrina refugees: Haitians generally received aid
but through modes and channels that were not generally equivalent to the
efforts toward Katrina victims (relocation, employment programs, cash
allotments, and the like, were not available); thousands died as a direct
result of this nationalized inaction. Despite Haiti’s close cultural ties to many
communities in the US political space—and notwithstanding that the island
is closer to Washington, D.C., than Iowa and places west—the exclusion-
ary treatment, while criticized by some, was understood as a conventional
response to people in need. It is the national narrative and its consequences
that clouds the emotions and sanctions this destructive unequal treatment
during the most catastrophic of events.

Codifying Myth: Conquest and the Cultural

Engineering of Empire
An important dimension of the study of the social appropriation of space—that
is, the construction of the cultural geography of the patria—involves the
physical and symbolic manifestation of cultural myth. A significant portion
of this discussion examines cultural conquest: how normative social devices
like official and unofficial languages, political systems, cultural narratives,
and other mores are put into practice in spaces subsequent to military inva-
sion, land seizure, or other annexation.3 Thomas Jefferson thought it would
be appropriate to “conquer without war”—and that violence “was not the
best engine for us to resort to” (qtd. in Bogues 2010, 13); however, in prac-
tice, the attempts at cultural conquest of communities resident in the US
political space has been, in almost every case, subsequent to military inva-
sion: the ensuing social campaigns strive to construct subjectivities based on
mythic spiritual associations with symbology referent to the invading group.
The realization of these shared “ways of life,” based in large part on the
preexisting cultures of the invading peoples, should, in utopian state-centric
approaches that inform these programs, result in a “pax Americana.” The
“ways of life” here are understood to be biopolitical and cultural modes
personified usually by the dominant male sector of the invading community.
Anthony Bogues has termed these campaigns as “fundamental attempts to
shape consciousness” (2010, 20).
 The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity  23
Multicultural, Colonized Spaces of the US Political Body
Robert Cooper has argued that the US government’s interventions abroad
attempt “to remake the world in its own image” (2005, 34). Cooper’s argu-
ment imagines the communities of the US political space as a single, stable
image that may be replicable and exported. As an alternative view, the dis-
cussion here examines the regions integrated by the US political body as
member provinces (i.e., “states”) not as a stable, controlled cultural de-
mography that has been unified to the extent that it may be exported but,
rather, as fluid, diverse communities that are under the auspices of an ongo-
ing colonial cultural program. Indeed, the cultural engineering described
by Cooper that is waged “abroad” (i.e., outside the spaces claimed by the
political body) is also being waged within the spaces (states, territories, pro-
tectorates, and so on) over which it asserts more direct, metropolitan politi-
cal dominion. Because of the charged notions that inform Cooper’s reading,
the spaces claimed by the US political body (even provinces that have been
integrated as member “states”) are not generally understood as “colonial”
or “postcolonial” spaces in criticism; similarly, in Dwelling in American,
John Muthyala frames his discussion:

‘Colonialism’ refers to the settlement of another country or region and

the appropriation of its resources, cultures and peoples. ‘Imperialism’ is
about one region, state, or empire advancing its own interests by direct-
ing and managing the internal affairs of another entity.
(2012, xi emphasis added)

Muthyala’s use of another in these definitions belies that imperial programs

are also engaged internally, within the borders claimed by the political body.
The critical view in this chapter departs from those tendencies by interpret-
ing the residents of spaces claimed by the US political body as fluid, mal-
leable, extra-institutional communities.
It is the cultural conquest and its codification that has, since its inception
as a political entity, strived to transition the image of cultural symbols of the
invading communities from “foreign” to “natural,” “domestic,” and osten-
sibly exportable, in the spaces in question. In practical terms, cultural myths
(and, thus, manifestations of material culture) function as power ancillar-
ies that accompany and follow the military conquest of a region. The Cul-
tural Conquest involves three discrete and sequential phases, as shown in
Table 1.1.
As the third phase is ongoing in perpetuity, justification for the state con-
trol of material culture begins as a dimension of military conquest. Once
a region has been invaded or annexed and the resources therein seized, in
traditional colonial complexes, martial law is implemented as a measure
to stabilize the occupation. This phase of conquest is complemented by a
construction of the metropolitan aesthetic in the new area; the saturation of
24  The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity
Table 1.1  Phases of Conquest

People in new space Objective

(1) Merchants Encounter resources

Also termed E.g., minerals, trade routes, spices, furs, communities
“explorers” e.g., to tax or conscript, fertile agricultural zones, strategic
Lewis and Clark geography, etc.
(2) Military Control resources
An invasion force Implement martial law so that the metropolitan may
exploit resources; establish “Fort” cities, e.g., Fort
Lauderdale, Fort Worth etc. that facilitate metropolitan
settlement.
(3) Politicians Social engineering
Socialize the space Acculturize the space into a region of the metropolitan
into a new through saturation of symbol, legend, and myth.
province of the Establish laws and norms that promote the metropolitan
metropolitan (invading system) as dominant culture and prohibit or
criminalize other systems; offer citizenship to conquered
peoples in exchange for submission to metropolitan
cultural norms and abandonment of original or other (in
the case of immigrants) social tendencies.

cultural material is accompanied by the prohibition of a previous or another

symbol, and the celebration of new myths through monuments and other
state commissions. A similar process occurred (and continues) throughout
the continent, in the Caribbean and Pacific, by settlers and others affili-
ated with US political mores, over a period of centuries. While many crit-
ics unpack the US as a monocultural and mono-community paradigm (or
as a trans-hybrid iteration thereof), as this discussion will make clear, the
social construction of this reality was gradual, contested (and continues to
be contested), and is by nature incomplete. The partial and imperfect con-
figuration of this ontology takes an implicit conceptualization of reality and
attempts—and often fails—to elide other forms of collective existence.
An objective of controlled cultural projections (in language, visual images,
founding narratives) together with strict legislative regulations of these can-
ons, is to isolate residents within constructed spheres of symbols. The limi-
tations inherent to such socially engineered frameworks, in turn, endeavor
to enact specific behavioral outcomes from the people isolated within them.
The broader intended outcome of these interventions might be described as
a common recognition of possession of the land itself (on behalf of the orga-
nizations publishing and financing the images). Secondarily, these structures
imply the concept that there are appropriate languages, creeds, and cultural
ceremony to be engaged by communities residing in the geographic region.
This series of constructions enhances the status of some projections while
minoritizing those that do not fit a prescribed shape, often relegating them
to hyphenated status.4
 The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity  25
The purpose of national and patriotic cultural systems is to establish an
internal logic that attempts to appropriate the space and shape the action of
the people who live in it. The cultural representations strive to organize the
space and its communities into a history; the transnational, multicultural
narrative requires the interpellation of certain peoples with space itself and,
in this way, organizes a method to perceive the composition of the commu-
nity. By locating the source of the narrative’s creation outside the narrative
itself—often, in God5—attempts to universalize the presence of the dominant
group. Once history and its actors are set in motion, other cultural systems
have been criminalized, and several generations have been isolated within
the spaces saturated by mythic symbols, the constructed reality is supposedly
established such that other social or cultural action in the same space appears
ungrammatical and is therefore marginalized and sometimes prohibited.6
These patriotic systems are ostensibly authorized by the will of the people;
they administrate the totality of the biopolitical and biocultural: all dimen-
sions of life and death, their records and meaning, are subordinated to the
auspices of the patria domain. The cultural system classifies and intertwines
various biocultural, economic, and social activities in pervasive and ubiq-
uitous forms, such that affiliation with the US political body is not based
on voluntary affiliation. (For instance, in order for a citizen to renounce
political ties, one must physically leave the political space for the declara-
tion to be recognized.) The contemporary patria-system, so entangled with
the nation and transnational state models, extends to each individual in the
spaces claimed by the political body and strives to determine the context of
his or her living environment.
The state’s exertion of cultural power is generally through the threat of
violence (“the right of the sword” in Foucault’s terms). The dominant com-
munity’s entitlement to physically control others (through incarceration,
taxation, deportation, capital punishment, and so on) is constructed on the
discrimination between “us” of a community and “other” excluded by it.
The obligatory social devices—language, perceived history, shared rituals,
and so on—are mechanisms that construct a cultural dimension to political
citizenship for conquered peoples and immigrants.7

On Governing Diversity: The National Answer in

Multicultural Societies
To rule a country effectively, especially if it is [heterogeneous] . . . you require
a national identity, and if you can’t wait for it to form, then you impose one.
—Enright (1990, 1)

What ultimately matters is not what is but what people believe is.

—Connor (1978, 380)

In the print-capitalist period, the political construction of a nation may be

understood as a narrative of constructed symbols projected in a fashion
26  The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity
intended to develop specific behaviors in a mass population. As these hege-
monic canons of value are often realized through state-controlled arenas,8
they reduce to a series of behavioral expectations of each individual: a per-
son’s adherence to and observance of these spheres supposedly produces the
perception of collective belonging, that is, “patriotism,” that spans and pen-
etrates identity. “To be ‘us,’ ” notes Philip Schlesinger, “we need those who
are ‘not-us’ ” (1992, 14). The implied power of the state’s cultural program
rests in part on the praxis of that knowledge and, concretely, on the social
conditions that produce it. The axis of these uncertainties relates to the con-
ception and controls on the metaphoric maps that define the group identity.
The multilateral influences on the formation of collective identity in this
sense are closely attuned to governmental social engineering; the purpose
here is to characterize the structures that place a contrived primordialism in
the image of, generally, the settler-American, and to explore how these ideas
are implemented through state controls on material culture.
Identity construction spills over into various fields: restrictive linguistic,
symbolic, iconographic, metaphoric, cartographical, and cultural (among
other) measures converge to form a collective social model—an allegori-
cal image of a group member. To begin, we might focus on practices that
attempt to coerce those who are strangers to one another into a community
through triangulated cultural directives. While political citizenship is for-
mal and aversive in its rigidity, cultural citizenship is sometimes constructed
through similar mechanisms. “Look at what the institutions are trying to
do,” remarks Noam Chomsky (1992, 2:17:25). According to his model,
national governments use a series of emotionally potent stories and sym-
bols as a paradigm, a framework that sets an agenda of behavior to which
citizens should adhere. The structures that determine, shape, control, and
culturally restrict, in order to forge an image of a member of the collective,
are often built through public media.9
A person’s sentiment of collective identity tends to take shape during
childhood and adolescence both in the home-space and through contact
with public spheres.10 During this crucial period of life, when we do not
control our environment (and lack appropriate cognitive faculty to fully
understand our surroundings), a person is presented a system of cultural
symbols that are offered in such a way that they seem constant, perennial,
and natural. The collective system of indicators attempts to create an imagi-
nary community of people who apparently believe they share, among other
things, experiences, beliefs, customs, histories, and sometimes ethnicity, reli-
gion, and language. As Benedict Anderson explains, modern collective iden-
tity is a fantasy, as “members of even the smallest nation will never know
most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them” (1991, 7).
The nation-state itself, as Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller observe “is
premised on the idea of cultural as well as political unity. In many countries,
ethnic homogeneity defined in terms of common language, culture, tradi-
tions and history, has been the basis of the nation-state. This unity has often
been fictitious—a construction of the ruling elite” (1993, 15).
 The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity  27
Aesthetics in Conquered Spaces: Mythmaking, Prestige,
Isolation, Adolescence
Isolation within culturally engineered spaces during childhood and ado-
lescence, then, is a powerful social resource for implementation of collec-
tive myths. More specifically, some culturally engineered arenas include
classrooms, sporting arenas, museums, mosques/churches/synagogues, war
memorials, holidays, books and media outlets; these constructions define
a model of social order. The arrangements of symbols and frameworks,
which over generations are to become accepted (and even familial) tradi-
tions; combined with an immobile populace lacking communication from
extra-systemic sources, have been effective instruments in controlling re-
sources of a territory and a creating collective identity.11 Michael Brear-
ley and Andrea Sabbadini’s “The Truman Show: How’s it Going to End?”
demonstrates some of the implications of isolating a young person within a
prescribed space of cultural symbols that are nonrepresentative of the com-
munity. They note that Truman Burbank’s situation “is prototypically ado-
lescent” as he believes in the reality with which he is presented because he
“has no other choice” (2008, 434). The moment of epiphany occurs when
Burbank breaks from the symbols to become a True-man:

The film may be taken to show how our whole orientation, belief-systems,
and life are controlled, limited, and made risible or pathetic by a sys-
tematic religious/political mentality of power. The ordinary citizen has
had his subjectivity warped and falsified by prevailing powerful uncon-
scious attitudes which reside, among other places, in the media.
(2008, 437)

Brearley and Sabbadini make clear that Burbank’s circumstance mirrors the
prescriptions of life in a modernity inundated with symbols and myths pre-
sented as facts. Contemporary society in spaces claimed by the US political
body might be more exclusionary than Seahaven, as those that have intro-
duced “other” ideas of value in the form of political, religious, or scientific
thought; gender, sexual or racial roles; or a transformation of economic
or social hierarchy, have been systematically marginalized through propa-
ganda, mockery, incarceration or deportation—if not assassination.12
At their best nations and transnations offer the guise of fraternity and
protection through ostensible group membership.13 At their worst, they
destroy human empathy through narratives of fear and persuasion to act
not on compassion for others but in the interests of non-local resource man-
agers. The nature of the group is inexact and relies on presumed affilia-
tions that only fully realize themselves in imaginary forms. The next chapter
discusses the nature of the physical structures that, conceivably, function
to construct and iterate “American” (or a dialectic thereto) as a quality of
a person, action, or piece of material culture in the colonial, patriotic cul-
tural system. The meticulous process of place-making strives to outline the
28  The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity
possible physical and metaphoric surroundings and thus intends to unite
many peoples, communities, and traditions under a specific set of tradi-
tions and perceived values. The discussion locates the cultural canons that
saturate the US political space and interprets their use as instruments that
strive to construct the impression of asymmetrical difference among the
residents of those spaces, dividing them into hierarchies based on their sup-
posed resemblance to the dominant iconic member, or supposed mimicked
performances thereof, or hybridized relation thereto.

Acknowledgments
Parts of this chapter were originally published as “Reflections on Social En-
gineering and Settler-American Literature.” European Journal of American
Studies. 2011. (17.2). 2+

Notes
1. The discussion here has many parallels to Imperial Rome, Spain (following the
so-called “Re”-Conquest), Australia, France, and much of Latin America.
2. Nations break empires, and thus, in many locations nationalism can be a source
of rebellion, change, and gestures of equality—and the US political and cultural
machine has been effective in suppressing the nations (like Puerto Rico and the
Lakota Republic) it has occupied and continues to occupy.
3. While there are multicultural discourses embedded within monocultural sys-
tems, the existence of nondominant cultures is tolerated provided that they do
not eclipse the footprint of the dominant system.
4. This is not universally true. Puerto Rico is a notable exception as the concept of
“Puerto Rican–American” is nearly absent from sociopolitical dialogs.
5. A common articulation of this for the US is John O’Sullivan’s statement that
the invading people have a right “to possess the whole of the continent which
Providence has given us.”
6. The consideration of Spanish as the official in Cenizo, Texas, for instance, pro-
voked a media and popular convulsion.
7. The US political body claims any birth in the US political space as citizen-member,
an obligatory and de facto and ex officio status.
8. While Barack Obama has made predictions for the Super Bowl and March
Madness, and might someday throw a pitch at a baseball game, he will not
do the same for Chunkey or Pasuckuakohowog events; governmental holidays
celebrate Columbus and Washington not Tecumseh, Metacomet, or Sacco and
Vanzetti; codified laws on race (like miscegenation regulation until 1967) and
religion (such as decrees for governmental breaks at Christmas but not Rama-
dan) attempt to structure popular behavior through governmental regulation.
9. See Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent (1988).
10. Noam Chomsky has pointed out that linguistic self-definition, which is to say
the formation of a mother tongue, has close ties to identity, and the crucial phys-
iological linguistic developmental process occurs during puberty. Thus, while
there are exceptions, our language is stamped upon us, so to speak, as is our col-
lective identity during a few short years of life (interview with the author). As a
result, exposure to institutional definitions of nationality during one’s youth is a
crucial component of a person’s identification with the umbrella social structures
throughout adulthood.
 The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity  29
11. See Rodney Bruce Hall’s National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and
International Systems (1999) and Magnette’s Citizenship: The History of an
Idea (2005).
12. The US Department of Defense classifies nonviolent protests as “low-level ter-
rorism” (Osborne 2009); playwright Howard Zinn was arrested nine times in
passive demonstrations (2001); the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) labeled
Martin Luther King “the most dangerous negro [in US]” in 1963 (“The Most
Dangerous Negro” 1979); the FBI had surveillance on W. E. B. Du Bois until he
was 95 years of age (Gabbidon 2007, 53); US government refused to denounce
Pat Robertson for proposing assassination of Hugo Chávez (“US Dismisses Call
for Chavez’s Killing” 2005). The family sphere is generally understood as the
most influential agent of socialization as its shaping characteristics dominate the
period of the lifespan when humans are most dependent on their environment.
The most profound effects of the mythic culture are often, through parents and
older siblings, implemented as appropriate linguistic and cultural values to be
used in public spaces. The cultural myth as the bases of the social reality is also
cultivated through multiple media sources and often expressed by important
public figures at a local level. Teachers, coaches, religious figures, and direct
representatives of the national idea often reiterate the same concepts (such as
appropriate language, celebration of holiday, and gender roles) through various
disciplines, and for these reasons, the effects of a pervasive set of metanorms on
the structure of the symbolic environment are subtle, multifaceted, and fused
through many spheres of authority.
13. The patria system has its defenders, even in the academy. John Muthyala has
argued, “Patriotism . . . can be and has often been an affirmation of belong-
ing to a nation and trusting its institutions” and, he continues, such apparently
democratic social paradigms are those that “we need to affirm and celebrate
today” (2012, 47). Some, like former Harvard and Columbia professor Samuel
Huntington, argue that the appropriate form of residing in the US political space
should involve a more dogmatic, rigid form of cultural identity implementa-
tion, articulated through the strict colonial prescriptions of jingoists: “I believe
that . . . Americans should recommit themselves to the Anglo-Protestant culture,
traditions, and values” (2004, xvii).

Work Cited
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. New York: Verso.
Bogues, Anthony. 2010. Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom. Hanover,
NH: Dartmouth University Press.
Brearley, Michael and Andrea Sabbadini. 2008. “The Truman Show: How’s It Going
to End?” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89: 433–440.
Bruce Hall, Rodney. 1999. National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and Inter-
national Systems. New York: Columbia University Press.
Castles, Stephen and Mark J. Miller. 1993. The Age of Migration: International
Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: Macmillan.
Chomsky, Noam. 1992. “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.”
Dir. Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick.
Chomsky, Noam and Edward S. Herman. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Politi-
cal Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon.
Cohen, Jonathan, and Gabriel Weimann. 2000. “Cultivation Revisited: Some Genres
Have Some Effects on Some Viewers.” Communication Reports 13.2: 90–113.
30  The Ontology of Cultural Groups in Modernity
Conner, Walker. 1978. “A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is
a . . .” Ethnic and Racial Studies 1.4: 378–388.
Cooper, Robert. 2005. “Imperial Liberalism.” The National Interest 79 (Spring):
25–34.
Enright, Dennis Joseph. 1990. “Second Thoughts.” The Independent 10 March. 1.
Gabbidon, Shaun L. 2007. W.E.B. Dubois on Crime and Justice. Burlington:
Ashgate.
Huntington, Samuel. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National
Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Jurado Ertll, Randy. 2005. “Temporary Protective Status (TPS) Should Be Granted
to Immigrants Impacted by Hurricane Katrina.” Hispanic Vista 28 September.
Magnette, Paul and Katya Long. 2005. Citizenship: The History of an Idea. Essex:
European Consortium for Political Research.
“The Most Dangerous Negro.” 1979. Time 28 May.
Muthyala, John. 2012. Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization.
Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.
Osborne, James. 2009. “Pentagon Exam Calls Protests ‘Low-Level Terrorism.’ ” Fox
News 17 June.
Schlesinger, Philip. 1992. “Europeanness: A New Cultural Battlefield?” Innovation
5.1: 12–18.
“US Dismisses Call for Chavez’s Killing.” 2005. CNN 24 August.
Zinn, Howard. 2001. Conversations With History. Berkley, CA: Institute of Interna-
tional Studies, University of California. 20 April.
2 Place-Making

Which culture is that? Boston? New York? Savannah? New Orleans? Den-
ver? Los Angeles? I grew up on the Mexican border (on the Texas side).
My culture was eating tacos and enchiladas, listening to both Mexican and
American music, and speaking Tex-Mex (a combination of English and
Spanish).
—Hornberger (2004, 160)

Once a label is attached to those places (either by those within the group or
by outgroup members), the place’s characteristics are reified (in place time),
leading to essentializing, homogenizing, and stereotyping in line with a so-
cial identity.
—Reysen and Levine (2014, 256)

Place-making and meaning-making often occur simultaneously; they are

highly interrelated.
The political body engages cultural management of conquered regions
as a means to foster a monoidentity (and sometimes multicultural, hyphen-
ated versions thereof) in efforts to obscure differences in language, social
tendencies, cultural identities, among the residents of these spaces. These
social engineering initiatives control and manipulate the physical spaces in
such a way that residence in them results in specific cultural experiences (for
instance, obligatory exposure to specific languages, holidays, images, icons,
narratives, and so on). The place-frame exigencies levied by the US political
body on annexed, conquered, and/or integrated spaces, as part of Phase III
of the Cultural Conquest, constitute a moving and flexible discourse that
attempts to bind life experiences of residents to the cultural agenda, and in a
wider scope, the place-making schemes intend to manipulate the allegiances
of residents of spaces claimed by the political body into self-identifying
members of the metropolitan. In order to better understand the gap between
geography-as-cultural-proxy (an embedded component in national and
transnational approaches) and atomized cultural experiences, this chapter
examines state management of physical and metaphorical spaces and dia-
logs with collective-action framing theory. The discussion strives to offer a
32 Place-Making
series of contextual bases to situate a comprehensive critique of territorial
presumptions of cultural identity—that is, transpatriotisms.
Place-design intends to de-linguicize actors and devaluate cultural and
social ontologies that are not explicitly vetted, if not articulated by, the dom-
inant group. The place-making designs are intended to immerse an individ-
ual in an environment saturated with material imbued with symbolism that
subordinates the viewer; the imagery that fills out the physical space (and its
intellectual possibilities) is sometimes intended to cause and foment a sense
of self-doubt in potential agency of the individual. These physical symbols
of domination transcend military force and resituate power through a flex-
ible, passive form of exploitation and cultural violence.1
The dialectical approaches to place-making (and culture-making) sys-
tems, as they relate to identity and controls on culture, tend to employ a
three-dimensional conceptualization: a cultural thesis (in this case, state
or national identity), an antithesis (reciprocal, often anti-state response),
and a third way (a hybrid, synthesis, often transnational, that incorporates
multiple canons). These dialectical concepts are important ideas that are
often embedded in the ways that the terms American or United States are
used to describe people and places in transnational scholarly approaches.
The terms function on this grouping system, one that attempts to contain
cultural manifestations through law: thesis material is celebrated and legal;
antithesis material is often made illegal; hybridized projections are some-
times protected by law as long as non-systemic components do not eclipse
the national or patriotic thesis.
A place is a form of reality, one that is already imbued with controls
and proprietorships, historic myths, and thesis–antithesis structures. It is
a reality projected over the cultures of the residents of the spaces, charg-
ing their cultural action with the dialectics of the dominant cultural myths.
A place-forging program often takes many forms over several generations
and is a politicized and industrial process that involves the design of the
environment where people live.2 Such processes often include neighborhood
plans, regulatory and inducement strategies, zoning and housing law, his-
toric preservation and exclusion, and educational platforms that celebrate
the places and present the directives as natural. The local government is
generally responsible for the implementation of the policies that serve the
state norms, and penalties are leveled when localized initiatives contradict
the principal messages of the broader system.3
The role of public education, particularly compulsory education, is an
important arena through which the cultural assertions of the political body
(like those about George Washington) are waged; the classroom and the pre-
sumptive authority of figures like teachers, coaches, and professors, then, are
useful ancillary figures to the process of interpellation of physical structures
(spaces, days, cities, states, and so on) with a metaphoric social structure
that supports the political and cultural claims of the dominant discourses.
As Mark Goldman notes, the purpose of the government-administrated
 Place-Making  33
education bureaus is “to reach as many houses in the city as possible with
propaganda for the purpose of creating an informed public opinion in
regard to . . . developing and fostering patriotism” (2007, 76). As “patrio-
tism” could be described as a belief in or an identification with a constel-
lation of traditions, the process of constructing those traditions makes the
authority presumed by institutions of education of great consequence. As
compulsory education occurs, generally, before a person’s brain is mature
enough to comprehend their environment, presenting the myths in such a
way that they appear uninterpretable (through the authority of teachers,
coaches, holidays, and so on) allows the process to establish these distor-
tions as reasonable and natural in appearance.4
The political body engages schools and other spaces in attempts to
homogenize diverse communities through the implementation of a set of
cultural prescriptions; these myths strive to set the center of the field imagi-
nary of national and transnational discourses. Donald Pease has argued that
these involve:

The image repertoire of the US national community can be ascertained

through a recitation of the key terms in the national metanarrative
commonly understood to be representative of that community. Those
images interconnect an exceptional national subject (American Adam)
with a representative national scene (Virgin Land) and an exemplary
national motive (errand into the wilderness).
(1994, 4)

It is important to clarify here Pease ostensibly intended to note that these

myths are commonly misunderstood to be representative. The falsehood
that they are “representative” is an operative cultural mechanism in pro-
jecting the imaginary as though it were a democratic cultural expression of
resident communities. That critical leap, which is a sanctioning measure,
is the important and often unmentioned distortion that posits the culture
of invading peoples as organic, natural, and “understood to be representa-
tive” in the spaces. This institutionalized falsehood is constructed in part
through the forms that the political body expresses control over physical
and metaphorical spaces, which are, thus, of great importance in the cul-
tural program.
When the political entity of the United States came into being, for
many residents of the continental space it was a shift of colonial political
control—from London to Philadelphia (then Washington). As the new gov-
ernmental body made expansionist claims to what are often termed Florida,
Texas, and the Midwest, later west to the Pacific and south into the Carib-
bean, these regions were already inhabited by people with other collective
and individual cultures. Many born in these conquered and annexed lands
were not displaced, which is to say that they remained to live under the
new imperial government from Washington. A gradient of this circumstance
34 Place-Making
took place for Native Americans in all regions; many peoples of Asian
descent in the west; Spaniards in northern Florida; Frenchmen in St. Louis,
New Orleans, and throughout Illinois; Spaniards and Mexicans in the west-
ern territories. The same social strata that carried out imperial expansions
also waged two forced migrations: Africans in the slave trade5 and Native
Americans, often relocated by military or other force.6 Moreover, people
from other parts of the world (termed immigrants, as per the narrative)
arrived to populate the new annexations, territories, protectorates, and
states. This conglomerate of already-present collective identities inhabiting
the same space created a particularly complex task for the imperial govern-
ment: invention of unity across a diverse population.
The attempted erasure of cultures and languages in the US political space
has been (and is yet) carried out under the guises of democratic justifica-
tion, allowing the enterprise to appear appropriate if not organic.7 As soon
as military occupations took place,8 the federal government began active
promotion of metropolitan collective identity through social devices such
as citizenship, compulsory language, holidays and monuments promoting
founding myths, and endorsement of certain sports and religious obser-
vances. Emphasis on settler social structures has been carried out in part
through management of the space itself; the symbolism of the spaces, and
rituals carried out in them, aim to strengthen the idea of the collectivity,
which is to say the idea of the nation, which in turn greatly facilitates execu-
tive authority in arenas like control of capital and tax collection, sometimes
war conscriptions and military invasions.
In these cases an unhyphenated-American (understood here as a noun,
not an adjective) in the spaces claimed by the US political body was mani-
festly forged in the likeness of, generally, an English-speaking, supposedly
Christian settler ostensibly of European descent whose dominion reached
“from sea to shining sea.” This persona has been presented as a primordial
part of the geographic, social, and cultural landscape in an attempt estab-
lish sociocultural and governmental proprietorship of the region.9 To be
sure, these affairs as to which residents of the same space were considered
politically eligible for citizenship until the middle of the twentieth century
were drawn along racial, gender, and religious lines—chasms yet plague
the fictions promoted by the political body.10 As Donald Pease comments,
“how the state’s management of its territorial borders played a foundational
role in how the nation imagines itself and in how the state legitimates the
techniques of coercion and discipline that engender a normalized sense of
national identity” (2008, 179).

The Soft Power of Cultural Appropriation

A core dimension of cultural imperialism involves a material expression of
power that seeks a subordinate response from those who are exposed to
it. This system of attempted cultural dominance often occurs subsequent
 Place-Making  35
to military invasion or political seizure, as the third phase of cultural con-
quest, involving the dominant group’s exertion of social and cultural control
through an array of devices. The state’s organization of these dimensions
of the human condition provides a forum where dominant values may be
(or should be, per the state prescription) adopted universally. While these
values and ways of life are often not assumed universally—or, in some cases,
at all—the structures attempt to limit what an individual may desire as a
collective aesthetic delight. The endeavor to achieve such an effect involves
limitations on cultural activities that are available (and in some cases, legal)
to perform. The intended outcome, then, is to limit the constitution of I and
subsequently we of the residents of the space to a set of norms that reiterates
the power of those who control the structures.
In this way, the construction of places is a form of exerting soft power,
subtle violence, and cultural hegemony. The conquered space becomes a
zone of dispossession and repossession, a physical manifestation of the sym-
bolic violence of the dominant group. The process of city, town and rural
planning, then, may be understood a venue of cultural engineering that
attempts to condition the residents of the space to engage in specific behav-
iors. The mandates of the state change over time and thus the organization
of the space itself also changes (for instance, a discussion of the digitized
conquest of e-spaces occurs in Chapter 7). The physical entities that are
repeated throughout the spaces claimed by the political body offer a myth of
social continuity—and are a mechanism to both forge and maintain unequal
relationships, promoting the myths of power structure.

“Everything around You Will Tell You, This Is America”

The procedures through which a place is created hinge on the ways that
individuals interact with their communities. The dominant groups attempt
to transform the existing structures (or, implement new structures to a pre-
viously empty space) into a permanent, stable “place,” where the values
of the occupier are imbued as dimensions of life for those who reside in it.
In this way, in recently conquered spaces this conversion is often achieved
through destroying the previous symbol, reconstructing landscape elements,
and restructuring the existing materials to accommodate industry and ac-
tivity that are common or acceptable, or even necessary, to the dominant
group. While this process is greatly varied around the US political space
because of climate, preexisting communities, and migrant and immigrant
demographics, among other factors, the blueprint of a universalized and
stable “American” space is the ultimate end: the possible human activity in
those regions, then, is in certain ways limited to the confines inherent in the
forms that the spaces are organized. The “American” space is constructed
on social and cultural pillars that seize the fundamental blocks of human
communication, including language, spirituality, time; and the rituals sur-
rounding birth, death, and betrothal. It is also common for specific elements
36 Place-Making
of the preexisting cultures—sometimes words, imagery, icons, heroes, and
so on—to be appropriated into the dominant myth, a syncretization of ma-
terial that interpellates it as an inferior component of the broader system.

What Are Central Components that Make Up a Place?

Language: Graphization, Standardization, Criminalization
The direct control of language—perhaps more accurate, control of represen-
tational images of language—is one of the more ubiquitous and powerful
components of place-making around the US political space. A precondi-
tion for establishing social authority of the residents of a space is through
verbal communication, and verbal exchanges require a shared praxis that
establishes a common ground on which assertions of dominance may be
articulated and realized. In a broad sense, individual residents of the US
political space, whatever be their background, must be proficient enough in
the language of the dominant group in order to be shaped by the informing
intentions of the textual narratives.
While there is no official language of the US political body on a national
level, twenty-seven states have codified English as the “official” language;
on several occasions, courts have agreed that residents do not have legal
rights to public services in their native languages (Inhofe and Muñoz 2003).
The de facto role of English-as-official is designed to favor that language
community and concomitantly to discourage other languages in what might
be understood as definitive arenas, such as courts, business transactions,
schools, and any cultural expression at a collective/supra-grouping level.
These policies aim to shape how English and other languages are used, cul-
tivated, and understood to exist, throughout the political space over which
the US political body asserts control.
Embedded in the language policies of the US political body is the myth
that every resident, regardless of citizenship or native language, should be
exposed to (if not know and use) the English language, notwithstanding the
dominant language of the community where he or she lives. The language
planning in the US political body is a deliberate effort to shape the function,
existence, and acquisition of languages and the cultures, sentiments, and
philosophies that accompany them. The linguistic engineering of a space
involves the construction of a language as a supposed natural component of
the community interaction, which allows the other communities and their
actions to be ordered into a hierarchy and thus marginalized and stripped of
agency. The US political body employs three central dimensions of supposed
linguistic superiority in its attempts to project a natural status of English in
the spaces it claims: graphization, standardization, and criminalization.
Graphization: Regardless of the linguistic composition of a community,
all public spaces are to be inundated with the English language, a prac-
tice which employs the use of libraries, sporting arenas, courts, libraries,
 Place-Making  37
military outposts, Interstate highways, roads, museums, signs, universities,
schools, jails, city halls, railroad and bus stations, airports, banks, post
offices, residences, and leisure areas (restaurants, bars, and commerce), all
of which—even those not directly controlled by state actors—as spaces of
myth. The absolute saturation of the English language even, perhaps espe-
cially, in places where English is a minority language is an expression of
power. These symbols attempt to interpellate the spaces into a narrative that
at once obfuscates the presence of other linguistic systems and claims that
the most-present language system on physical material (regardless of lan-
guage use among residents of the space) is the appropriate one to be used.
Standardization: Labeling non-English as foreign, even in places where
English is a minority language, is realized through many state mechanisms,
including obligatory public education and the institutionalized characteriza-
tion of languages-other-than-English as “foreign.” Any non-English native
tongue is termed a “Heritage” language by the state and many cultural
institutions—including the Modern Language Association, the largest pro-
fessional organization in the humanities. The concept of a Heritage lan-
guage is charged with the falsehood that a person’s native language could
part of a culture that has passed, or is only inherited and not presently
active (and therefore no longer important in that space). In many ways, the
institutionalization of the term Heritage for supposedly minority languages,
means that English, too, because of its minority status in many locations, is
a Heritage language around the US political space; however, because of the
myth’s hierarchy, it is not ever framed as such, and the imagined superior
status of English elides the utilization of the term in this sense in public
spheres. In general, Heritage applies a supra-grouping to individuals who
speak languages other than English in spaces claimed by the political body,
subordinating them and their language (and the multiple identification
spheres that relate to language) to inferior status. So-called Heritage speak-
ers in English-language classrooms are often penalized for use of their native
tongue in school and in public spaces, in general.11 There are, moreover, no
public institutions of higher education (save the University of Puerto Rico)
that offer fields such as mathematics, science, humanities, or history in a
language other than English.
Criminalization: Part of the perceived superiority of English in spaces
claimed by the political body is constructed on the criminalization of initia-
tives that observe languages-other-than-English as representative in public
spaces. A notable case of this occurred in El Cenizo, Texas, in 2006. Like
many other communities in that region and elsewhere in the US political
space, the main language of El Cenizo is Spanish; as is the case in all munic-
ipalities of the claimed by the political body, the English language inun-
dates public spaces, schools, road signs, and so on. When Spanish was the
declared as the “official” language of the tiny municipality, national media
networks and public officials representing national bodies descended on the
town, quizzing the mayor about how such a circumstance could be possible.
38 Place-Making
Due in part to this pressure (it is unclear if threats of reduced federal fund-
ing were officially leveled) the use of Spanish as “official” in El Cenizo was
dropped almost immediately.
A similar series of events occurred in Puerto Rico in 1991, when the island
briefly abandoned English as a co-official language. Since the US invasion
and political claims to the island, which date to 1898, “The [obligatory]
teaching of English [has been] seen as a way of Americanizing Puerto Ricans
for the purpose of securing their loyalty” (Schweers and Vélez 1992, 25).
In the ninety-three years of US political and cultural interventions aimed to
construct a specific linguistic dimension to everyday life in Puerto Rico, in
1991 around 20% of the population self-reported to be bilingual (Schweers
and Vélez 1992, 24). As a response to the assertion of a Spanish-language
community, Spain conferred the Prince of Asturias Prize—usually given to
individuals—to the people of Puerto Rico in 1991. Following pressure to
renormalize the linguistic system according to the symbolism and colonial
claims of the US political body, English received official status again in 1993.
(As was the case in El Cenizo, it is unclear if threats in relation to the loss of
federal funding were leveled as a result of this language policy.)
US laws also use language as a way to regulate who can legally participate
in civic affairs and as public representatives. While non-English-speakers
are prohibited from federal jury duty, just one state, New Mexico, allows
non-English-speaking jurors. Serving in a public office has similar restric-
tions: When Alejandrina Cabrera—a US citizen who is more comfortable
communicating in Spanish than English—ran for city council in San Luis,
Arizona, in 2012, a federal injunction questioned whether or not she or any
person who is not fluent in English could represent a community in the US
political space in such a capacity—despite the majority of that community
favoring the language of the candidate, not English, in everyday affairs.
Despite the prevalence of Spanish in that municipality and region, Cabrera
was removed from the ballot: the law requires that elected officials be flu-
ent in English, regardless of the linguistic demographics of the places they
represent (“Woman Fights to Run for City Council” 2012).
The English-only exigencies of the US political body are sometimes man-
ifest in cultural arenas. At the 2014 World Cup, for instance, US coach
Jürgen Klinsmann (a native of Germany) would not respond to inquiries
from the press in German. This promotion of English-as-representative is, of
course, an unstable one; aside from the several players on the US World Cup
team who are native speakers of German, there are many precedents for
use of that language (and others) by US athletes. Babe Ruth and Lou Geh-
rig were native speakers of German and often spoke that language to one
another in the dugout of Yankee Stadium, and many notable cultural figures
(such as Billy the Kidd, John Wayne, and Ernest Hemingway) who were
native speakers of English spoke Spanish more often than English as adults,
while residing in the US political space. German is also the principal native
language in many communities in the US political space (Cillizza 2013).
 Place-Making  39
The language policy of the US political body is imbued by the myth that
English is more prestigious than other tongues and therefore should enjoy
legal and cultural superiority over other languages. While there are some
public and even governmental initiatives that strive to develop certain lan-
guages, such as Wampanoag, these are generally languages that do not
presently threaten the fragile power of linguistic dominance that the US
political body universally and unilaterally asserts around the US political
space through forced the implementation of English. The US political body
yet maintains a policy with the unilateral flavor articulated by Theodore
Roosevelt: “We have room for but one language in this country, and that is
the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people
out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot
boarding house” (1926, 554).

Time
The control of the calendar is one of the more passive mechanisms of
the state’s use of soft power to shape behavior. The seven-day week, the
twelve-month year, the division of hours and minutes, and the use of holi-
days are also active implementation mechanisms of collective myths. Con-
trol of time schedules is one of the dimensions of cultural engineering that
directly shapes familial interactions and biological activity, such as eating
and procreation. The workday that is broadly recognized and supported by
the state directives (from 9 a.m.–5 p.m.) concomitantly constructs an appro-
priate schedule to eat, sleep, and engage in leisure pursuits.12 In many parts
of the US political space, this imperial schedule represents a new mapping
of the day’s activities.
In much of the south and southwest, the Pacific and Caribbean, prior
to the US military invasions and subsequent cultural conquests, the daily
schedule had a longer break period in the middle of the day. During this
repose, the large meal of the day (often a family ceremony) was consumed;
the new, imperial schedule is significantly different with respect to the cul-
tural and biological action that may be engaged in the evening and morning
hours. The temporal directives of the US political body radically changed
the possible activities of the daily schedule in these communities, and pro-
foundly reengineered many of life’s most basic processes, which are also
central cultural ceremonies and infused with meaning and significance. The
imperial schedule profoundly influences the most fundamental behavior
of people and their biocultural processes, including establishing when and
where activities such as food consumption, procreation, leisure interaction,
and rest may occur.
The implementation of a holiday schedule celebrating US myths, more-
over, is another salient social mechanism intended to organize the behavior
of masses. Along with the Christian festivals, the US political body also
obliges periods of labor respite, and therefore leisure and vacations, around
40 Place-Making
holidays such as Thanksgiving, Independence Day, Memorial Day, and
Presidents Day. These mandated vacations also affect family meetings by
entangling the dates of their celebrations with the collective narrative. (In
this sense, whether the individuals recognize the holidays in a sense is incon-
sequential.) These dates are also imperative in what leisure activities may be
carried out during those pauses in work, as seasonal activities are limited by
the time of year (thus climate factors) and the nature, purpose, and duration
of the break itself.

Spaces
The US political body imposes an industrialized existence as the supposed
appropriate one for residents of the continental space. The overdetermina-
tion of the automobile, for instance, as a dimension of the life experience
establishes a monopoly on precisely how movement in general is to occur.
This state-supported means of communication (often roads) renders other
forms of transportation, like walking, bicycling, horse riding, using rick-
shaws, or other forms of movement, impractical and sometimes dangerous.
The US political interventions thus ensnare the purchase of an automobile
into what could be understood as a necessary action, one that encompasses
enormous outlying factors such as procurement of gasoline, the nature of
road construction, locations of residence in relation to one another, and
the enormous cultural weight that these exert on how individuals carry out
their lives.
Moreover, these conceptualizations of how space should be organized
also interpellate the state’s means of aesthetic (the car, in this example) as a
requisite space of personal expression, as this piece of material is inevitably
charged (like clothing or use of language) with identity enunciation. These
topics are central to bear in mind when examining the state’s slogans on
freedom, choice, equality, and other expressions, which are often used as
undercurrents to the identity that the US political body supports, and sub-
ordinates them to these mechanized circumstances. The material networks
implemented by the state are of enormous power in the appropriation of
places the cultures of their residents, as in order to sustain life itself, the
individual must comply with many activities that the physical nature of the
surroundings command.

Subsidized Colonial Settlement: Homestead Act,

Names, and Peoples
The use of law—or the codified opinion of those in the decision-making
sectors of the civic body—as a determining set of rules and guidelines to
govern behavior has been central to the cultural appropriation of the US
political space. In recently-conquered and annexed spaces, one of the most
widespread mechanisms to shift the collective understanding of the space
 Place-Making  41
itself toward the colonizing body was the presence of people who believe in
(or at least been exposed to) the ideas articulated by the US political body.
To that end, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the Midwest
and West (prior to becoming “states”) were being populated by migrants
from the metropolitan and so-called immigrants from elsewhere, who were
often in search of land from the Homestead Act (1862). This legislation
offered free tracts in exchange for settlement and was accompanied by a
robust propaganda campaign, one that used state means, such as postage
stamps, national hymns, and seals, to contrive the image of an “American”
(as a noun). What might be more powerful than the visual and narrative
symbolism, however, was the presence of these people in those spaces them-
selves: the attempted cultural appropriation of the space is underscored by
the presence of people acting in concert with the directives of the political
body, who reside in those areas as a result of subsidies that were not univer-
sally available.13
Together with the cultural soldiers of the Homestead Act, these free-land-
for-occupation subsidies also brought into the recently conquered spaces
laws that often resulted in new names (honoring the myths), rail and roads
(interconnecting conquered spaces), temples (generally Christian, some-
times built with state monies), schools (underscoring and institutionalizing
myths), types of businesses (often subsidized with loans if they support state
purposes), and thus a comprehensive system of prestige and economic privi-
lege tied to the idea of US political claims and their cultural outcomes.
As many of these place-manipulation controls transcend public arenas,
the US political body strives to reach into what are often described as “pri-
vate” spaces, such as households, religious gathering places, family reunion
sites, as so on, such that the programming attempts to form an extended set
of subjectivities beyond the physical articulations manifested in the spaces.
These assist the dominant cultural body’s endeavors to control the inner,
supposedly most intimate of human practices, such as procreation (or rejec-
tion thereof), which are sometimes shaped into laws that expressly prohibit
certain practices—like polygamy—that could be described as the standard
realization of life in other societies.14 The state also directly awards some
forms of procreation, such as children born into marriages (a station that
confers special tax breaks) and at the same time penalizes single individuals
or others who do not subordinate themselves to the state’s articulations of
how human relationships should be carried out (these people do not receive
tax privileges).
How an individual who resides in the spaces controlled by the US politi-
cal body organizes her or his life, in these senses, is to be constructed (and,
to a certain extent, must be realized) in function of these frameworks, and
there are penalties such as fines and incarceration for variance. And for that,
how a person expresses identity is also dependent in some ways on these
structures, as car ownership, home ownership, food consumption, and even
the nature of procreation is directly or indirectly in the purview of state’s
42 Place-Making
canonic prescriptions of culture through its direct management of spaces
and time. Place-making is both a method to make certain actions easier
than others, and to make certain philosophies possible, while making others
relatively—and sometimes legally—impossible.
As a result of this program of cultural appropriation, settler-Americans
(understood as those who ostensibly believe in or identify with the myths,
regardless of demographics) are often considered indigenous to any region
of the continent, responsible to none for invasion, conquest, or cultural
cleansing. This reductive historical track is presented as linear, infallible,
and, importantly, over. As Ali Behad has noted, essential to the continued
domination of settler interests is “not the recollection of the past but its exci-
sion, in order to invent an alternative future,” a process this critic describes
as “emancipatory politics of memory” (qtd. in Pease 2008, 190). A crucial
part of this task has been and is the idealization of settler fictions through
selective cultural transmission and discriminating collective remembrance.
This process strives to erase settler responsibility and possibility of repara-
tion (regardless of the measurable sums that present generations enjoy from
their forbearers’ crimes),15 replacing them with nostalgic tributes. Notably,
Noam Chomsky has remarked that “[o]ur system isolates . . . it’s very dif-
ficult to have ideas” (1992, 2:17:25).

Neoliberal Dimensions of Transnational Place-Making:

Legalizing Darwinist Cultural Policies Toward
Only-Possible Realities, Aesthetics, and Emotions
As a parallel force, cultural and social neoliberalism strives to organize
communities (and “others” who are, ostensibly, excluded from these com-
munities) into stratified matrices of power and agency, thereby situating
some demographics with specific privileges that ensure their dominance.
The myths of neoliberal cultural systems maintain that the material dif-
ferences between demographics, individuals, and subcommunities, are
legitimate because the underlying system which links them together meta-
phorically is based on a form of market-based competition. An overarching
myth embedded in the cultural systems promoted in the US political space
is that competition is an appropriate—and perhaps the optimal—method
to communicate and achieve outcomes in relations between individuals and
groups. This market rationality and its concomitant aesthetic, so central to
the somewhat counterintuitive union of democracy and capitalism, is also
unpacked in cultural and social arenas as a device of legitimation.
A neoliberal and supposedly free marketplace of culture, like a mythic free
economic market, is constructed on controls that make the competition only
unwinnable by specific demographics. While economic markets use tariffs,
embargoes, and other protectionist devices to maintain order and distort the
market so that capital be available only to specific interest groups, similar
instruments are used to organize cultural goods. For instance, artistic and
 Place-Making  43
literary tracts are often recognized as important if they win prizes, appear
as best-sellers, are made into films, critiqued by scholars, and so on, but
situating a piece of material cultural so that it may reach those supposedly
important feats is predicated on specific characteristics—characteristics like
the language of literature and film, which is, when not hyphenated, in all
cases English.
The broader outcome, though, is the promotion of the idea that if cultural
goods have “won” these contests, that they are appropriate, acceptable,
and, in a sense, representative of the will of the community from whence the
tracts emerge. Arlene Dávila has called this “the work that culture is asked
to do in neoliberal contexts,” a process is unpacked to construct “authen-
tic” national identity and is thus invested in “imperial legacies” (2012, 2–3).
Dávila’s deft work on this subject interprets “how neoliberalism impacts
cultural production,” specifically noting that materials are “objectified and
almost always hierarchically ordered” (2012, 4). These controlled (and
false) competitions and the supposedly free market cultural arena is deter-
minative of “who and what should be at the center or at the margin of
cultural initiatives” (2012, 1). In the US political space, the cultural struc-
tures function as modes to rehash the “salient racial hierarchies and social
disparities” (2012, 8).16
Similarly, Patricia Ventura has argued that neoliberal cultural interven-
tions strive to establish “a structure of feeling” (2012, 2). These canons
intend to impart a sentiment on those who are exposed to them, an emotion
that extends this competition or market ideal to all dimensions of life, and
as Ventura argues, these subjects (or “we,” as Ventura terms it) are manipu-
lated to “look to ourselves rather than the larger social-welfare structures or
society as the source of our success or the blame for our failure”; what may
be Ventura’s most salient reflection, the success/failure cultural dialectic itself
is determined “in market terms” (2012, 2).17 The political body unpacks its
cultural and financial resources to promote this market perception of social
reality, one that proliferates in many ostensibly non-governmental and
non-state agencies (some of which are discussed in Chapter 7). The intended
outcomes include behavioral prescriptions toward accumulation of material
and conspicuous consumption thereof, which are posited as transcendent,
primeval, and natural forms of human life and society. These concepts have
been codified in what Noam Chomsky called Adam Smith’s vile maxim:
“the spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self” (Chomsky 1996,
77). The conglomeration of social reproductions lead to, or endeavors to
produce, what Eva Cherniasky has called “neocitizenship,” a new form of
material-based self-perception (2009, 3).18
The stratified neoliberalized grouping is often termed as a form of “prog-
ress.” Grace Hong has argued that “progress” is often promoted as the
“most important explanatory paradigm” (2006, 3). While the US political
body has used forced migration, enslavement, segregation, and internment
as devices to control social order, the neoliberal progress myths strive to
44 Place-Making
legitimize the vast inequalities of the status quo. Cultural goods that cel-
ebrate and promote the interests of oppressors, argues Hong, reassert “the
primacy of the propertied subject” (2006, 7). This supposedly exceptional,
propertied subjects enjoy an “ability to exert will” and is, thus, are the only
“self-determining” demographic (2006, 3). The pretext of progress becomes
both a “material and social practice” and a way to make sense of the world’s
racism, violence, and inequality (2006, xii).19

Diversity: Toward Neomodern Hyphenization and

Demographic Criminalization
The social and cultural structures thus far discussed here posit any aesthetic
outside consumerism as ungrammatical, and they make culture an arena
where new geographies (iterations of the status quo) are made possible.
Diversity, for instance, is a form of cultural change or shift but effected
within constraints articulated by the dominant group. While the rise of non-
traditional demographics in mainstream cultural realms appears counter-
intuitive, perhaps a deconstruction or even destruction of the traditional
power spheres in favor of a more democratic and representative system,
the neoliberal frame has valorized and appropriated difference, and uses
these distinctions not toward empowering nontraditional demographies (or
gesturing toward equality) but to commodifying the image of the other as a
new, aestheticized good that can be present—even alongside—the dominant
sphere but only within the hyphens of hierarchy.
Patterning the differences into aestheticized goods is a form of social
control, as there is no cross-category (woman/man or Latin-American/
Unhyphenated-American, for instance) equality because of the imaginary
separateness of the groups. The distinctions are often expressed linguisti-
cally through hyphenation, which resonates as codified subservience; the
referent group (unhyphenated-American demographic) is situated such that
all others are codified as linguistic, social, and cultural inferiors. As a result
of these colonized notions of difference, there can be no common universal-
ity (a cross-group equality) among the separate and externally prescribed
demographies.
In this way, hyphens can be understood as predatory. As Snéha Khilay points
out, we do not hear British-Romanians, British-Irish, British-Portuguese, or
British-Australians: “Does this mean that dual identities are only applied
to people who are not white?” (2014, 1). Hyphenation is a form of neo-
liberal reasoning that praises hierarchies and celebrates codified inferiority
as a natural part of the ongoing mythic free-market cultural competition,
which has been “won” by the unhyphenated demographics, who are to be
understood as central cultural players even when those demographics are
local or regional minorities. Hyphenation is a form of external labeling that
applies the whims and interests of the dominant onto the subject. While the
terms or conditions of being are unclear and perpetually in flux, they can
 Place-Making  45
be—and often are—revised by the dominant group in real time, a process
that is always external to the subject being hyphenated: “the very decision
of hyphenation, of inclusion and exclusion, of identification or annihilation,
happens elsewhere. It is imposed and enforced from the outside” (Sheikh
2014, 13).

Cultural Appropriation, Social Death, and

Racialized Rightlessness
The cultural programs in the US political space also order demographies
into criminal and non: as Lisa Cacho observes, in the wake of Hurricane Ka-
trina, “criminal activity was unrecognizable without a black body. Without
a black body, the same action was interpreted as a (white) survival strategy”
(2012, 2). Cacho’s work evidences how class, presumed cultural demog-
raphy, gender and sexuality, race and legal status function as proxy val-
ues, pre-formed ways of understanding people within a stratified hierarchy:
“Human value,” notes Cacho, “is made intelligible through racialized, sexu-
alized, spatialized, and state-sanctioned violences” (2012, 4). The categories
are immutable and fixed; the legal measures that institutionalize these dif-
ferences are rely on the permanent criminalization of some demographics:

These permanently criminalized people are the groups to whom I refer as

ineligible for personhood—as populations subjected to laws but refused
the legal means to contest those laws as well as denied both the political
legitimacy and moral credibility necessary to question them. . . . Crimi-
nalization can operate through instituting laws that cannot be followed.
People subjected to laws based on their (il)legal status—“illegal aliens,”
“gang members,” “terrorist suspects”—are unable to comply with the
“rule of law” because U.S. law targets their being and their bodies, not
their behavior.
(Cacho 2012, 6)

While terms like freedom and equality abound in the cultural propaganda
of the neoliberal system, in practice many demographics “do not have the
option to be law abiding” (Cacho 2012, 8). Some of Cacho’s reflections
about the universality of a cultural system that strives to produce such con-
ditions are haunting: “we are all recruited often unwittingly and/or unwill-
ingly to devalue lives, life choices, and lifestyles because valuing them would
destabilize our own precarious claims to and uneasy desire for social value”
(2012, 27). This cauldron of hatred construction is the outcome of the cul-
tural engineering discussed here, and it has resulted in what Cacho and
others have termed the “Social Death” of hyphenated groups, the calculated
and intended outcome of the third and ongoing phase of Cultural Conquest.
In the case of the traditional non-controlling, voiceless and hyphenated
demographics, the US political body’s assertions about cultural activity and
46 Place-Making
appropriate ways of life have been an avenue of mimicry. Salient members
of traditionally non-controlling demographics resident in the US political
space have at times adhered to the prescribed articulations of the mentioned
forms of settler-belonging, a phenomenon that has, according to some
critics, augmented the dimensions of control. As Gregory Rodríguez has
pointed out, “culture can trump mere demography” (2010)—and the new
players of settler-power culture are not limited to those in any demographic;
traditionally excluded demographics “could aspire and acculturate to
the . . . norm and ideal—by gaining entrance to their schools primarily, but
also by joining their churches, appreciating their art forms and imbibing
their ideas, adopting their aesthetic” (2010). Rodríguez asserts that the Ivy
League schools represent the uppermost authority of these concepts and
that “Ivy League law schools [have] complete hegemony over the Supreme
Court. That only proves the point” (2010).20

Identity: A Bundle of Competencies and the Limits of

Universalizability
Despite the comprehensive application of the state’s prescriptive place-making
schemes throughout the claimed spaces in question, in general the repressed
demographics do not have a record of silent compliance with the imposed
norms. The oppression of Native Americans has been exceedingly severe, as
is summarized in a 1991 letter to the president of the United States:

Dear President Bush. Please send us your assistance in freeing our small
nation from occupation. This foreign force occupied our lands to steal
our rich resources. They used biological warfare and deceit, killing
thousands of elders, children and women in the process. As they over-
whelmed our land, they deposed our leaders and people of our own
government, and in its place, they installed governments systems that
today control our daily lives in many ways. As in your own words, the
occupation and overthrow of one small nation [. . .] is too many. Sin-
cerely, An American Indian.
(qtd in Zinn 1980, 627)

This plea is not unique; in December 2007, the Republic of Lakota21

declared independence (reassertion of sovereignty) from the United States,
citing that “the U.S. has denied all Native people their International Treaty
rights, Treaty lands and basic human rights of freedom and sovereignty”
(Declaration of Continued Independence 1974). Gary Garrison, of the
State Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, said the Lakota announcement
“doesn’t mean anything” and that the group might “end up like all the
other groups that have declared themselves independent—usually getting
arrested and being put in jail” (qtd. in Daly 2008, 1). The settler-idea of the
United States has been developed and iterated through the cultural systems
 Place-Making  47
thus far mentioned, especially at the governmental level, resulting in these
binary notions of communal rights. Garrison’s perception and assertions of
settler-dominance of the space is demonstrative of contemporary social cur-
rents taught in the classrooms, noted in the textbooks, and reiterated at a
colloquial level throughout much, though not all, of the geographic region.
While it is true that public schooling, monuments, and other governmental
imaging are not devoid of Native American themes,22 expulsion and eradi-
cation are portrayed as sentimental and nostalgic national rites of passage,
firmly planted in the providential rights of the affiliates of the US political
body—a myth reiterated through cultural, political, and economic spheres.23
While Massachusetts itself and many of its townships bear Native American
names, the descendants of the pre-Columbian Wampanoag and Nauset who
populated the region the previous millennia have been marginalized in the
last few centuries—more are in poverty than the rest of the population—and
since European invasions these tribes have been denied rights of construc-
tion and economic stimulation by the Massachusetts government, a body
which has never had a Native American representative (“Mashpee: Wam-
panoag” 2009; Viser 2008, 1–3). Centuries of land seizure and codifica-
tion of rights, laws, and cultural principles in the interest of colonizers has
resulted in Europeans (who had no entry visas from the Algonquian) colo-
nized, attempted to control and expel the earlier civilization, and invented
a settler-identity—and now their descendants claim perpetual rights to the
land itself and to govern the societies that live in them.24
The next chapters explore the aesthetic outcomes on concepts like beauty,
heroism, and morality, as expressed through material culture of individu-
als who have been ostensibly isolated within spaces that have been cultur-
ally engineered toward myths of the US political body. The use of cultural
expressions in literature and art, and other visual modes, from those who
ostensibly believe in or identify with the metropolitan myth is an important
space of cultural performance—and a close attention on how the works
have been institutionalized offers many avenues for extra-national and
extra-transnational readings.

Acknowledgments
Parts of this chapter were originally published as “Reflections on Social
Engineering and Settler-American Literature.” International Journal of Cul-
tural Studies 2012. Vol 15, Issue 4. 399–414.

Notes
1. Subtly and powerfully, the layout of the physical space insinuates that the domi-
nant culture is superior, acceptable, appropriate and perennial, and thus rel-
egates other conceptualizations of the same concepts to ungrammatical status.
These physical controls on space attempt to condition the structure of education,
48 Place-Making
media forums, leisure activities, spiritual rituals, ceremonies of death and birth,
family gatherings, of the peoples who reside in the space.
2. The design of the space itself is constructed to ensure the growth and expansion
in accordance with the myths of the dominant culture. The dominant culture
in conquered spaces is often not the culture of the majority of residents, so this
process is a central dimension of the appropriation of the space itself and the
culture of the communities who live in it. The place-making involves strategic
architecture, layout of roadways and public parks, and other spaces of leisure
and labor activity, in such a form that implements the tenets of the dominant
cultural myths and restricts cultural action that is outside the dominant group’s
prescriptions. It also provides “a perpetually renewable state of cultural inno-
cence” (Ross Chambers qtd. in Pease 2008, 5).
3. This has been the case in El Cenizo, Texas, a town which implemented Spanish
as the official language of municipal affairs.
4. While more recently, the narratives have been requestioned and in some cases
rejected, the institutions of education yet donned with the principle markers of
the system: language, holidays, and histories; a circumstance which concomi-
tantly dialecticizes antithesis approaches (subordinating them to the dominant
system) and muddles the rise of any new construction of community that relies
on nonsytemic bases. Moreover, the local boards of education around the US
political space, even in cities with diverse populations, are often constructed
through appointments that favored the dominant cultural system rather than
democratic representation (Goldman 2007, 155).
5. By 1800 more souls arrived to America from Africa than any other continent
(Slavery and the Making of America, 2004).
6. Native communities eventually (in 1924) received offers of US citizenship—an
invitation to be part of the collective—in exchange for assimilation. “Only a
Native who had come close to [. . .]‘civilized life’ by abandoning his own culture
could become an American citizen” (Hoxie et al. 2001, 315).
7. Moreover, with these new paradigms, the society appears organic, “more demo-
cratic, ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains
and bodies of the citizens” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 23).
8. Puerto Rico, for example, is subject to metropolitan cultural submission without
statehood status.
9. Some notable visual projections of this image include dozens of government
postage stamps; American Progress (1872) by John Gast; Western Course of
the Empire Takes its Way (1861) by Emanuel Leutze; and The Promised Land
(1850) by William Jewett. In music, this effort was manifest in Katherine Lee
Bates’s America the Beautiful (1910) and Streets of Laredo (anonymous; late
nineteenth century).
10. Paul Magnette and Katya Long observe that citizenship defines which residents
of the same space are to be “excluded from the civic body” (2005, 7).
11. In Mullen Hall Elementary School in Falmouth, Massachusetts, for instance,
Portuguese-speaking children in the 1980s were forbidden to use that language
on school grounds. The first student who used it in the school day was given a
ball; the ball then changed hands during the day when other students used Portu-
guese, and the student holding the ball at the end of the school day had to wash
the chalkboards. Many of the teachers maintaining this policy were Portuguese
or of Portuguese descent.
12. Matthew Wolf-Meyer has deftly illustrated the ways that nocturnal resting as
a bioprocess have been manipulated by scientists, pharmaceutical companies,
educators, lawmakers, among others, into the myth that eight hours of sleep at
night is a positive and natural way for humans to rest. His discussion, which has
 Place-Making  49
been influential in the coalescence of ideas in this book, organizes the “forms of
sleep that society produces” around their neoliberal dimensions. He posits that
capitalist structures endeavor to seize the biopower of specific waking hours
by normalizing an eight-hour night of sleep such that—like any cultural or lin-
guistic aberration from canonic prescriptions discussed here—any other natural
forms of resting are understood not as natural but as “disorders” in the US
political space and around the West more generally (2012a, xv).
13. These newcomers in the conquered spaces maintained a privileged situation (as
landowners and often bearers of political citizenship) and their art and litera-
ture, which is discussed in a later chapter, form a powerful complement to the
forced implementation of the cultural order designed by the US political body.
14. Immigrants to the US political space who are citizens of polygamous societies
(and are potentially in polygamous families) must renounce this practice in order
to be present in the United States.
15. Today the Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Forbes families enjoy extraordinary wealth,
a prosperity their ancestors acquired in part through use of slave labor to con-
struct railroads. The descendants of the laborers are also traceable and also
almost equally poor.
16. Dávila observes that these mechanisms are often structured around myths of
historical presence, progress, and cultural propietoriship (2012, 3).
17. Dávila, similarly, observes that the system strives to “reduce culture to economic
logics” (2012, 9).
18. This form of social stratification, as Wendy Brown enumerates, “involves extend-
ing and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action” and, in
doing so, “prescribes citizen-subject conduct” (2003, 7).
19. Lisa Lowe notes that “abstract citizens” who are ostensibly “formed by a unified
culture to participate in the political sphere, is precisely concerned to maintain a
national citizenry bound by race, language, and culture” (1996, 13.)
20. In a theoretical sense, approaches in the Transnational Turn in American Stud-
ies often attempt to contain these demographic and democratic incongruities of
agency, cultural control, and traditional state power, through pluralizing and/
or hyphenating the subgroup actors, an approach which ostensibly offers the
concept of some level of agency before the cultural myths of the US political
space. These are problematic, nonetheless, because of their embedded referent
to the culture of the US political body and what could be termed their pre-
scriptive sub-manifestations. As a hyphenated identity interpellates two or more
mythic systems, moreover, any such nomenclature assumes the critical respon-
sibility of assigned meaning, identity and myth, which are not always reflec-
tive of an individual’s realities. As the construct of identities and affiliations
are ephemeral, highly contextualized, and often take on the slippery slope of
assumed-demography-as-identity, when taken to a logical end, the presumptions
of such cultural affiliation with any group as a base lose traction before the mul-
tiplicity and diversity of personhood. Because of this facet of the human psyche,
critical models should reinvigorate around atomized individuals or new modes
of perceiving groups.
21. In Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.
22. Current US passports, for example, have eleven representations of settlers, four
landscapes, one Native American image, and one portrayal of outer space.
23. Massachusetts’s “Plimoth Plantation,” for example, has a European name; its
Native American exhibit is smaller, has fewer employees, and receives less mon-
etary expenditure than settler reenactments.
24. It is important to note that while the definitions reduce to and are manipu-
lated into rigid categories like “national” and “foreigner,” individuals are not
50 Place-Making
communitively restrictive per parameters of the national prescription—although
we are inundated with propaganda indicating that they are. Despite continual
obligatory exposure to the regulatory labels of “nationality”/collectivity through
the multiple linguistic, cultural, political and educational constructs, people from
distinct geographic regions and/or linguistic, economic, and social backgrounds
do not generally differentiate between “other” and “us.” The scale is not an
organic component of humanity but a construct; social grouping tends to be
much more localized than how groups have been codified in modernity. In conse-
quence, because collective identities are mutually exclusive, they often neglect to
describe the predisposition of humans to fraternize with whomever we happen
to cohabitate—regardless of religion, language, race, and the other paradigms
of identity. Instead, the collectivity prescribes specific norms, controlled through
canons of communication.

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Chomsky, Noam. 1992. “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.”
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Dávila, Arlene. 2012. Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neolib-
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3 Literature as a Device of Cultural
Appropriation

Literary texts have a unique capacity to create tradition. Narratives often

assign meaning to places—and, sometimes, to the cultures of the commu-
nities who reside in those spaces. In a sense, a place can become a charac-
ter in a literary text, one who grows, changes, and participates in the plot
development. National literature (and concomitantly transnational canons
and criticisms) often structure meaning as a function of symbolic meanings
embedded in the physical landscape where events take place. This chapter
interprets how the codification of certain cultural ideas through literature
and literary studies has been (and continues to be) a mode of cultural appro-
priation in the US political space—and poses some inquiries with respect to
the limits of literary texts and studies thereof as institutionalized transmit-
ters of cultural value. The analysis examines some of the ostensibly unifying
characteristics of the texts that have been promoted as representative of
the communities resident in spaces claimed by the political body (i.e., the
unhyphenated-American canon) and discerns some of the outcomes of the
use of the term American, including its hyphenations and subgroups, as a
dialectic center to describe literature and the individuals who produce it.
The creation of national and transnational literary traditions by scholars
and academics collectivizes works and authors into groups, labeling cer-
tain aesthetic tendencies as characteristic (and others, not-characteristic, or
characteristic in a subordinate, hybrid sense) of a community at large. The
naming of a text or author as representative of a culture is generally based
on the concept that a literary text or literary canon can offer an “ ‘image’
or an ‘expression’ of the culture from which it emerges” (Ryan 1991, 17).
When novels and poetry, and other forms of emotional narrative, are pro-
moted and endorsed as a literature of a community, the texts are detached in
a sense from an individual existence: they maintain significance in compari-
son to other texts and the notion of group unity. While authors and literary
scholars in general ostensibly exist as independent from the prescriptions of
the transnational state, its intelligentsia, and its imperial cultural interests,
the characteristics of the supposedly representative literary texts, and the
related subhyphenated canons, generally follow the same model as other
cultural disciplines: we find the same fetishizations, demographies, and
 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation  53
aesthetics celebrated and deceptively portrayed as representative, a verity
which minoritizes other literature and imbeds them in the dominant cultural
discourses.
Antonio Gramsci has called members of the intelligentsia (those who con-
struct cultural canons) as “experts in legitimation” (qtd. in Lipsitz 2001,
271). Noam Chomsky has also argued that teachers, academics, journalists,
and others from educated sectors of society often enable the community at
large to be inculcated into the ideological program by using their scholarly
arenas to encourage appropriate cultural myths (1973). Literature and lit-
erary canons are important objects in this power dissemination, as literary
canons offer aesthetic and apparently creative dimensions to the myths that
sanction how places and the communities in them are to be understood.
(The notion that authors selected for canonization work autonomously,
ostensibly free from external cultural control, only rehashes the value of
their texts in the transmission of dominant discourses.) While the nation
and its transnational dialectics are a bundle of political, social and eco-
nomic competencies, the institutionalization of cultural ideas as expressed
in a literary canon is particularly influential, as the aesthetic organization
transcends the objects themselves and allows the ideas expressed therein to
function as identity markers.

Use of Literature to Monumentalize Places and

Ideas: Codifying Literary Tracts in Accordance
with Broader Narratives
Many of the most-celebrated (tradition-laden) works of Western epistolary
culture—from the Homeric epics to the precision verse of Angelou—stem
from a much older tradition of oral performance, one that combined rhyth-
mic delivery with the musical inflections of tone and timber. Many of the
most powerful, and therefore most communicative, examples of textual
composition are both thematically potent and emotionally arresting; the
arrangement and sound of words alongside one another can capture and
maintain the attention of the listener (or reader), making literary arenas
an important medium for sharing of ideas. The canonic texts tend to enjoy
both (sensory and thematic) realms of aesthetic distinction, though it is the
themes of the works selected and promoted into the canon that are of para-
mount importance here.
Like the city-planning schemes, literature that has been institutionalized
and endorsed around the political space as representative (i.e., unhyphen-
ated) function as an auxiliary form of state soft power, striving to construct
and reinvent the supposed cultural order of the promoted reality. The US
political body and its cultural interests as expressed in the literary con-
struct are invested in the concept that the presence of select non–Native
American peoples (often European or of European descent, and their lan-
guages, religious traditions, and cultural tendencies) is generally a positive
54  Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation
phenomenon in the spaces claimed by the US political body; moreover, the
people and cultures who are outside the delimitations as articulated in the
dominant literature are imagined and prescribed as “foreign,” alien, or
otherwise understood as non-community members and therefore are to be
hyphenated or categorized as another subservient position. In this sense, the
canon monumentalizes and codifies certain ideas—ideas that often func-
tion in close parallel to the political body’s more direct cultural and social
interventions.
The link between literary texts and ideology is important consider:
institutionalized unhyphenated-American literature generally fetishize the
presence of European language, a Christian religious system, and a heter-
opatriarchical form of life; some characters in this canon appear to per-
form identity in relation to myths expressed by the US political body in the
spaces it claims and sometimes outside of it.1 The colonial and imperialist
nature of supposed US monoculture and monoliterature has been nuanced
somewhat in recent decades, and the move toward multicultural, ostensibly
representative texts in the forums of cultural inquiry, pedagogy, and canon-
ization has opened some enriching new exposés on the groups in contact
with the cultural canons of the US political body, yet, because of the inces-
santly stressed relational ties to the dominant discourse (often expressed as
a hyphenated version of the “central” literature and cultural expressions)
these advances in some ways reiterate the discourses that they intend to
elude. As the imaginary nature of these “relational ties,” which are often
constructed by critics, very rarely comes into focus, the dialectical methods
in which the texts and authors are grouped pushes the non-myth-supporting
literary tracts into “other” labels and, thus, subordinates them in relation to
unhyphenated material.
The ostensible intersection between the political affairs of the imperial
government and the themes embedded in literature and literary studies has
received significant critical attention in recent years. John Carlos Rowe’s
“Reading Reading Lolita In Tehran in Idaho,” for instance, underscores
how Azar Nafisi’s memoir deploys political themes under the guise of cul-
tural inquiry. Rowe criticizes the tendency for literary tracts to be unpacked
as “neo-liberal rhetoric . . . by neo-conservatives” and feels that “the impor-
tance they have placed on cultural issues” is generally external to the texts
(2007, 122). Rowe understands Nafisi’s text as measured and calculated to
“build the cultural and political case against diplomatic negotiations with
the present government of Iran” (2007, 127). He goes on to outline the
not-so-subtle ways that Nafisi allows (or perhaps encourages) the discussion
of literary texts as political fodder in scholarly settings, permitting “only the
most dogmatic rants in her classroom trial, noting explicitly how little they
cared to read the novel, enjoying instead their own tendentious speeches
about religious or political proprieties” (2007, 170). Similarly, Hamid
Dabashi has described Nafisi as a “native informer and colonial agent” and
goes on to locate her text as a document of US cultural imperialisms:
 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation  55
Azar Nafisi’s book is thus the locus classicus of the ideological fore-
grounding of the US imperial domination at home and abroad in
three simultaneous moves: (1) it banks on a collective amnesia of
historical facts surrounding successive US imperial moves for global
domination—for paramount in Reading Lolita in Tehran is a conspicu-
ous absence of the historical and a blatant whitewashing of the literary;
(2) it exemplifies the systematic abuse of legitimate causes (in this case
the unconscionable oppression of women living under Muslim laws)
for illegitimate purposes; and (3) through the instrumentality of English
literature, recycled and articulated by an “Oriental” woman who de-
liberately casts herself as a contemporary Scheherazade, it seeks to pro-
voke the darkest corners of the Euro-American Oriental fantasies and
thus neutralise competing sites of cultural resistance to the US imperial
designs both at home and abroad, while ipso facto denigrating the long
and noble struggle of women all over the colonised world to ascertain
their rights against both domestic patriarchy and colonial domination.
(2006)

The politics of literature and literary studies within the spaces claimed by
the US political body has also received critical scrutiny that is worthwhile
to note here. Jodi Melamed has argued that literature and literary studies
can be generative of presumptive truths that place residents of the spaces
claimed by the political body into a hierarchy, one that is racially moti-
vated and charged. In this sense, literature has been “recruited to provide
for everybody, in a manner noxious to none, the official story of racial dif-
ference within the emerging American project, the Cold War national mis-
sion” (2011, xi). Melamed singles out literary studies as central players in
instituting and disseminating situated meanings, arguing that they operate
as a social device “for consolidating official antiracisms” (2011, xviii) that
accord with US political body’s cultural prescriptions that support the ongo-
ing imperialism on the continent and its racist forms of neoliberal capi-
talism. “White Americans,” she notes, can use literature “to get to know
difference—to learn the supposed inside stories of people of color, to situate
themselves with racial difference” (2011, xvi). Melamed’s deft reflections
demarcate a challenge to the neoliberal, multicultural narratives of prog-
ress, and implicate the “antiracist” cultural interventions of the political
body (and the corporations and universities that support them)2 as agents
of legitimization that thus re-normalize racism. Cultural canons, like those
organized through presumptive and hierarchical geography-based literary
study, structure what Melamed terms “the whole truth of the matter” by
setting the horizons of being, possibility, and the logic of acceptable cul-
tural performance according to racist, sexist, and classist norms in the form
of eloquent and ostensibly antiracist public policy: these social programs
attempt to appropriate the groups in question and their cultural perfor-
mances, striving to construct what is to be understood as “the permissible
56  Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation
content” of a social and cultural order informed by inequality that is “to
be taken for granted” (2011, xvi). In this case, the content to be taken for
granted is the interpellation (or interpellated-status) with American modi-
fiers, which is misunderstood, misinterpreted, misapplied, and miscodified
as a self-evident and unquestionable relationship.3
Amid this perpetual externalized grouping process of creative tracts,
whether or not the authors themselves are able to reconcile their presumed
relationships vis-à-vis literary canons, the themes of their writing, and the
nature of the group to which they are externally interpellated (and subor-
dinated) is, nevertheless, in a sense inconsequential because of the nature
of this grouping mechanism: the texts are grouped and characterized by
third-party actors, generally the intelligentsia described by Gramsci and
Chomsky. The externality of literary criticism is sanctioned by categorizing
the critical studies as “nonfiction,” a label that claims what is reported in
such texts is indeed not fiction, and thus allows the material therein to be
presented as factual (and thus not interpretable) by the cultural soldiers of
the neoliberal intelligentsia.
Several transnational critical texts have attempted to circumvent the
national myth as a center of discourse; however, such efforts are often sub-
ject to the same flaws and untenable critical theses. For instance, The Multi-
lingual Anthology of American Literature, edited by Marc Shell and Werner
Sollors and first published in 2000, ostensibly intends to democratize the
literature of the residents of the US political space—but the collection suf-
fers from many of the inherent problems with using transnationalized myths
as critical discourse. Despite being comprised almost entirely of monolin-
gual writing, the texts of the volume were all written in “languages other
than English”—a circumstance that relegates the tongues represented in the
volume to a modified, subaltern status. Aside from its privileged location
in the colonial discourse, it is unclear why texts in English are absent from
the volume. Is English not one of the languages of the US political space?
The nomenclature and the composition of the volume place the languages
present in the US political space into a reciprocal comparison to English;
underscoring this subservience, all the texts in the collection are translated
into English—not into Wampanoag, Spanish, Spanglish, Telugu, German,
Vietnamese, French, Navajo, or any other of the many dominant tongues
that coexist in the US political space.
Using presumed cultural groups and the supposed literature of those
groups as an axis of imaginary community creates these problems: the
treatments are placed into a comparative supra-relation to other imaginary
groups, a circumstance which immerses any text into a circular correla-
tion to broader structural myths. These supposedly postcolonial studies
of literature in the US political space may attempt to distance themselves
from the heteropatriarchal and Europeanized, settler-American canon, but
because their definitions are judged only in opposition or in a hybrid nature
to that mythos, the readings and constant interpellation of them to the
 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation  57
“American” modifier allows them to exist only in mutuality. In this way
transnational, worlded, temporalized, and other interpretations (and stud-
ies thereof) may be understood as social practices involved in determining,
or attempting to determine, the ideological conditions of the cultures in
a space.4 While the literary tracts of the canon are apparently composed
in isolation, independently from the US political body’s cultural prescrip-
tions, because of the myopia of the transnational grouping mechanism, any
distinguishing qualities may be characterized only as a dialectical relation
to the text’s (externally categorized) group—unless and until the grouping
mechanism (that is the national and transnational assumptions) is modified
or abandoned.

American: “One Word Is Still There, Still Holding Court”

(Dimock 2001, 255)
Abandoning the concept of “American,” or of cultural groups in general,
has been largely rejected by scholars who study the cultures of residents
in spaces claimed by the US political body.5 Because of these critical and
interpretative limits, whether or not an author can or does distance her or
himself from the ideology of surroundings, as Althusser and Balibar have
claimed, is, in many senses, immaterial, as once the work itself is institu-
tionalized into a body of supposed cultural values (as in the case of the
“multi”lingual anthology), it is concomitantly judged in a dialectic relation
to those standards (Althusser and Balibar 1968). Whatever the intention
or nature of a text when it is composed, the moment it is codified as an
institutional artifact (taught, studied, prized, listed among texts or authors,
or otherwise grouped) it manifestly functions as transmitter of the domi-
nant discourses (its antithesis, or a hybrid synthesis thereof). In this way,
the anesthetized nature of literary canonization, anthologization, or other
inquiry drawn from a relation to a cultural group (even when the model is
worlded, hybridized, temporalized, transnationalized, and so on) implicitly
removes potential aesthetics or philosophical novelty, relegating the con-
cepts to their structural dialectics of the canon’s ideology.
While the existence of these ironies has had significant traction, they have
been largely ignored among many literary scholars who study texts com-
posed by residents of the US political space, at least in a linguistic sense:
the scholarly tendency is to allow the colonial cultural discourse of the
political body to proceed unabated through transnationalizing, globalizing,
planetizing, temporalizing, worlding, or hybridizing the “American” myth
base.6 Despite the serious theoretical failings of the rationalizing term [trans/
hyphenated-] American to describe the literature of residents in spaces
claimed by the political body, there is little traction given to studies that
offer critical shifts that would gesture toward another dimension of inquiry
with other outcomes. Some have rejected outright that anything other than
“American” myths should form the base of study.
58  Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation
“American literature,” writes Wai Chee Dimock, “does stand to be clas-
sified apart, as a nameable and adducible unit” (2006, 4). While Dimock’s
work on “deep time” deftly demonstrates ways that literary tracts can vio-
late state-claimed cultural mores, her work is closely wedded to the myth
that geography of residence determines aesthetics. She comments that
“[p]hysical space, in this paradigm, is endlessly reinscribed in other spheres
of life: it becomes a political entity, an economic entity, a cultural entity”
(2001, 755). That geography produces the nature of cultural entities is the
slippery theoretical position that Dimock unpacks to levy a defense of the
container “American,” which she describes as “a set of attributes based on
the territorial, determined by it. All of these are its replica; all warrant the
use of the adjective American” (2001, 755). In a sense, such prescriptive
readings function as a case study of the failures of territorial-based cultural
study: that identity could be determined by surroundings is in many senses
refuted by studies in social psychology and neuroaesthetics, which locate the
emotions, sentiments of selfhood, community, and aesthetics—precisely the
components that the term American presumes are uniform—as significantly
more plastic and relative than the static nature of a predetermined platform.
It is important to note here that while Dimock endorses “American” as
an adjective, she does so in the traditional disciplinary sense, perceiving
the term as a limiting noun modifier in a permanent rather than temporal
or circumstantial sense; she goes on to explain why she feels the linguistic
container is of such importance: “the adjective American can serve as liter-
ary description. Using it, we assume, with or without explicit acknowledg-
ment, that literature is an effect, an epiphenomenon, of the US, territorially
predicated and territorially describable” (2001, 755). American Studies as
a field, Dimock goes on,

is largely founded on this fateful adjective. This governs the domain of

inquiry we construct, the range of questions we entertain, the kind of
evidence we take as significant. The very professionalism of the field
rests on the integrity and the legitimacy of this founding concept.
(2001, 755)

As this “founding concept” is destabilized when contextualized with how

identity and culture are manifest in the mind, such linguistic conventions
call out for revision. And Dimock herself has revised, acknowledging it
should be “domain-specific, binding only at one register” (2007, 4), but
amid these new specificities, the term—even when worlded, hyphenated,
hybridized, temporalized, and domain-specific—yet relies on a register
predicated upon the presumption that geography of residence is a cultural
proxy, or even a determinant. “Nationalistic, indeed imperialistic, arro-
gance is Dimock’s bête noire,” argues Justin Quinn. Her work, he con-
tinues, “ultimately, displays the provinciality of American literary studies
within the US” (2009, 1).
 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation  59
The naming issue has been raised by other scholars. Judith Radway,
for instance, has mused if scholars should “consider renaming [the field]
in order to prevent this imaginary unity from asserting itself in the end,
again and again, as a form of containment” (1998, 2–3)? Her reflections
acknowledge that a new nomenclature and center of inquiry might “renew
the field by pushing scholars to reconceptualize its proper object” and spur
“questions about culture for which they do not already have the answers,”
but, she concludes, “in the end, the name ‘American studies’ will have to
be retained.” She believes that the field should perceive the groups not as
subordinate-dominant but, in a separate-but-(supposedly)-equal approach,
as “intricate interdependencies.”7

Revisiting Unhyphenated-American Literature

An important outcome of canonizing certain literary ideals under the
“American” concept is to codify the nature of the people, language, and
action in all literary work composed by those who are supposedly influ-
enced by the cultural norms promoted by the US political body, in relation
to a dominant—or at least institutionalized as dominant—aesthetic. The
fetishized ideas create (or attempt to create) a proprietary nostalgia linked
to those concepts; a secondary intention in the unhyphenated canon is to
present the authors and their protagonists as representative of the cultural
landscape. This process uses ideas embedded in literary texts to codify the
presence of certain languages, political citizenships, and so on in attempts
to collectivize resident peoples; the functioning myth is that such ideas are
existent (if not natural), established, and positive dimensions of the soci-
ety, thus reproducing a supposedly historic image that serves the dominant
discourse.
The publication and dissemination of literature (and, tangentially, the
study of literature) within boundaries of such collective-identity assump-
tions invariably focuses public attention on the opinions of a small num-
ber of authors, publishers, reviewers, and critics. The [trans/hyphenated-]
American author, whatever be their demographic, might be understood, in
this sense, as a man or woman who has been, ostensibly, influence by the
cultural canons promoted in the US political space and, according to the
critical prescriptions, employs those sensory dimensions (or a relational dia-
lectic thereof) as an aesthetic or interpretative device.
In this way, much of [trans/hyphenated-] American Literary studies con-
cerns examining texts as thought they were composed in relation, rebellion,
or reciprocity to such a canon; it is also a targeted, demographic-specific
form of study. Many works of literature have been systematically excluded
from the unhyphenated canon (and thus its discourse of values) concerning
the representative societies resident in spaces claimed by the US political
body because of the demography of the author, the use of a language or lan-
guages other than English, aberrance from Christian and heteropatriarchal
60  Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation
values, or other characteristics prescribed as external to the aesthetics pro-
moted by the US political body.
This exclusion has also occurred in the case of many works written in
English, such as that of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, whose novels con-
cerning nineteenth-century California have recently been recognized by
critics (though not as relevant to the supposedly representative, unhyphen-
ated canon, which is not possible because of her demography canon). Ruiz
de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It (1872) is a cutting satire of US
political discourses, employing jestful surnames like Cackles and Hackwell
for characters who demonstrate the nonsense of US political claims when
weighed against the reality of their action. The characters are driven by
greed, self-interest, and misrepresentation, and the plot allegories mock the
absurdity of Manifest Destiny and the cultural dispossession that accompa-
nies the US political claims.
Even in revisionist age that is ostensibly moving toward representative
egalitarianism, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s work (unless the present
national/transnational system is wholly abandoned) cannot displace present
canonical texts or be understood in schools and universities as representa-
tive of the peoples of the US political space as a whole (i.e., it cannot be read
as unhyphenated-American literature) because of the themes in her fiction,
her native language, and demographic background—the structural exclu-
sions embedded in the transnational myths reiterate with exacting precision
the colonial and exceptional terms of unhyphenated-American value and its
toxic transnational hierarchies.

Cultural Appropriation through Literature: Land,

Movement, Language
While male authors and literary characters who apparently speak English
and seem to be Christian monogamists are enormously overrepresented in
the unhyphenated canon,8 women ostensibly from the same demographics
(save gender) also have a very important role. One such example of the
promotion of specific literary aesthetics in literary studies and canonization
is the work of Willa Cather. Cather was born in Virginia and spent a sig-
nificant period of her youth in Red Cloud, Nebraska—the latter township
was her inspiration for several novels, including My Ántonia. Much of her
work hinges on the presence of affiliates of the US political body in recently
conquered spaces, like nineteenth-century Nebraska, and the details of life
for colonists during the initial phases of the new cultural empire (the early
stages of Phase III of the Cultural Conquest). The myth that there were
no peoples, communities, or cultures in the conquered lands is one that is
oft-repeated in this strand of writing,9 as the wagon arrives in the plains in
My Ántonia:

There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out
of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land—slightly
 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation  61
undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake
as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.
I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the
edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction.
(1918, 7)

The narrative begins in 1880. Native Americans are conspicuously absent, a

literary reflection which would have contradicted Cather’s own experience
as a settler. Native American cultures thrived in that area in her youth in the
late nineteenth century as they do now, but she employs this creative license
(analogous to using Muslims rather than Basques as the enemy in “Song of
Roland”), an aesthetic that at once dehistoricizes the text and alludes to the
reality that Cather was writing for an audience, mainly on the east coast,
who was ignorant of the setting. The conceptualization of the waggoneers
as “outside man’s jurisdiction” is also a political and literary fantasy, as
the area had been invaded repeatedly by the US military in the years lead-
ing up to 1880, including during the First Sioux and Great Sioux Wars
(1855, 1876), Colorado War (1865), Cheyenne War (1864), and Pawnee
War (1859). These invasions allowed the US political body to annex the
space and found the several dozen permanent forts (and later, fort cities) in
the area to encourage the martial law that would facilitate their creation of
the jurisdiction necessary for colonial settlement. The waggoneers and this
literary treatment of them were a part of the symbolic violence manifested
in the form of new histories, languages, and cultures, which arrived after the
explorers and the military, as the third phase—cultural soldiers, like Cather,
whose work strives to transition the image of the invading peoples from
“foreign” to “natural” in the spaces.
Cather was also writing to construct an impression of a region claimed
by the US body for people who would never experience it: this text spoke
to East Coast readers of a far-off land few would ever see, and the events
of the narrative (fictionalized and nonhistoric as they are) fetishized that
the societies resident in that place fall under the cultural myths that the US
political body has articulated. Žižek claims that adhering to the rules of
the dominant group in such a nonsensical and irrational (but significantly
non-satirical) way can be a libidinal pleasure: the rules can be understood
as their own source of enjoyment (2000)—and in this case, a deceitful liter-
ary account that denigrates Native Americans by imagining their absence,
enables Cather to engage the emotion embedded in her support of the cul-
tural norms of the US political body.10
Cather also differentiates between the settlers, using the term foreigners
to allude to those whom she perceives as culturally separate from the US
myths. Upon Mr. Shimerda’s death, for example, the Norwegian cemetery
disallows his burial, which is met with “If these foreigners are so clannish,
Mr. Bushy, we’ll have to have an American graveyard that will become
more liberal-minded” (1918, 73). Cather’s “American” characters were
also foreigners in that place, and such a use of language is not unlike more
62  Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation
contemporary US assertions about the war in Iraq, when it was proclaimed
that “foreign” fighters were a problem for maintaining order; as the vast
majority of foreigners were members of the armed forces of the US govern-
ment, the verbiage and its inherent irony were eventually abandoned (Fisk
2003).11
Much of the ostensibly nonfictional literary study of Cather’s work reit-
erates similar perspectives about the settings of the texts, the communities
that reside therein, and the celebrative notions about the presence of the
cultural constructions of the US political body. Moreover, some ostensibly
nonfictional critical texts that appeared in the twenty-first century also cel-
ebrate the imperial nature of Cather’s work. For instance, Kathleen Norris
published this leadup to the American Masters series on PBS about Cather’s
work that appeared in 2005:

Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is about the hardy people who risked their
lives and fortunes in a harsh new land; Cather had the great good for-
tune to have lived among the first generation of white settlers in 1880s
Nebraska, and she gives witness to their time and place in such a way
that American literature will never forget them.

Aside from a Pulitzer Prize and the institutionalization of Cather’s texts

and such interpretations of them, the “Willa Cather Historic District” is
the largest area monument dedicated to an author on the National Register
of Historic Places. This celebration (and historicization) of Cather’s work
and image complements how the US political body has codified the space:
of the thirty-six sites on the National Historic Register in Webster County,
Nebraska, one relates to Native American cultures.

Space, Rights, and Movement West

In the unhyphenated literary canon, the treatment of a region can change
drastically within a short period.12 For instance, Rip Van Winkle sleeps for
two decades and, upon rising from the deep slumber, finds a cultural and so-
ciopolitical map that had changed drastically: his region (the Catskills) had
the same physical landscape, but his friends had left, George III had transi-
tioned from protective king to enemy, and his wife—who symbolizes coun-
try and nation—was dead. In this vein of the unhyphenated canon, the land
itself is not sacred, and Native American civilizations are disregarded and
misunderstood by invading groups.13 This shift in cultural landscape
and social proprietorship of the land itself also informs James Fenimore
Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales; the continental space that had been “wil-
derness” becomes “civilization” through Cooper’s series. When interpreted
sequentially, the texts demonstrate the cultural message of each phase of
the US political body’s Cultural Conquest; two novels concern Phase I: The
Deerslayer (1744) involves “explorers” who encounter hunting grounds
(among other resources) in the space, and, likewise, The Pathfinder (1750s)
 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation  63
celebrates the “American Adam” or feral affiliate of US political myths in the
soon-to-be militarized space. A sole novel, The Last of the Mohicans (1757),
concerns Phase II of the Conquest, describing the military invasion of Na-
tive American regions and their expulsion by force. Two treatments concern
Phase III of the Conquest: The Pioneers (1793) celebrates early stages of the
third stage, the presence of affiliates of the US political body in recently con-
quered spaces, and newly annexed spaces, and, finally, The Prairie (1804),
offers a glimpse of an advanced stage of Phase III, in which laws and cultural
mores of invading peoples have been normalized. The arc of Cultural Con-
quest is exemplified by the relationship between Judge Temple and Leath-
erstocking in this novel. Leatherstocking is arrested when he slayed a deer,
a scene that organizes the space as a controlled, pacified, and domesticated
space that is controlled by the law of the invading people and, thus, offers a
rounded, anesthetized way to understand the genocidal encounter.
Together with the social transformation that the imperial body intends
to enact through the process of cultural initiatives, movement—to the west,
especially—through regions claimed by the US political body is also a founda-
tional component of the unhyphenated-American experience when portrayed
through literature. Starting with migration to the continent, followed by west-
ward movement across it, the literature promoted by the US political body
imagines the space as the perennial native realm of the settlers and their affili-
ates, often without clarification of the cultural appropriation of the area. The
characters who perceive themselves to be affiliates of the political body pre-
sume rights of presence, action, and habitation in the space. The characters in
works by Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, and Cormac McCarthy, among many
others, use the motion west (and sometimes east) of unhyphenated-American
protagonists as a principal means to develop character.14 The cultural annex-
ation of space demonstrated by movement through it allows the space to be
presented as a static, undifferentiated and uniform area.
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, a central text in the unhyphenated
canon, celebrates the claims of the political body, with particular attention
to the notion of “sivilization” that the Cultural Conquest supposedly brings
to the conquered communities. Huck’s use of English, and his final desire to
flee west into Indian Territory, apparently to control it or bring his sup-
posedly unhyphenated-American culture to it, restates myths of invaders’
“rights” with some associated references to the fictions of social Darwin-
ism. Moreover, Jim’s ultimate recapture and Huck’s intention to go west,
crystalizes their social positions (which are linked to demography), locating
the narrative decisively within the scope of the cultural fictions expressed
by the US political body. These concepts are important to later works in the
unhyphenated canon, as Ernest Hemingway asserts in Green Hills of Africa
(1935), “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark
Twain called Huckleberry Finn” (22).
Movement west as a trope is repeated frequently in the unhyphenated
canon, even in the case of protagonists who are on the margins of demo-
graphic membership in the colonizing society. In Jack Kerouac’s On the
64  Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation
Road (1957), protagonist Sal Paradise is a character of immigrant descent
(Italian)—and of steadfast dedication to the idea of the US political
body. The text is a thinly veiled autobiography, yet Kerouac was the son
of working-class immigrants from Quebec. “Feeling himself on the mar-
gins of society,” asserts Ann Charters, “Kerouac stripped himself of his
French-Canadian ancestry [if we read On the Road as autobiographical] to
make himself more American” (qtd. in Kerouac 1957, xxi). For Charters,
the novel itself is “the story of his own search for a place as an outsider
in America” (qtd. in Kerouac 1957, xx). This text, then, might be read as
an exercise in cultural mimicry, in particular if we focus on Kerouac’s use
of language, which he learned English at age six and spoke with a marked
accent into his late teens. In this other works, Kerouac employed a literary
technique that he called “spontaneous prose.” This writing practice involves
“the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained”
(Kerouac qtd. in Ramazani 1994, 251). This overuse of language saturates
and elongates clauses, thus hyper-identifying Kerouac with the sociocultural
underpinnings of the other—in this case, colonizing—language structure.
Charters also remarks that Paradise strives for the “American dream by
trying to pin down its promise of unlimited freedom” (qtd. in Kerouac 1957,
xxi). This freedom is embodied precisely by exercising an effervescent writ-
ing technique in the language appointed as appropriate by the US political
body, but it is also displayed through unbounded character movement from
place to place within the spaces claimed by the political body (and in the
concluding stages of the journey, Mexico). The constant motion and glori-
fication of these constructs of the unhyphenated-America experience indeed
drive the novel, and we might understand the Americanization (in an unhy-
phenated sense) of Kerouac, achieved through Paradise, as a multimodal
process; publishing the work in the language promoted by US political body
(English)—and a garrulous use of it—together with the exaggeration of a
settler-custom (movement west) are chief concerns. The latter, according to
Paradise, is embodied by “the road—the soul of the Beatific” (1957, 161).
Thus, the mechanism which grants Paradise/Kerouac entry into the social
group—the roadway—becomes an aesthetic delight. Coming to terms with
Kerouac’s personal dimensions of immigrant status through exaggeration of
settler-American rituals is indeed a captivating characteristic of this novel,
one that has raised the standing of the work to a near-canonical position in
settler-American literature.

Hemingway’s Michigan
Ernest Hemingway’s work, particularly his early texts which are set in
spaces claimed by the US political body, also demonstrate the tropes thus
far mentioned here. His portrayals of Michigan, for instance, have many
similarities to the Nebraska of My Ántonia, though they are situated from a
slightly later period in Phase III of the Cultural Conquest. The Hemingway
 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation  65
family purchased a cottage—Windemere—in northern Michigan, where
they would spend summers when Ernest was a boy. The Michigan narrative
in Hemingway’s life and writing exists as a countrified, stable environment
where affiliates of the US political body may enter into a space that had been
recently conquered by the US military—and was immersed in the process of
cultural conquest—in order to engage in leisure pursuits. The Hemingways’
simulations of rural life at the cabin involved Ernest dressing up as Huckle-
berry Finn and learning to fish and hunt; the family photographs of him en-
gaging in these activities were taken precisely because he is playacting roles
that interpellated him with the cultural programs that occurred subsequent
to the military invasions and political claims to the space.
Being in the colonized space and repeating the settler or pioneer/colonizer
conquest of it (in the form of an aesthetic ceremony) had become an impor-
tant ritual for many affiliates of the US political body by 1900. While the
Hemingways performed nostalgic cultural rites around Windemere, Presi-
dent Roosevelt was taking trips west, playing dress-up in ridiculous cowboy
and Leatherstocking costumes. As innocuous as the costumes and playact-
ing appear, settler- and unhyphenated-American activities, and the eventual
literary pieces that treat them, are part of a broader narrative that, accord-
ing to Bill Brown, “aestheticizes the genocidal foundation of the nation,
turning conquest into a literary enterprise that screens out other violent
episodes in the nation’s history” (1997, 85).
The region and its cultural context played a central role in Heming-
way’s vacations and in later writing that stemmed from them. The area of
Michigan itself—sacred to several Native American tribes—was politically
appropriated by the US through the Treaties of Saginaw (1820) and Chicago
(1833), which forced Native Americans to relinquish claims to the space.
The pioneer activities carried out by citizens of the political body reenact
the settlement of the area and are part of the cultural appropriation of the
region subsequent to the political annexation. In Hemingway’s boyhood,
these settler-rituals underscored the myth that the presence of US citizens in
that space is generally a positive phenomenon (the Native Americans who
cohabited the area were not US citizens until 1925, after Hemingway left
Michigan for the last time). While Windemere was “an Eden-like retreat,”
as Frederick Svoboda points out, “nearby were destitute Indians, once lords
of the woods, now living in an abandoned lumber camp” (qtd. in Hendrick-
son 2012, 377).
The repeated rites and ceremonies of newcomers to Michigan—like the
Hemingways—created a proprietary nostalgia for the place and its nature;
these rituals imbued a new sacrosanctity to the region, this time on behalf of
the settler-Americans and their perceived community. In the same way that
Native American histories, heroic events, and cultural myths were repeated
ceremonially in the same space, over time the newcomers’ rites became tra-
ditional to them—and they were (and continue to be), thus, a powerful fea-
ture of cultural appropriation process that intended to transition the space,
66  Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation
in a very short span, from a “foreign” one into the cultural geography of
the US political metropolitan. The young affiliates of the political body, like
Ernest Hemingway, existed (and yet exist) in a reality that was controlled
and proscribed in such a way that these concepts of cultural proprietorship
of Upper Michigan itself were firmly wedded to the newcomers—and that
situated reality is portrayed as self-evident and uninterpretable.
In this sense Hemingway’s short story “Summer People” is similar to
many literary tracts that celebrate comparable ideas.15 Nick, the protagonist
of several Hemingway stories set up in Michigan including “Summer Peo-
ple,” is valuated on his dream to become “a great writer,” which is depen-
dent on his literacy (a skill to which many Native American residents of that
area had no access). Each summer “everybody” (a pronoun that excludes
Native Americans) shares a lavish existence that is measured through their
action and freedom (i.e., their “right”) to be in that space: in this way, the
newly annexed political space is where one may act out rituals that establish
their perceived social positions. Being in Michigan as a member of the US
political body is a symbol of power, and “everybody” in the text shares a
dimension of this status. Others are unimportant (and, at the time “Sum-
mer People” was composed, Native Americans had no voting rights and
were otherwise excluded from the civic body). Michigan in this sense is a
commodified backdrop that had been fetishized into an element of a leisure
pursuit (carried out in the language of the colonizer) that ultimately become
a series of traditions, which have as a foundation the cultural appropriation
of the space claimed by the US political body.
The cultural appropriation of a space through implementation of
non-local rituals, languages, symbols, holidays, ceremonies, and literature
is also an ongoing reality in places like Michigan that have been suppos-
edly controlled and thus appropriated as states; it is also the case in Puerto
Rico, a nation where many US cultural directives—such as a Thanksgiv-
ing Day celebration, the English language, and American flags—intersect
with a Latin American society. When I teach Hemingway at the University
of Puerto Rico, my students, particularly undergraduates, are often acutely
attuned to how such matters function in Nick Adams’s stories. “La ceremo-
nias tienen que ver con quién controla el lugar; y como consiguiente, quién
controla a quién” (the cultural ceremonies demonstrate who controls the
space, and as a corollary, who controls whom) was how Ingrid Millán-Ruiz
deftly described it. And thus, the ostensibly innocuous acts of certain peo-
ple celebrating Fourth of July, fishing or hunting or swimming while up in
nature in Michigan, or writing about those things from Paris, are dimen-
sions of broader narratives that involve nation-states, political rights and
citizenships, and the controls on and the spreading-out of cultures.16
The literary projections that parallel the cultural articulations of the US
political body have maintained principal locations in the unhyphenated
canon.17 While these cultural tracks may not be generally representative of
the localities or the communities at large, their institutionalization imbues
 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation  67
the narratives with a social power that sanctions and misrepresents the mes-
sages therein as symbolic of the culture as a whole. While the canons are
in constant flux, a near-universal standard is the presence of the English
language and various iterations of the aesthetics thus far developed here.
The institutionalization strives to relegate any other literature into “multi”
status.

The Fictions of Literary Canons and Criticism

The literary and cultural histories thus far described here are fictional. These
and other assertions of unity (or disunity) of “American Literature(s)”—or,
groups formed in dialectic relation to these canonic prescriptions—are con-
structed on close, circumstantial readings that are used as representative
touchstones for far-reaching myth sentiment (anti-myth, or hybrid action).
To assert that a writer is an unhyphenated-American in a cultural sense,
apparently supposes that he or she has been immersed in the canons and
place-making of the US political space, believes or identifies with them, and
performs those myths in material culture—but those are critical and episte-
mological leaps that hinge on selectively extrapolated ideas from texts that
were produced in a specific circumstance and for a specific audience.
The idea that Ernest Hemingway, for example, is best understood and
studied as an unhyphenated-American author is to generalize specific con-
cepts from textual or biographical glimpses. There are many instances when
Hemingway rejected or distanced himself from the cultural ascriptions so
often applied to him and his work: two decades after moving to Cuba, in
an interview in Spanish he said, “I consider myself Cuban . . . I sympa-
thize with the government and all our difficulties.” Hemingway empha-
sized “our” in that phrase—then kissed the Cuban flag, and remarked,
“I do not want them to consider me a Yankee” (qtd. in Herlihy 2011, 90).
While such citations—which are numerous, especially in Spanish—are of
paramount importance to Hemingway’s writing as well as biography, they
are very rarely cited because of the overwhelming critical bias that favors
the mythic unhyphenated-American Hemingway. Willa Cather, too, aban-
doned many of the literary settler-myths in her later life; she would occa-
sionally engage, as one critic described it, a “Native American voice” in
her literature (Swinehart 1992, 39). Many of the most salient protagonists
of unhyphenated-American cultural canons also fall short of the linguistic
myths if we use the English language as a measure: in fact, many writers
promoted in concert with the linguistic myths of the US political space were
not native/first-language speakers of English; such is the case of William
Carlos Williams (Spanish), Gertrude Stein (German), Saul Bellow (Yiddish),
Jack Kerouac (Joual), Anaïs Nin (French), and Ayn Rand (Russian), among
many others.
Such are the problems with using linguistic or cultural groups to catego-
rize individual texts and authors: using presumptive ties to the cultures of
68  Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation
the US political space as a register of inquiry demonstrates not only the slip-
pery nature of the ties but also the shortcomings of criticism that relies on
those suppositions. As Annette Kolodny notes, “we appropriate meaning
from a text . . . according the critical assumptions or predispositions (con-
scious or not) that we bring to it” (2001, 2145). In addition to Kolodny’s
deft reflections, the traditional literary model also strives to structure and
influence precisely what “we bring” by saturating metaphoric spaces with
myth, promoting specific aesthetics as representative and identificational,
and employing the authority of cultural prizes and public figures (such as
teachers) to conceive a specific sensibility about the texts and the communi-
ties they treat.

Unlinking the Authors from their Canons

Like much of Cather’s later work, in each of Hemingway’s novels and a
great deal of his short fiction, protagonists have profound social ties to
non-US communities; affiliations that, arguably, supersede their supposed
relationships with the US cultural canons and notions of community. Rather
than interpolate those particular circumstances, critics tend instead to rely
on terms like American or Mexican or Spanish or subhyphenations thereof
(each employed as separate entities), and thus concomitant categorical
placement of author and work into one construct or the other, or in several
at once, when at best texts and behavioral performances like writing are
mere glimpses that manifest only the specifics of situational matters.18 It is
a problem that spans not only how critics groups their terms—but it also
demarcates the inherent instability of the terms themselves. As Katy Masuga
has noted about so-called expat writers, often born in the US political space,
“[t]hey are not American. They are something else. And I won’t say some-
thing in between because that would encourage unnecessary and inaccurate
dualities” (2013).
An inner dilemma with the notion of “American” literature (and their
subhyphenations) is the reliance on group dynamics as a mode of inter-
pretation of individual texts. An individual is not intrinsically a member
of a cultural group, though she or he may—always on an ephemeral and
situational basis—assert or express sentiments of belonging and group iden-
tity; these feelings and their potential codifications in text, art, music, and
other material culture should be understood as reactionary and dependent
on the particulars of the author/artist’s surroundings. Literature, in this
sense, should be decoupled from these identity and cultural labeling limits,
as even those most comprehensive of transcultural characterizations have
restrictions that render many of their ultimate conclusions to a function of
particular contingencies. The use of literary texts as part of a broader narra-
tive concerning the role of people in space, as with place-making and other
appropriative measures, grants paramountcy to the community, rather than
 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation  69
to the individual. The atomization of literary studies and abandonment of
the “American” and other such prescriptions will open a new set of spaces
of inquiry, analyses that are not so dependent on supposition, imagined
affiliations, or identities.

Notes
1. The celebration or collective recognition of authors and/or texts that ostensibly
reiterate the myths function as a means to implement material as a part of satu-
ration of the space with the third phase of cultural conquest.
2. The nature of corporate marketing and the rise of the neoliberal university will
be discussed in later chapters.
3. These antiracist policies strive to legitimize enormously asymmetric material
conditions, which have direct negative outcomes (that are demographic-specific)
in poverty, life expectancy, literacy, and incarceration rates, among other prod-
ucts of the rise of the neoliberal state.
4. Though the editors may have had democratic and representative goals in mul-
ticulturizing the literature of the US, the nature of the publication underscores
some of the myths they attempt to nuance.
5. The final chapter of this book argues in favor of modifying this construct toward
age, rather than the constructs of traditional collectivity, as a form of addressing
the inequalities caused by the dialectic nature of the present cultural groups.
6. The terms American Literature and American Studies, and their subhyphena-
tions, dominate nomenclatures of academic programs and faculty appointments.
7. The perpetuation of conceptualizations such as “American” literature (and its
supposedly non-subordinate interdependencies) however, fails to address the
inherent inequalities embedded in the term American and the nature by which
cultural grouping itself applies presumptive associations and/or demographies to
criticism.
8. There are many other works of literature in many languages that have been his-
torically excluded from the canon because of distance from English, Christian,
and heteropatriarchal values.
9. This also occurs in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) “a new world,
material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air drifted
fortuitously about . . .” (162) and the Little House on the Prairie television
series.
10. Cather’s tone would change, however. Later in life her work spans and even
integrates Native American storytelling and art.
11.
These cultural materials function in close correspondence to many
nineteenth-century political initiatives, like the “Armed Occupation Act,” which
states that supposedly “unsettled” land that had been claimed by the US political
body (and was more than two miles from a military outpost) may be occupied by
male citizens who comply with the following: (1) obtain a permit from the Lands
Office, (2) not possess more than 160 acres when soliciting the permit, (3) he or
his heirs reside for five consecutive years on the allotted tract, (4) enclose and
cultivate five acres in the first year, (5) build a house in the first year (“A Century
of Lawmaking for a New Nation” 1875). Cather’s work may be understood as
a sub-canon in unhyphenated canon that concerns cultural imperial initiatives.
12. The physical spaces of the continent have an important role in many canonical
texts; the continental space is regularly engaged as a narrative element in which
literary characters, who are often colonizers, migrants or immigrants, settlers,
or other non–Native American peoples, are often portrayed as characteristic of
70  Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation
the culture of that space. Some of the literary institutions and prizes that support
this system include the following:

American Academy of Arts and Letters

Pulitzer Prize (Fiction, Drama and Poetry, as well as various non-fiction and
journalist categories)
National Book Award (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry and Young-Adult Fiction)
American Book Awards
PEN literary awards (multiple awards)
United States Poet Laureate
Bollingen Prize
Pushcart Prize
O. Henry Award

13. For Native American literature parallels, see Robert M. Nelson’s The Func-
tion of Landscape in Native American Fiction (1993) and from P. Jane Hafen’s
“Indigenous People and Place” in A Companion to the Regional Literatures of
America (2003).
14. The canon has often associated travel with male characters and authors like the
ones cited here, but women writers and their characters (e.g. Ellen Montgomery
in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, or Eliza Harris in Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin) have also demonstrated movement motifs. For an
examination of women and travel in American fiction, see Marylin C. Wesley’s
Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women’s Travel in American Literature (1998).
15. Despite the frontier aesthetic that the Hemingways attempted to construct during
the retreats, theirs was a rather upholstered version of nature. In 1900, as now,
the affluent families posing in settler-life had all the creature comforts—high-end
groceries, for instance, were delivered at an enormous premium to cottages on
the lake via boat, and families were often accompanied by their servants. Upper
Michigan at that time, as Svoboda has pointed out, “[w]asn’t really a wilderness.
It was actually quite civilized . . . it was more civilized in 1900 than it is today”
(qtd. in “Hemingway in Michigan” 2008). Petosky had trains pass through
town every fifteen minutes; there were three opera concerts per day; wealthy
short-term visitors from St. Louis, Kansas City, and all over the Midwest filled
out the cottages. “It was a hub,” notes Svoboda. For these reasons, the exaggera-
tion of the settler/pioneer rituals, with shotguns, rods and reels, backpacks, and
so on, were an expression of a nostalgic, and in some ways imagined, past. Isn’t
it pretty to think so—that Michigan was once so bucolic, so harmonious, and so
pastoral as is it in Nick Adams’s life?—but such a concept is a construction, one
that helps to embed the emotion for the past, a past that never quite existed, as
a foundation in the cultural rites of the present.
16. The US political body also asserts cultural control of the Caribbean island, and in
a literary sense, the writers from Puerto Rico and those of Puerto Rican descent
who reside on the continent are so grouped in subordinate relation to this domi-
nant discourse. Literary studies and naming are also a cultural ceremony, and the
general tendency toward literature in Spanish or Spanglish, wherever they are, is
to denominate them as a subgroup.
17. “A literary canon” is an idea that is used widely to refer to literature that is
considered the most significant of a time period or a community. The concept of
canon status offers authority and esteem to a work or author. A canonized text
gains status as an exemplary piece of that place or time, and is often studied and
understood as representative.
18. This has also been the case of George Santayana, Sandra Cisneros, Joseph Con-
rad, and many others.
 Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation  71
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis and Étienne Balibar. 1968. Reading Capital. Paris: Librairie Fran-
çois Maspero.
Brown, Will. 1997. Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns. New York:
St. Martin’s.
Cather, Willa. 1918. My Ántonia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and
Debates, 1774–1875. 1875. Statutes at Large, 27th Congress, 2nd Session. 502.
Chomsky, Noam. 1973. “Scholarship and Ideology: American Historians as ‘Ex-
perts in Legitimation’.” Social Scientist 1: 20–37.
Dabashi, Hamid. 2006. “Native Informers and the Making of the American Em-
pire.” Al-Ahram 7 June. 1+.
Dimock, Wai Chee. 2001. “Deep Time: American Literature and World History.”
American Literary History 13.4: 755–775.
Dimock, Wai Chee. 2006. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across
Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: University Press.
Dimock, Wai Chee. 2007. “Introduction: Planet and America, Set and Subset” in
Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Wai Chee Dimock
and Lawrence Buell, eds. Princeton, NJ: University Press.
Fisk, Robert. 2003. “This is a Resistance Movement, Whether We Like It or Not.”
Democracy Now! October 30. 1+
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1925. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner’s.
Hafen, Jane. 2003. “Indigenous People and Place” in A Companion to the Regional
Literatures of America. Charles L. Crow, ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Hemingway, Ernest. 1935. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribners.
Hemingway, Ernest. 1987. “Summer People” in Complete Short Stories of Ernest
Hemingway. New York: Scribners.
“Hemingway in Michigan Pt 1.” 2008. Last modified September 21. www.youtube.
com/watch?v=QNiyDN1thkw.
Hendrickson, Paul. 2012. Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and
Lost. New York: Vintage.
Herlihy, Jeffrey. 2011. In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism.
New York: Rodopi.
Kerouac, Jack. 1957. On the Road. New York: Viking.
Kolodny, Anne. 2001. “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the
Theory, Practice, and Politics of Feminist Literary Criticism” in The Norton An-
thology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Leitch, ed. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company: 2143–2146.
Lipsitz, George. 2002. American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Minneapolis, MN:
Minnesota University Press.
Masuga, Katy. 2013. “On Expat Writers.” National Endowment for the Humanities
Lecture, April 12. Albright College, Reading, PA.
Melamed, Jodi. 2011. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New
Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
Nelson, Robert. 1993. The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction. New
York: Peter Lang.
Norris, Kathleen. 2005. “Willa Cather.” PBS American Masters 7 September. www.
pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/willa-cather/about-willa-cather/549/.
72  Literature as a Device of Cultural Appropriation
Quinn, Justin. 2009. “Review: Through Other Continents: American Literature
Across Deep Time.” Irish Journal of American Studies 1 (Summer): 1+.
Radway, Janet. 1998. “What’s in a Name?” Presidential Address to the American
Studies Association, 20 November.
Ramazani, Jahan. 1994. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy From Hardy to
Heaney. Chicago, IL: University Press.
Rowe, John Carlos. 2007. “Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho.” American
Quarterly 59.2 (June): 253–275.
Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo. 1872. Who Would Have Thought It? Philadelphia,
PA: J. P. Lippincott & Co.
Ryan, Judith. 1991. “Skinside Inside: The National Literature Major Versus Com-
parative Literature.” Profession 23.1 (Spring): 49–52.
Swinehart, Stephen. 1992. “Native American Voice in Willa Cather’s The Song of
the Lark and Other Writings.” Great Plains Studies XXV.2: 39–51.
Wesley, Marylin. 1998. Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women’s Travel in American
Literature. Albany, NY: SUNY.
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4 A Coda to Literary Canons

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass
twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
—McCarthy (1992, 1)

Literature has a particular cultural power: notable novels are often redis-
seminated in various media, including film and theater—and they are often
institutionalized in academic studies and read as representative examples
of national and transnational cultures, or subgroups thereof. Cormac Mc-
Carthy’s 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses received the US National Book
Award and went on to become a 1999 film of the same title. It has also been
the subject of a great deal of literary studies. This discussion examines some
of the institutionalized misreadings of the novel, academic and nonfictional
though they are, as a form of perpetuation of cultural myth. This chapter
demonstrates the shortcomings of traditional, colonial readings of the text
(and similar works) and brings attention the ways in which McCarthy deftly
uses many of the topics thus far discussed in this book (presumptions about
language and culture applied to people based on supposed their demog-
raphy) in playful interaction; despite the established critical tradition that
places All the Pretty Horses as unhyphenated-American literature, McCar-
thy’s novel mocks the national idea and its literary codifications through
a unique web of discursive characters who are presented as affiliates with
national myth—but, on close inspection, are often diametric oppositions of
these assumptions.
Literary criticism and canonic transnationalisms can be victims of a form
of predatory globalism that, while ostensibly comprehensive in scope, can
carve down its objects of study into neoliberal artifacts that supposedly
communicate national or transnational ethos. Sometimes this scholarly phe-
nomenon charges texts so profoundly with the doctrinal imperialism of the
author or protagonist’s supposed demographic categories (and, thus, their
performances), that the reconstruction of the text through interpretation is
limited to the extent discourses.1 For instance, the National Book Award
strives “to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience,
74  A Coda to Literary Canons
and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America”; in order to
be eligible for the prize, texts must be published in English and the authors
must be political citizens of the US political body; the obsolete measures that
link political to cultural citizenship, identity, and community are also req-
uisite of the award judges.2 Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (composed
of All the Pretty Horses, 1992; The Crossing, 1994; and Cities of the Plain,
1998) has important dimensions of meaning and a thematic freshness that
destroys the cultural canons of the US political body—and tests the limits of
what such “national” prizes will appropriate as “American.”
McCarthy’s trilogy questions the composition of place-based cultural
frameworks and their presumptions, as literary and community instru-
ments. Like Finn, On the Road, and My Ántonia, the English language,
and movement west are characteristic, though sometimes unmentioned,
concepts in the span of the three novels. The Spanish language is abruptly
introduced as an unhyphenated-American cultural characteristic, one that
teases the restrictions of the hierarchy and the national awards as well.
While Finn notes the presence of a new unhyphenated-American (English)
language and Kerouac inundates On the Road with a version of that tongue,
two of McCarthy’s protagonists, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham (both
apparently feral-affiliates of the US political body), in the Border Trilogy,
are native speakers of Spanish (and speak English as a second language), a
verity with profound consequences—but this dimension of their being has
very seldom been explored in criticism.
John Grady Cole raised for a significant period of his youth, perhaps
fifteen of his sixteen years, by a family of Mexican origin who worked on
his family’s property. The intercultural dimensions of his upbringing have
a crucial role in his actions and sense of identity both in Texas and once
he crosses the political border into Mexico. A close inspection of his Latin
American linguistic, gastronomic, and social attachments belies the critical
readings of the character that generally describe him as an Anglo-American
(in a cultural sense) who is a native speaker of English.3 McCarthy destabi-
lizes the mythic image of the western cowboy through Cole’s diverse identity
register, which involves a Mexican American identity that he performs in
Texas and Mexico. This article reexamines the cultural geography of the
Grady-Cole homestead, the town of San Angelo, and the south/west Texas
border area4 in order to offer a new perspective of John Grady’s background
and cultural identity.

Quest as a Theoretical Frame
On the surface, the narrative structure of All the Pretty Horses appears
to be an interpretation of a classic theme, the quest.5 The existing studies
of the novel generally read the text under the following pretenses: John
Grady Cole is a Texan cowboy who engages on a romantic journey into a
mysterious land—Mexico—in search of an Edenic existence, true love, and
 A Coda to Literary Canons  75
a bucolic life on the range; this is followed by his return home, which is
informed by the coming-of-age events he has realized on the voyage. Den-
nis Cutchins, for instance, outlines the narrative in this way: John Grady is
“[a]n American (a Westerner from Texas) [who] goes to a Spanish-speaking
country (Mexico)” (2006, 295). He notes that “John Grady speaks Span-
ish well.” Similarly, Phillip Snyder asserts that John Grady’s behavior is
structured around cowboy codes, which “embody ideals which signify well
beyond their western borders, reflecting notions of a fundamental American
identity and revealing an essentially American anxiety over the instability of
that identity” (2006, 149).6
While a transnational approach would read Cole’s multiculturalism as
a form of creolized performance in language and action that can only be
available in terms of various hierarchies of distinction, he is rarely read as
a transnational character. The argument here attempts to destabilize some
of the general assumptions concerning the text by resituating critical focus
on the extra-canonic situation of John Grady Cole; the prescriptions of US
political culture (the presence of English and cowboy motifs, and so on)
or Mexican ones (that he is a native speaker of Spanish and fluent in those
cultural mores) are played with and occasionally rejected by this charac-
ter’s cultural performances, and thus the labels adhered to him in criticism
are unintentionally fictitious, or perhaps superficial, as is often the case in
canonization and institutionalized material culture. These critical interpre-
tations of the novel have been constructed in large part through predacious
readings that are much too informed by the traditional canons—and the
end result is that Cole is prescribed as a form of feral affiliate of US cultural
myths (i.e., an “American” in Mexico), an interpretative flaw that obfus-
cates an important dimension of McCarthy’s genius.7

Place, Space, and Character

John Grady Cole was born on a cattle ranch in West Texas to an ostensi-
bly English-speaking mother.8 He was raised for a significant period of his
youth, perhaps fifteen of his sixteen years, by a family of Mexican origin
who worked on the property. The intercultural dimensions of his upbring-
ing have a crucial role in his actions and sense of identity, both in Texas
and once he crosses the political border into Mexico. His Latin American
cultural attachments—in language, gastronomic inclinations, and social
ceremony—belie the critical readings of the character, which generally as-
cribe him as a settler/Anglo-American (in a cultural sense) who is a native
speaker of English.9 McCarthy destabilizes the mythic image of the Western
cowboy through Cole’s identity register, which involves a Mexican-American
identity that he performs in Texas and Mexico. This reexamination the cul-
tural geography of the Grady-Cole homestead, the town of San Angelo, and
the South/West Texas border area in order to offer a new perspective of John
Grady’s background and cultural identity.
76  A Coda to Literary Canons
Cultural Geography of San Angelo and South/West Texas
I grew up on the Mexican border (on the Texas side). My culture was eating
tacos and enchiladas, listening to both Mexican and American music, and
speaking Tex-Mex (a combination of English and Spanish).
—Hornberger (2004, 164)

In order to flesh out the details of Cole’s multicultural background—his

native fluency in Spanish and adept competencies in things Mexican—it is
important to examine what occurred in this boy/man’s life before the nar-
rative begins. As is often the case with texts by Ernest Hemingway, one
of McCarthy’s literary mentors,10 All the Pretty Horses has a significant
amount of extra-textual information that one must sift through in order to
understand what is occurring in the novel itself. Before placing John Grady
into the conventional canons of a national or regional culture, the precise
influences on his home life and upbringing, and the social characteristics of
his region, are crucial to consider.
John Grady was born September 6, 1933, in San Angelo to a family with
Grady and Cole surnames (Pretty Horses 167). The Grady side settled the
ranch in 1866 and has resided there ever since;11 John Grady is sixteen years
old when the novel begins in the fall of 1949. The West/South Texas region
and the city of San Angelo were heavily influenced by Mexican culture and
language from 1933 to 1949, as they are now. As John Bourke notes, the
political border between the US and Mexico “can in no sense be regarded
as fulfilling any of the conditions of a line of [cultural] delimitation” (qtd.
in Arreola 2002, 2). Bearing this in mind, what would a childhood in San
Angelo be like in the 1930s and 40s? What languages would John Grady
have spoken and heard at home and in public? What were his pastimes?
What festivals would have been celebrated in his home and by his commu-
nity? Who were his behavioral icons and cultural influences as a boy?
At a café on Austin Street in Robert Lee, Texas, a conversation between
John Grady and his father Wayne Cole reveals several details that are of
paramount importance to understanding Cole’s upbringing. It is the final
interaction between father and son (as the elder dies while Cole is in Mex-
ico). His father explains the track of his marriage to John Grady’s mother:

We were married [in 1931] ten years before the war come along. She
left out of here. She was gone from the time you were six months old
[March 1934] till you were about three [1937]. . . . We separated. She
was in California. Luisa looked after you. Her and Abuela.
(Pretty Horses 25)

This explanation, however, does not clarify what happened after 1937,
when his mother apparently returned to Texas from California. The idea
that she stayed in Texas—and on the family ranch—from 1937 until 1949,
when the novel begins, is repudiated by the penultimate conversation that
 A Coda to Literary Canons  77
John Grady had with his father, which occurred at a café in San Angelo a
few weeks before their meeting in Robert Lee. Cole’s father had been a pris-
oner for several years in World War II, and much of the family, including his
wife, had given up hope for his return; some wanted to sell his belongings.
He was eventually freed and returned to Texas in the late 1940s. However,
he has not spoken with his wife since before his war service. John Grady’s
father explains at the café that the “Last conversation [he had with Cole’s
mother] was in San Diego California in nineteen forty-two” (Pretty Horses
12). This conversation occurred, ostensibly, just before he departed for mili-
tary service overseas.
It is unlikely that Cole’s mother traveled to San Diego from San Angelo
in 1942 to see her husband off to war—especially given their cold relation-
ship, previous separation, and nine-year-old child. Therefore, at some point
between 1937 (when she returns to the ranch) and the conversation with his
father in San Diego in 1942, John Grady’s mother returned to live in Cali-
fornia. Given her career as a second-rate actress in San Antonio when the
novel commences in 1949, it is likely she moved to California on those two
occasions in attempts to become a Hollywood star. Two sentences in the
original manuscript, which were not included in the published text, allude
to this career track: “Mother was in a movie once. She was eighteen” (“Cor-
mac McCarthy Papers” Wittliff 91/46/9 14). She was eighteen years old
in 1932 and, consequently, Cole was conceived in California. His mother
returned to Texas to give birth, and six months later, as his father explained,
she returned to the West Coast to pursue acting. When the plot begins in
1949 his mother is back living in Texas, but she doesn’t live in San Angelo;
she has a role in a theatrical production in San Antonio, a five-hour drive
from the ranch, where she also has a boyfriend. This timeframe indicates
that after the first six months of his life, John Grady Cole lived with his
biological mother for a few fleeting stints of his childhood.
What is of principal importance in this timeframe is that the sixteen-year-
old John Grady Cole is a member of a Latin American family—with Luisa
and her mother (the woman Cole calls Abuela—and on one occasion,
abuela or grandmother) and Arturo, Luisa’s husband. Luisa and Arturo are
John Grady’s surrogate parents; they cared for him exclusively for perhaps
fifteen of his sixteen years. As our primary linguistic tendencies derive from
our mother (a “mother” tongue) John Grady Cole is a native speaker of
Spanish. This is also the case of several other important characters in the
Border Trilogy, including Billy Parhnam, John Grady’s mother (and pos-
sibly his grandfather and his brothers), and perhaps Jimmy Blevins, each of
whom are speakers of Spanish who were ostensibly born in the US political
space into families with what are generally ascribed as English-speaking
surnames.12
Accordingly, the first words spoken to John Grady in the novel are in
Spanish by Luisa, his de facto mother: “Buenos días guapo” (Pretty Horses
4). After sitting down, he, somewhat strangely, responds to her in English,
78  A Coda to Literary Canons
which Luisa—despite having grown up on the ranch—does not understand.
“I appreciate you lightin the candle,” he says. “Cómo?” she responds. “La
candela. La vela,” he says. “No fui yo,” she answers (Pretty Horses 4). This
is an evocative dialogue if we read the flame as a symbol of life—an image
that is oft-repeated in McCarthy’s work. He appreciates that she lit (initi-
ated) the flame (life): it wasn’t Luisa who put a match to the candle, but she
took the place of the woman who did.
The Grady homestead is colored by Latin American social ceremony and
cultural traditions. John Grady Cole’s grandfather’s funeral service, which
opens the novel, is carried out according to Mexican-American rites. In tra-
ditional Mexican-American wakes, “[t]he body of the deceased would be
laid out [in the home] with burning candles, hence, the term velorio (derived
from the Spanish word vela or candle)” (Sosa Gavaleta 2012, 563). In such
ceremonies, a candle must be lit at all times. The first words of the text—
“I appreciate you lightin the candle” (Pretty Horses 4)—emphasize John
Grady’s gratitude that Luisa has maintained this rite for his grandfather (he
was mistaken; his mother, in fact, did this). Luisa serves sweet rolls and cof-
fee. In The Mexican American family, Norma Williams observes that “often
the women serve coffee and sweet rolls” (1990, 37) for funerals, and Karen
Hursh-Graber argues that this combination is of a special significance in
Mexican-American families, such that some call the drink a “ ‘funeral cof-
fee’ because [it] is always served at the velorios . . . with large trays of sweet
rolls” (2004, 1).13
Two Mexican-American funerals—for his biological grandfather and
for Abuela, his surrogate grandmother—provide a structural symmetry to
the beginning and the end of the novel. Following the second service, John
Grady stands with his “Hat in hand” over the earth of Abuela’s grave just
after she has been interred (Pretty Horses 301). The narrator reveals what
Cole reads from the nearby headstones, which were “names he knew or
had known” (Pretty Horses 301). Familismo is an unspoken subtext in this
episode. In Latin American families (including those in Texas) childrearing
duties are commonly shared among a large group; this extended commu-
nity is “typically multigenerational and include[s] family friends” (Peake
Andrasik et al. 2011, 276). The surnames that Cole reads from the head-
stones include Villareal, Sosa, Reyes, Holguín, Armendares, Ornelos, Tarín,
Jáquez, and Villareal Cuéllar. These are all members of John Grady’s family.
In this context, the nomenclature John Grady Cole could be understood
as a variation on the Latin American naming tradition, in which both mater-
nal and paternal surnames are used. (In the traditional naming practice,
his surname would have had the paternal name before the maternal, as in
Cole-Grady.) What is clear is that an important dimension of John Grady
Cole’s sense of self and community relates to his Latin American family,
extended family, and friends. While Cole refers to his biological mother by
the pronoun she (her first name is never revealed in the text), he endearingly
situates himself with the family members who raised him, seeking them out
 A Coda to Literary Canons  79
for advice, companionship, and guidance on rites of passage into adult-
hood. Cole’s multicultural social actions involve affective agencies in prac-
tices of sociability and self-building that correspond to a cultural reality
that is significantly more diverse than what standard critical models allow.
It is also worthwhile to mention here that John Grady Cole’s mother and
grandfather (and grandfather’s brothers) grew up on the same ranch with
the same cultural backdrop, and they are, like John Grady, native speakers
of Spanish (Pretty Horses 15). John Grady’s mother was “cared for . . . as a
baby” by Abuela and the same was the case for the previous generation, as
Abuela had “cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother’s uncles
[and father]” (Pretty Horses 301). For these reasons the Grady family may
be read through Mexican-American canons of identity in the same way that
they are read through the American myths.14 This family enjoys the social
paradigms of a rich regional culture that in many ways belies the sociocul-
tural ascriptions that are often put upon them in criticism.
The Latin American cultural rites in the Grady household were not lim-
ited to speaking Spanish and funeral services: John Grady ate and drank
with Luisa, Arturo, Abuela, and other people he “knew or had known”;
they worked and relaxed together; celebrated holidays, feasts, and birth-
days as a family; and that group dynamic formed a significant aspect of
his reality. It is uncertain if the non-Grady members of the family are Teja-
nos, migrants, or of another background, but McCarthy makes clear that
Abuela has been on the ranch since the nineteenth century (Pretty Horses
18). Abuela’s daughter Luisa, therefore, could be understood as a sister to
John Grady’s mother, as they are of a similar age and grew up together on
the ranch.15 At any rate, if we perceive Luisa, Arturo, Abuela, and the oth-
ers listed at the cemetery (and John Grady’s mother and grandfather) as
close affiliates with Mexican cultural mores (which would include, and not
be limited to, color symbology, concepts of heroism, political tendencies,
religious inclinations, gastronomic preferences, betrothal predilections, and
so on) these would inform John Grady Cole’s sense of being as he was iso-
lated within these concepts in his home life. It would also clarify how John
Grady has such a comprehensive knowledge of things Mexican—such as the
peso exchange rate to the dollar and that the Mexican government does not
practice capital punishment (Pretty Horses 120, 160)—before he embarks
on the journey south.

Cultural Geographies of San Angelo, San Antonio,

and South/West Texas
San Angelo is generally understood as the northern frontier of US–Mexico
border region, an area that has been termed “a Mexican American home-
land” (Arreola 2002, 6; Montejano 1987, 2). Some studies maintain that the
majority of San Angelo’s population has been Mexican or Mexican-American
since the foundation of the township in the 1860s until the present; others
80  A Coda to Literary Canons
report that Latin Americans were a majority in the town until the early
twentieth century (León 1985, 18; Zamudio 2010, 1); whatever the case,
the cultural demography of the town manifests this social mix. In San An-
gelo, as is the case with much of South Texas, in many senses the “ancestral,
cultural, and even economic ties are far stronger across the Rio Grande . . .
to Mexico, than to most northern American cities” (Arreola 2002, 1).
In San Angelenos: Mexican Americans in San Angelo, Texas, Arnoldo de
León observes that several Mexican festivals have been celebrated as public
holidays since its incorporation as a township; these include the sixteenth
of September, Cinco de Mayo, and the independence from Spain centen-
nial and bicentennial celebrations, which were memorialized with festivals,
parades, and parties in 1910 and 2010, respectively. Some of the traditional
betrothal rites before marriage in San Angelo for the community as a whole
were Mexican, not Anglo, in the first part of the twentieth century (1985,
24–26), and the Catholic Diocese in San Angelo holds special services for
El Día de los Muertos and All Souls Day (Fulton 2012, 1). Sandy Rojas
observes that even today, the Mexican festivals in San Angelo are central to
the culture of the community as a whole, regardless of the origin of those
who celebrate them: “Many San Angeloans (Mexican and Anglo alike)
recall with great fondness attending the Cinco de Mayo and Diez y Seis de
Septiembre celebrations” (2007, 1). Howard Taylor, Director of San Angelo
Museum of Fine Arts, underscores the plural cultural dynamic of the cel-
ebrations in his hometown:

Mexican culture is very much a large part of our culture. It’s contributed
greatly here in San Angelo, especially with the Mexican-American pop-
ulation between 40 to 50 percent. . . . There are traditions here locally,
and I’m not [only] talking about Día de los Muertos, but like quincea-
ñeras and decoration ideas that come from Mexico. It’s all around us.
(qtd. in Zamudio 2010, 1)

These aspects of life in San Angelo encompass many dimensions of the life
span and its social ceremonies: “Reinforcing the above precepts were corri-
dos and other songs, poems, folklore and other traditions, and Mexican-style
ceremonies and social gatherings occasioned by weddings, funerals, and
religious holy days” (León 1999, 78).
Amid the rich Mexican culture in Texas, David Arreola has pointed out
that since the nineteenth century “Anglos and other non-Hispanic[s] . . .
have tended to become Mexicanized, a condition that evolved in South
Texas among Anglo and European ranchers and continued among merchant
groups” (2002, 158). There are many prominent families in San Angelo,
and people in the surrounding region have non-Latino surnames but are cul-
turally Mexican today, including the Harris, Veck, Wuertemburg, Keating,
Marx, Block, Monroe, Nix, Stuart, and Ellert families (León 1985, 151 and
 A Coda to Literary Canons  81
28; Montejano 1987, 37).16 The Wuertemburg and Veck families arrived in
San Angelo (then Santa Ángela)—like the Grady family—in the 1860s. The
children of their subsequent generations have been “carefully nurtured in
Mexican culture” (León 1985, 23). León describes the Wuertemburg family,
who, “were . . . reared as Mexican Americans and spoke Spanish” (1985,
152). Even today in San Angelo, there are many families who have “retained
their mexicanidad (“Mexicanness”) in its entirety, to the point that they
carry on Mexican culture with . . . German [and other non-Latin] name[s]”
(León 1985, 151). As Latin Americans were a majority in San Angelo in the
first half-century of settlement (and possibly in 1949, when All the Pretty
Horses begins)—out of necessity and interest, these non-Latin-descent fami-
lies were Mexicanized through taking on the Spanish language, festivals
and traditions, and other cultural rites. The process has been characterized
as an acculturation that was “far more than the learning of a language and
proper etiquette” (Montejano 1987, 37); it was one in which the conceptual
boundaries of peoples, communities, and cultural separation dissolved. As
Arreola notes, in this period many parts of Texas tended to “Mexicanize its
foreigners [and US citizens] more than Mexicanos became Americanized”
(2002, 151).
Because of the cultural backdrop of his home and hometown, John Grady
Cole was brought up as a Mexican-American (or American-Mexican). The
Latin American dimensions of his society indicate that the region across
the political border to the south, at least in cultural and linguistic senses,
is one that shares many characteristics with his own reality and personal
experiences. The depth of social experience in San Angelo that John Grady
would have experienced thus contradicts conceptualizations of Mexico as a
foreign cultural reality, meaning that the quest reading of the narrative is an
unstable one.17 Nonetheless, the concept of John Grady Cole’s foreignness
in Mexico has been the central component to his treatment in scholarship.
For instance, Rosemary King has argued that “crossing the geopolitical
border necessarily involves crossing cultural borders” (2004, 59) and that
“John Grady Cole is an Anglo cowboy moving in the spaces and places of
Mexico without regard to the cultural sensibilities of its inhabitants” (2004,
50); Daniel Weiss maintains that John Grady has a “failed understanding
of Mexican history, ethnicity, social structure, and law. Cultural differences
extend beyond geographical cues and are often not contained . . . [Cole and
Rawlins] believe that they can pass borders without consequence while their
travels project (imperialistically) their American culture” (2010, 67). Mea-
gan McGilchrist claims that “John Grady views most Mexicans in the way
he views animals” (2010, 176). The context of Cole’s upbringing, however,
challenges such conceptualizations of Mexico as a foreign cultural reality.
Regardless of the origin of his surname, as a Mexican-American, the culture
south of the Río Bravo del Norte was not foreign but, rather, a central com-
ponent of his upbringing and identity.18
82  A Coda to Literary Canons
John Grady Negotiating Mexican-American/
American-Mexican Identity
There are several episodes in the novel that indicate that John Grady Cole
identifies himself in a cultural sense as a Mexican-American, and he actively
performs that identity on the ranch, in San Angelo and San Antonio, and
in Mexico. This identity is manifest in the manner that he situates himself
within cultural institutions in Texas, in his interactions with Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans (in Mexico and in Texas), and in how he is processed
as a prisoner by Mexican authorities prior to his incarceration in Saltillo.
When carrying out his personal errands before the trip south, John Grady
seeks out the Mexican neighborhoods for his affairs in both San Angelo
and San Antonio. The central Mexican town of San Angelo in 1949 was a
nine-square-block area with limits of South Chadbourne Street and West
Beauregard Street, on one side, to South Koenigheim Street and West River
Drive, on the other (León 1985, 28–30). When John Grady is in town doing
some routine chores, his destinations are in this Mexican barrio of the town.
Upon meeting his father “in the lobby of the St Angelus [Hotel] . . . they
walked up Chadbourne Street to the Eagle Cafe” (Pretty Horses 7). The
St Angelus was at the corner of Irving and Beauregard, at the northeast cor-
ner of the Mexican town. The two walk to the frontier of the Mexican town
(at Chadbourne) then turn and walk—symbolically and literally—north and
out of the Mexican town to the café named for a bird that is both a US and
a Mexican cultural icon.
When he returns to the hotel a few days later to pick up the saddle his
father has given him, John Grady exits the lobby and “walked down to South
Concho Street” (Pretty Horses 14). McCarthy employs a poetic license here,
as the street two blocks south of the hotel is West—not South—Concho.
The use of the cardinal direction underscores the boy’s ultimate destination
with the saddle. The direction also brings him, this time alone without his
father, from the edge of San Angelo’s Mexican town south to its center.19
The last time he is in San Angelo, “He’d been to Cullen Cole’s shop
on North Chadbourne . . . and he was coming up Twohig Street when
she [Mary Catherine] came out of the Cactus Drug” (Pretty Horses 27).
According to Worley’s San Angelo City Directory, 1950, the store at 615
North Chadbourne was known as “Cole’s Repair Shop” (Bell 2000, 20).
The other Mexican town in San Angelo is known as “Santa Fe” barrio,
which is an eighteen-square-block area with limits from North Bryant Street
and East Eighth Street, on one side, to West Fourteenth Street and North
Chadbourne Street, on the other (León 1985, 28–30). The repair shop is on
the southern edge of barrio Santa Fe. When he sees Mary Catherine, John
Grady has walked from one Mexican town south to the other (from the
edge of Santa Fe barrio to the eastern edge of the central Mexican town).
After speaking to her, John Grady turns the corner and heads again south
toward South Concho Street.
 A Coda to Literary Canons  83
Segregation is an underpinned theme in this text, and each of John Grady’s
actions in San Antonio is a function of his circumstance as a segregated
other—a Mexican American—in the city. (San Angelo was also segregated
in 1949.) “El propósito [of segregation] ha sido tener el mexicano humil-
lado y tratado como un ser inferior” [The purpose of segregation has been
to have the Mexican humiliated and treated as an inferior being] (“Lista que
contiene los nombres de las poblaciones”). These directives determined the
places where a Mexican person may legally sleep, eat, and engage in leisure
pursuits—such that Mexican-Americans (and other minorities) could not eat
at certain restaurants, stay at certain hotels, or attend concerts at certain the-
aters. These concepts are essential to have in mind when interpreting John
Grady’s actions in San Antonio—particularly because he is alone. As he does
in the episodes that take place in San Angelo, in San Antonio John Grady seeks
out the Mexican-American cultural institutions of that city and spends time
in the Mexican neighborhood. As a postcard from 1938 noted, “You might
imagine yourself in Mexico as you cross to the west-side of San Pedro Creek
and proceed in the direction of the West Side Squares” (Arreola 2002, 136).
John Grady walks through this section of town and pauses for a moment on
the Commerce Street Bridge over San Pedro Creek, which, like the Río Bravo/
Grande, divides the town into so-called Anglo and Mexican districts.
San Antonio hotels did not admit Latino guests when Cole visits in Janu-
ary 1950 (Blackwelder 1999, 188). In order to sleep in the “Anglo” district,
a Mexican-American would seek out an appropriate, non-hotel lodging
in that section (north of the Commerce Street Bridge) that would receive
minorities. The YMCA on the corner of Alamo, Martin, and Third, where
John Grady stays for the night, was among the only lodging institutions in
the Anglo Quarter of San Antonio at that time that would receive Mexican
Americans during segregation. As the San Antonio YMCA notes in their his-
torical record, the administrators rejected the segregation laws and “reached
out to African American and Mexican American youth in the community”
(“History of YMCA of Greater San Antonio”).
John Grady is in San Antonio to see his mother, who has a role in a play
at the Majestic Theater.20 The Majestic was also segregated in 1950, and
Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and African-Americans were obliged to sit
in the balcony (Gutiérrez 2007, 107). Moreover, minorities “couldn’t sit
in the front of the balcony, either; they had to go to the extreme top area”
(Cliff Bueché qtd. in Torres 1997, 123). Despite the fact that “The theater
was half empty” (Pretty Horses 21) John Grady is tendered a seat in the rear
of the balcony. Though he remains in his seat the entire performance, when
the lights went dim in the hall “some of the people in the balcony about him
got up and moved forward to the seats in front” (Pretty Horses 21).21
These episodes demonstrate that not only does John Grady occasionally act
within the scope of Mexican-American behavioral expectations during seg-
regation; but that other characters also perceive him as Mexican-American.22
In addition to the cashier giving him a ticket for the rear of the balcony at
84  A Coda to Literary Canons
the Majestic, at the café in San Antonio the Mexican-American waitress
addresses Cole in Spanish as he eats breakfast and reads the paper. This is
also the case when he is in Mexico, as the characters address him in Span-
ish upon seeing him for the first time. (The role of the English language in
Mexico, which I will soon discuss, is also of paramount importance.) As
CFS Straumsheim has pointed out, while incarcerated in Saltillo the jailor
does not request to see his documents:

Rawlins is instantly ordered to produce a passport. Instead, Rawlins

offers his driver’s license, and successfully recites all the information
printed on it. The captain, unimpressed, demands to see a work permit,
eventually pushing Rawlins to the verge of tears. John Grady, mean-
while, comes to his interrogation without a single form of identification,
and calmly responds to the captain’s allegations. . . . Rawlins goes in
as an American citizen, and takes great insult from being called a liar.
John Grady, however, has not been able to find a substitute for his given
identity, and brings only his constructed identity.
(2011, 11)

When viewed in the context of John Grady the Mexican-American, the

details become clear: he does not need to present identification because he
is not a foreigner in that place. “Group identity can manifest itself through
many cultural qualities,” notes David Arreola (2002, 161). John Grady
believes in and identifies with the Mexican myths; he is comfortable in
the Mexican-American neighborhoods and restaurants, and his last words
to Rawlins in the original manuscript—“Hasta la vista” (“The Cormac
McCarthy Papers” Wittliff item 438)—are spoken in Spanish as are final
words spoken by Cole in the novel: “he called her his abuela and he said
goodbye to her in Spanish” (Pretty Horses 301). This is the only time the
word abuela appears in the text with a lowercase A. John Grady is using the
term as a common noun (grandmother, who she is to him) and not a name
or proper noun (Grandmother, as a nickname of sorts). Though he did not
shed tears for his maternal grandfather, as he turned away from (his abuela,
lower case) Abuela’s service, “his face [was] wet” (Pretty Horses 301).

Mexican-American/American-Mexican Life in Mexico

In many ways Cole’s trip south is a successful one, at least initially. The
boy is able to cultivate a life that was impossible in San Angelo: he has
work, a love interest, amiable friends and colleagues, and a community of
people who appear to value his comradeship and presence with them. These
achievements are a function of his cultural background in San Angelo, as the
boy is able to employ his cultural multicompetencies so as to situate both
himself and Rawlins at the ranch. Finally at home on the range, in this case
as an employee (like his surrogate family north of the political border) and
 A Coda to Literary Canons  85
engaged in relations with Alejandra, Cole expresses his contentment with
the new reality, saying to Rawlins that he would like to settle in Mexico
permanently or for at least “a hundred years” (Pretty Horses 96).
John Grady is at ease performing a Mexican-American identity in Mexico,
and his use of the Spanish language is an important purveyor of this process.
He occasionally speaks in Spanish even with Lacey. On the day that they
begin work on the ranch, Cole describes the horses to him as “media san-
gres” and a “yeguada of mares” to which Rawlins replies, “what in the hell
is that?” Cole replies, “quarterhorses” (Pretty Horses 101). He also takes
to naming horses known to both of them in their Spanish equivalent: “José
Chiquito,” says Cole. “Little Joe?” Rawlins asks. ‘Yea’ ” (Pretty Horses
101). It is apparent, moreover, that the Spanish-speaking ranch hands and
others around the Purísima refer to Cole as “Juan,” not John. “Eres tú,
Juan?” (Pretty Horses 226). The first word John Grady says to Alejandra
is “Buenas” (Pretty Horses 117; a common abbreviation of buenas tardes,
or good afternoon), which offers a symmetry with the first word spoken to
John Grady by Luisa, which is “Buenos” (Pretty Horses 4; as in good morn-
ing, buenos días). He addresses the horses in Spanish (Pretty Horses 126,
128) and when queried by Héctor about which language he prefers to use,
Cole responds in Spanish, “Como le convenga” (Pretty Horses 113).
John Grady also takes to using a traditional piece of Mexican horse tack
after they arrive at the ranch. The Mexicans use hackamores (Pretty Horses
105) while Cole, Blevins, and Rawlins begin with bridles, or bitless bridles
(Pretty Horses 27, 66), and shift to hackamores as they spend more time
at the Purísima (Pretty Horses 129). A hackamore, which derives from the
Spanish jaquima, is a style of headgear for horses that does not have a bit (a
piece of metal in the mouth). They are understood to give the animal more
freedom of movement and to allow the rider a more natural form of horse-
manship. When he is poised to return to the US, John Grady utters: “get a
bridle” (Pretty Horses 260).
An important expression of John Grady’s affiliation with the others at
the Purísima involves a meal he takes with the vaqueros.23 Just before leav-
ing to work in the highlands, he and Rawlins break bread with the other
employees. The Christian symbolism during this last supper at the ranch
(during which Cole “asked that [a container of bread] be passed” from one
to another) is complemented by the use of a circular dish. “[T]here came
hands from both sides of the table to take up the dish and hand it down in
this manner like a ceremonial bowl” (Pretty Horses 110). The consumption
of food also functions as a means of cultural association, as the treasured
and ceremonial dish contains tortillas. After eating together in this commu-
nion, which is possibly on a Friday, “three days later” he and Rawlins rose
from the ranch up and into “the mountains” (Pretty Horses 110).
Another ritualistic meal occurs when Cole is on his way back to the
Purísima after being in prison. He makes the acquaintance of some people
along the road who invite him to eat with them. John Grady says grace for
86  A Coda to Literary Canons
the meal, asking “that God remember all that had died” (Pretty Horses
221). In other meal episodes in Mexico, John Grady is accompanied by
Rawlins (and before their arrival at Purísima, Blevins), and for this reason
he, too, is ostensibly marked as an outsider. In the scene when Cole “took
his supper with workers in their camp” (Pretty Horses 221), it appears that
the people understand him as Mexican. After sharing the meal, “they’d
have made a bed for him” if he desired (Pretty Horses 221). What is often
described as typical Mexican food also appears to pacify Cole in times of
strife, as he buys “beans and salsa” in his most desperate moment (Pretty
Horses 256), and with the last of his money, “he bought coffee and torti-
llas” (Pretty Horses 285).
It is Alfonsita, the matriarch of the Rocha clan, who forces Alejandra to
reject Cole as a potential suitor. Héctor, learning that Alejandra has had sex
with Cole, allows federal police to arrest Cole and Rawlins; they are sent to
prison, where both are nearly knifed to death. After Alfonsita pays a bribe
on their behalf, they are released. Rawlins promptly catches a bus for the
border, and John Grady goes back to the Rocha Ranch in an attempt to woo
Alejandra. She refuses, and Cole goes on the warpath, retaking his horse
(and that of Blevins and Rawlins) and gets shot and flees into the country
north, apparently on his way back to Texas.
Once he is south of the Río Bravo del Norte, everyone with whom Cole
interacts in the English language—save Blevins and Rawlins—plays a role
in his downfall. He speaks English with Héctor, who, in a form of reprisal,
allows him to be incarcerated; he speaks English with Alfonsita, who blocks
his potential marriage to Alejandra; he speaks English with Alejandra, who
abuses his interest in her in order to get vengeance against her father and
great aunt; he speaks English with the Capitán, the jailor who allows Blevins
to be murdered; and he speaks English with Pérez, the prison boss who uses
John Grady as a pawn in a death-game against another young inmate.24
Those who speak to John Grady in English have a precise and measured
role in the novel: McCarthy employs the English language as a mechanism
to demonstrate malice and the protagonist’s imminent misfortune.25
Moreover, it is the English-speaking characters who force the concept of
“country” into the narrative discourse.26 Rather than perceiving Cole as a
social equal, the English-speaking characters in Mexico frame their interac-
tions with him as though he were a cultural other. While discussing in English
her teaching career in London and her trips to European capitals, Alfonsita
demonstrates her ignorance of the cultural geography of Texas, saying “one
country is not another” and “I will tell you about Mexico” (Pretty Horses
145, 236). Indeed, those who rely on cultural separations, who insist on judg-
ing Cole through the national construct, when he is an individual who obvi-
ously breaks such parables, bring malevolence into the text and cause his
downfall. Alejandra, for instance, says early on that he is “a mojado-reverso”
(Pretty Horses 124) or a reverse wetback,27 and from there he comes to be
treated—like many undocumented peoples north of the political border—as
a social subordinate who lacks rights, agency, and significance.
 A Coda to Literary Canons  87
After the fight in the Saltillo prison, on two occasions John Grady has
difficulty understanding English, his second language. In a semi-delirious
state, the doctor asks him to “[p]ut your hands on my shoulders,” which is
met with “What?”; the doctor then comments that Cole is a “fasthealer,”
and John Grady responds: “A what” (Pretty Horses 205, 206)? Similarly,
in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago’s fight with the marlin
exhausts him to the point that he cannot speak Cuban Spanish and reverts
to his native peninsular dialect of Spanish (Herlihy 2009, 36). Some key
moments of All the Pretty Horses occur contemporaneously with The Old
Man and the Sea. Santiago’s four-day struggle with the marlin occurs from
September 12–16, 1950 (Hurley 1992, 77–80). On September 15, 1950,
John Grady sees Alejandra for the last time.28 The two lovers spend Sep-
tember 14 together at a hotel in Zacatecas, and the next day he watches a
train pull out of the station with Alejandra on it. Cole spends the night of
September 15 alone in the city, gets into a fight, and loses his belongings. He
quits town on September 16 with a new skeleton in his closet on the same
day that Santiago returns to Cojímar with the skeleton of the great marlin
(Pretty Horses 249; Bell 2000, 8).29
The maltreatment of the John Grady in Mexico is limited to these
English-speakers. Near the end of his time south of the river, after the gun-
fight in the countryside, “hombres del país” (their term) approach and ask
him, “dónde está su serape?” (Pretty Horses 281), before giving him one
of their own. This interchange represents an important cultural ritual, one
that underscores Cole’s social equality in that place. Indeed, the men of the
country, who speak to him in Spanish, do not seem aware that his place of
origin is north of the Río Bravo. There is a central quandary throughout the
text: does Cole understand himself as an outsider in Mexico? John Grady’s
expressions of identity are multiform; he speaks Spanish to the horses (Pretty
Horses 126, 128) and with most people he meets. At one point he says he
is an American, but he utters the phrase in Spanish. Moreover, in Mexican
Spanish americano is a layered and complex term, not a simple cognate of
American. It is charged with colonial weight:

The fact that early Mexican nationalists wrote of themselves as nosotros

los americanos and of their country as Nuestra América, has been in-
terpreted as revealing the vanity of the local creoles who, because Mex-
ico was by far the most valuable of Spain’s American possessions, saw
themselves as the centre of the New World. But, in fact, people all over
Spanish America thought of themselves as “Americans,” since this term
denoted precisely the shared fatality of extra-Spanish birth.
(Anderson 1991, 64)

As the Rochas endeared themselves to the term gachupines (a Mexicanism

for Spaniards in Mexico, Pretty Horses 230) John Grady’s use of the term
americano as a self-reference (instead of gringo, estadounidense, or norteam-
ericano) in a sense redoubles the concept that Mexico is not Europe. This use
88  A Coda to Literary Canons
of americano could thus be understood: Cuál es lo peor: que soy americano
[que no soy de cultura/herencia europea] o que soy pobre? [Which is worse:
that I am not of European heritage (cultural or otherwise), or that I am
poor?] Some of the issues are epistemological—what makes an American an
American, how is identity constructed and what are it agencies—but beyond
those concerns, the idea of a collectivity itself might be the crux of the prob-
lem. McCarthy injects some jest into the American identity fray through his
use of “blood.” After being injured at the prison, Rawlins receives a blood
transfusion and he worries that this might have made him “part Mexican”;
John Grady responds that “it dont mean nothin” (Pretty Horses 177).
Regardless of his self-perception and identity, as an immigrant to Mex-
ico, John Grady could not remain in the new place due factors beyond his
control. The ignorance and arrogance of the English-speaking characters in
Mexico nearly end his life. In Cities of the Plain, it does end his life: Edu-
ardo, who speaks English to John Grady, murders him. In All the Pretty
Horses John Grady Cole’s registers of identity eventually bring us full circle,
back to his mother’s desertion. After being rejected by a potential bride,
imprisoned by her father, and shot by his jailor, just before he crosses the
river, going north: “he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child”
(Pretty Horses 282).

All the Pretty Horses as a Narrative of Return

When his mother moved to California John Grady compensated for his iso-
lation by socializing with those whom were receptive and compassionate to
him. In this way, Cole’s trip to Mexico is a traditional narrative of return.
Indeed, the many modes of cultural membership that Cole demonstrates
during the journey across the border (and also before he leaves Texas) un-
derscore his optimistic opinion of the idea of Mexican culture; these exist
in his mind and actions as a collective imminence and ongoingness. The
journey across the border is toward an important dimension of his per-
ceived cultural ancestry; but this trip of return has been destabilized though
an actor whose social belongings do not fit the organized, often political,
cultural affiliations.
McCarthy’s text and the others from the Border Trilogy challenge the
paradigms of settler/English-speaking-unhyphenated-American identity
through linguistic, cultural, and in some cases, blood salvos, and indeed, we
might better categorize the trilogy as a trans or postnational body of texts
instead of labeling it part of American literature (hyphenated or not). The
novel examines acts, space, and ethnicity as agencies of identification; the
signifying transmitters of belongingness are not universal, yet the concept of
space as proprietary drives the action, generally from those who are in the
landholding, English-speaking classes, are in control of who belongs and
how they may participate in civic affairs. The farmers, peasants, cowboys,
and prisoners (save the political Whig, Pérez) all fraternize warmly with
 A Coda to Literary Canons  89
Cole, culminating in “estás bienvenido aquí” (Pretty Horses 226)—and the
men of the country coming to his aid on the return north.
But Cole’s social belongings involve affective investments in practices of
sociability and world building that are incompatible with the ascriptions
and conventions of ordinary identity: A postgeographic and postcultural
character, Cole’s social alignment subverts his attempts to situate himself
at the ranches in Mexico and in Texas, despite his salient skills and appar-
ent mobility in both cultural sets. McCarthy employs landscapes, ritual,
language, and multiple social discourses on the protagonist’s flight from
one ranch life to another for their existential qualities, with Cole seemingly
more comfortable immersed in the process of movement than he is situated
in either space. The cultural dynamics of Cole’s journeys (first south, then
north) underscore the instability of the social mores of political and national
concepts, and these form an ironic undercurrent in McCarthy’s iconic bor-
derlands novel.

After the Patriotism of Transnational Criticism

Despite the richness of All the Pretty Horses’s intercultural dimensions, the
traditional transnational patriotic readings of the text have effectively chan-
neled it into a binary artifact, one whose meanings are predetermined by the
shortcomings of established critical perspectives. McCarthy’s book is not
the only work that has been ciphered down into this dialectic—and for that,
often inaccurate—discourses: the corpus from Hemingway, Poe, Cisneros
and many others have also suffered from these national and transnation-
alizations, and the shortcomings of supposed transpatriotic sentiments as
a mechanism of criticism. These are the materials that form the foundation
of Transnational American Studies, in an academic sense. Perhaps without
intention, cultural artifacts like books and paintings are often brought into
the cultural prescriptions of the dominant discourse when they are institu-
tionalized, canonized, and read as transnational.

Acknowledgments
Parts of this chapter were originally published as “ ‘Mojado Reverso’ or, a
Reverse Wetback: On John Grady Cole’s Mexican Ancestry in Cormac Mc-
Carthy’s All the Pretty Horses,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. Fall. 2015.
469–92.

Notes
1. These are often transnational, and thus national, in their base, a tendency which
elides appreciations of other forms of performance and concepts of community.
2. All texts that have won the award were published in English and in order to be
eligible, “authors must be U.S. citizens,” which is also required of the judges.
90  A Coda to Literary Canons
The guidelines state: “The following are NOT eligible: English translations
of books originally written in other languages” (“Eligibility” National Book
Awards website, emphasis in original, “Mission and History”).
3. A somewhat standardized approach to John Grady Cole’s bilingual nature is that
he learned “Spanish as a second language” (Limón 1998, 193). See also Owens
2011, 65; Sanborn 2006, 176; Cutchins 2006, 295.
4. South Texas and West Texas are sometimes delineated as separate cultural enti-
ties; San Angelo spans both regions.
5. The quest motif has been broadly established as a standard critical approach
to All the Pretty Horses. See Ellis 2006, 100, 205; Tatum 2002, 37; Luce 2002,
156; Jarrett 1997, 100; McGilcrist 2010, 119; Woodson 2011, 25; Guillemin
2001, 103; Owens 2000, 71.
6. The concept of American identity in Texas as described here distinguishes lan-
guages other than English and other cultural modes as binary oppositions to
an imagined (and in many ways imprecise) American cultural order; under-
pinnings about a universal American cultural identity are central to quest
interpretations.
  The overdetermined “American” labeling of All the Pretty Horses has many
unintended consequences: it confines critical reading space and thus constrains
any conclusions to the preordained limits of the a priori categorization. The
reduction of a novel like this to such a category misplaces attention on the inter-
cultural nature of John Grady Cole’s life experience, character, and movement,
and misconstrues the ways that his personal background shaped his actions,
thoughts, interactions with others, and his perceived and performed cultural
identities.
7. The critical discourses creates Cole’s “Americanness”—and McCarthy’s genius
in this novel, like that of David Foster Wallace, is in this playful disregard for the
controls of institutionalization.
8. Despite the bilingual and bicultural nature of the Grady homestead, the
term Anglo and its linguistic associations dominate the conventional critical
approaches to the family (See King 2004, 50; Aldama 2013, 76; Hage 2010, 26;
Carr 2007, 32).
9. A somewhat standardized approach to John Grady Cole’s bilingual nature is that
he learned “Spanish as a second language” (Limón 1998, 193; see also: Owens
2000, 65; Sanborn 2006, 176; Cutchins 2006, 295).
10. In the film version of The Road, the town of Hemingway, South Carolina,
appears conspicuously on the coast of the map in the protagonist’s hands. In
reality, the town of Hemingway is thirty miles inland.
11. For a chronology of births, deaths, and other events in the novel, see James Bell’s
“Contextualizing Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.”
  A possible namesake for John Grady was killed on horseback at the Battle
of Gettysburg: “John Grady was killed at the battle of Gettysburg when a wild
horse he was riding ran into the Union Army troops who thought he was charg-
ing them” (“The John Grady I Descendents of Virginia” 1973, 151). Another
John Grady, possibly a namesake as well, was the first North Carolinian killed
in the Revolutionary War. As Patsy Boyette comments, “Caswell of Lenoir was
returning from the Battle of Moore’s Creek, he stopped at my grandfather’s (old
Bud Grady) house and told them about their relative (John Grady) being killed.
Caswell told them he was so brave, so resolute that he did not exercise the
prudence that he ought and consequently was killed while exposing himself to
danger” (parentheses in original 1999, 1+).
12. This is also the case of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. There are many icons
of US culture with non-Latin surnames who speak Spanish and have been
 A Coda to Literary Canons  91
significantly influenced by Latin culture. In addition to Texans Matthew McCo-
naughey and Tommy Lee Jones, others in this category include Maya Angelou,
Ted Williams, Al Gore, Ernest Hemingway, Jeb Bush, Ben and Casey Affleck,
Matt Damon, Will Smith, Bradley Nowell, Mitt Romney, Rob Gronkowski,
Kobe Bryant, Kate Bosworth, Gwyneth Paltrow, Landon Donovan, David Lee
Roth, Billy the Kidd, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and John Wayne. Like
Ernest Hemingway, John Wayne spoke Spanish at home during much of his
adult life; he requested that his tombstone be inscribed in that language (Cande-
laria 2001, 4).
13. The color yellow represents death in Mexico, and it is used with this symbolism
in the novel. John Grady observes the “yellowed mustache” on his grandfather
at the velorio (Pretty Horses 3), “a yellow scrap of newsprint” reports the deaths
of the male Gradys (Pretty Horses 6); and “yellow mexicanhat” is by the road-
side the last time he rides with his father (Pretty Horses 22).
14. This critical approach is linked to the standardization of quest as the accepted
critical frame (see endnote 3).
15. Despite that, Luisa addresses and refers to Cole’s mother as “señora”—even
after her divorce is finalized (Pretty Horses 4, 15).
16. The Mexicanization of English-speaking families in Texas has not come to an
end in recent decades. Robert Francis O’Rourke (mayor of El Paso) was born
in El Paso and is of Irish decent; he is culturally Mexican-American, fluent in
English and Spanish, and his nickname—“Beto”—is a common Spanish-language
moniker for those with names ending in “Berto”—such as Roberto, Rigoberto,
Norberto, Alberto, and so on. Cormac McCarthy is of Irish decent, fluent in
English and Spanish, and resided in El Paso when the text was written.
17. Critics have described Mexico as “alien and is (literally) consumed as such
in entirely stereotypical ways, by the incoming adventurers” (Messent 1994,
96) and “a blank screen upon which he can project an image of himself as
true-hearted lover and powerfully righteous avenger” (Carr 2007, 32). The cen-
tral shortcoming in these readings is the binary treatment of Mexico and Texas,
which injects an imagined separation into what is one community north and
south of the political border.
18. A central shortcoming in these readings is the binary treatment of Mexico and
Texas, which injects an imagined separation into what is one community north
and south of the political border.
19. “Concho” is the name of the river and fort in San Angelo; in Spanish concho
means “dregs” and can be used idiomatically to mean “to go down” or “to
sink”; when used as an adjective in reference to a person, it can mean “bump-
kin” or “hick.”
20. “The Royal Theatre [in San Angelo] had the balcony reserved for minorities
where the north section was for Mexicans, the south for African Americans and
the ground level was exclusively for whites. The St. Angelus Theatre did not
allow minorities in at all, for it had no balcony to accommodate them” (Guer-
rero 1999, 58).
21. Ozona, Texas, also figures prominently in All the Pretty Horses. John Grady
appears before the judge in the township, which has been described as: “Jim
Crow for Mexicans. In this town, drugstores were closed to Mexicans until
the late 1940s; restaurants and movie houses did not open to Mexicans until
the early 1950s; hotels were exclusively reserved for Anglo patrons until about
1958 . . . the bowling alley, cemeteries, and swimming pools still remained seg-
regated [in the 1970s]” (Montejano 1987, 285–286).
22. The reader is told on two occasions that Alejandra has blue eyes (Pretty Horses
109, 243), but John Grady’s physical features are not directly mentioned in the
92  A Coda to Literary Canons
text. The reader is informed, though, that he is shorter (or at least has shorter
arms) than Rawlins, who is five foot eleven (Pretty Horses 163). When shopping
for new clothes in La Vega, “[t]hey sorted through the stacks to find one with
sleeves long enough for Rawlins” (Pretty Horses 120).
23. In Texas, John Grady prefers to take his meals in the kitchen with Luisa and
Arturo, but he dines at the formal table when his mother is there.
24. John Grady kills the boy on August 6, 1950, the five-year anniversary of the US
bombing Hiroshima (Bell 2000, 8).
25. Two minor characters speak in English to John Grady at the prison. The func-
tion of these interactions is the same: the doctor notes that Cole is a “fasthealer”
(Pretty Horses 205, 206), though his psychological wounds are more profound
than the physical; the commandant, who delivers Alfonsita’s bribe money after
taking some for himself, tells Cole, “You going away to you house” (Pretty
Horses 207). At this point, John Grady does not want to return to Texas but to
marry Alejandra.
26. Incidentally, there is a social capital issue at hand: those characters with the
resources to have studied and become proficient in English are wealthy; they
unilaterally reject him, while the opinion of characters who are monolingual
in Spanish may be summarized in this phrase: “estás bienvenido aquí” (Pretty
Horses 226).
27. On two occasions in the text “coyotes”—which is a colloquial term for those
who guide undocumented people into the US—are mentioned to the south, one
is “hollerin for you” in reference to the boys (Pretty Horses 14, 91).
28. Jack Kerouac was in Mexico in 1950, too, and both On the Road and All the
Pretty Horses end in 1951, the centennial year of Moby-Dick’s publication. Neal
Cassidy, the character on whom Dean Moriarty is based, died in Mexico as does
John Grady Cole (Brinkley 2007, 844–845). Kerouac would write about that
event in a poem called “Mexico City Blues.”
29. Blevins, like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, is named for St. James, the
apostle of Jesus. The patron saint of Spain, Santiago “The Moorslayer” is said
to have appeared mounted on a great horse during a battle against the Moors
during the Reconquest. The Camino de Santiago, or Way of St. James, across
northern Spain was an important pilgrimage in medieval times. “Back in the
old days,” Blevins remarks at a roadside, “you had a lot more travelers” (Pretty
Horses 57). Rawlins comments on how out of place these observations are from
a young boy.
  Santiago and his legendary horse also have an important role in Mexican
folklore. While Blevins is petrified of lightning, “Santiago is widely known in
central Mexican villages today as ‘the son of thunder’ ” (Taylor 1996, 672).
The figure is not always revered and the recognition of St. James sometimes
takes “the form of disrespect of the saint—ridiculing him, defeating him in
mock combat, and promoting his horse as the object of devotion and source
of power” (Taylor 1996, 298). It is Santiago’s horse, rather than the man, that
is often an icon of reverie in Mexico: “the attention was increasingly drawn to
his horse, as if the animal had become the saint” (Taylor 276). These traditions
sometimes involve ceremonial violence. “Santiago would ride through the vil-
lage hitting Indians with the flat side of his sword . . . the dance ended with
people surging forward to manhandle the ‘saint’ ” (Taylor 1996, 276–277).
In these treatments the saint himself “escaped many times but was eventually
captured, taken off his horse, and humiliated . . . [the] struggle against him was
sanctioned by the judgment of kings” (Taylor 1996, 676). In the novel, Blevins
is reunited with Rawlins and Cole in the prison in Encantada on July 25, 1950,
the feast day of St. James.
 A Coda to Literary Canons  93
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200th Birthday.” San Angelo Standard Times September 15. 1+.
5 Art and Power

Art is part of the ecosystem of ideology. The ways ideas are given physical
form (in paintings, buildings, photography, currency, and so on) and the
structure of the environment where these objects are displayed for public re-
view, are a dimension of how the dominant groups use physical and nonver-
bal entities to promote and legitimize sets of ideas, as well as to inaugurate
specific affiliations and cultural norms. Visual images have a singular power
that differs somewhat from messages embedded in literary narrative; visual
imagery often attempts to seize primal, innate urges of the viewer for specific
responses. This discussion of the power of art has two conceptual bases: the
function of state art, or the use of visual imagery to promote the situated
understandings of cultural proprietorship (under auspices of transnational
myths) to residents of spaces claimed by the US political body and, second,
a reflection on how individual artists exposed to spaces saturated with myth
(physical spaces like cities and abstract ones, like literature), use art as a
mode to interact with, promote, disregard, or play with the aesthetic notions
that have been institutionalized by the cultural arms of the US political body.
Art offers a way of seeing (and thus understanding) people, places, com-
munities, and cultures. It can inform our consciousness and sense of our
surroundings; it is a device through which we are lead to entertain and expe-
rience specific feelings. To that end, visual forms can be organized with non-
verbal hierarchies; power and influence can be conveyed through the use of
light, gesture, action, negative space, and location on the canvas or screen,
among many other creative resources that artists employ to construct mean-
ing. These concepts are regularly seized by transnational (state and non-state)
actors for their evocative qualities. These visual forms, when unpacked in
transnational interests, often attempt to construct authority, sense of com-
munity, and subordination from those who are exposed to them.

Art and the Psychology of Prestige, Awe,

and Subordinate Subjects
Many state images constructed in forms that strive engage “prestige,” a
concept that Keltner and Haidt have located as part of the human psyche.
 Art and Power  97
It appears that people are innately programmed to respond to certain types
of stimuli, such that people have “hard-wired, pre-cultural sets of responses
that were shaped by evolution and built into the central nervous systems”
(2003, 306). The state seizes aesthetics like immense size, unusual height, and
symmetry in its visual symbols as a device to reinforce the hierarchies that
the material represents. The physical nature of the cultural artifacts, thus,
produces a psychological and physical response (heightened spatial aware-
ness, fear, and trepidation), which are forms of stimuli generally associated
with the presence of a dangerous entity. “Theorists agree,” note Keltner and
Haidt, that these experiences are marked by “feelings of submission” (2003,
303). Some of the most salient examples of state-commissioned art, in this
sense, use fear and awe as communicative mechanisms.1
A series of experiments by Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman examined how
people who had just experienced awe describe their feelings: the partici-
pants were likely to be unconscious of their day-to-day anxieties and to
believe that they were in the company of something greater than themselves;
they generally wanted the experience to continue, felt associated with the
objects that gave them awe, and had a sensation of being small or insignifi-
cant (2007, 944–963). As a function of awe and prestige, the characteristic
images commissioned or sanction by the US political body (several of which
are discussed in this chapter) attempt to restrict the interpretive capacity
of the viewer and to subordinate her or him to the messages embedded in
the material. The physical nature of the state’s material culture can—and,
in fact, intends to—constrain a person’s capacity to understand their sur-
roundings. The individual, when experiencing such circumstances, has his
or her mental representation of the world altered in order to accommodate
the new experience:

[W]e involves a challenge to or negation of mental structures when they

fail to make sense of an experience of something vast. Such experiences
can be disorienting and even frightening . . . since they make the self
feel small, powerless and confused. They also often involve feelings of
enlightenment and even rebirth . . . We stress that awe involves a need
for accommodation.
(Keltner and Haidt 2003, 304)

In this way, state symbol can cause the viewer or receiver to be in a hyp-
notic state in which her or his cognitive faculties are partially paralyzed.
This circumstance, note Keltner and Haidt, “reinforces and justifies social
hierarchies by motivating commitment to [the narrative], countervailing
self-interested attempts to overturn the social hierarchy” (2003, 307–308).
Awe has been described as a “peak experience” that differs from other
conditions. Abraham Maslow has linked awe and “peak experiences” to
specific psychosomatic conditions, like disorientation; ego transcendence
and self-forgetfulness; a perception that the world is good, beautiful and
98  Art and Power
desirable; passive, receptive, and humble sentiments; and a sense that polari-
ties and dichotomies have been transcended or resolved (Corsini 1998, 21).
The US political body attempts to contrive these circumstances through
visual images: promoting the myth of the dominant culture with physical
material that, conceivably, facilitates a “peak experience” linked to the
objects, allows the images to function as implementation mechanisms of the
ideology that the images supposedly embody.

Art Promoted as Representative by the US Political Body

The art of the US political body provides images that accompany and sup-
port the overarching narrative of rights (political, social, and cultural) for
certain demographics while mutually excluding others from the same civic
status. The images often involve aesthetics articulated by those who enjoy
rights in the system; the visual images of the US political body thus often
offer visual testament of what (or who) a “true” citizen is (per the state
narrative) and what communities, and which cultures, are aesthetically ap-
propriate (i.e., foreign vis-à-vis domestic) in that space. In spaces recently
invaded or annexed by the US political body, the art of the imperial program
is a cultural supplement to political appropriation. The symbols and images
are cultural representations of political claims. While cultural warfare some-
times employs direct controls such as censure and prohibition, more often it
is a soft and passive exercise of power.
While the visual images commissioned (or otherwise supported) by
the US political body are varied and span many disciplines—from cloth-
ing and museums to portrait paintings, fireworks, and typefaces2—a com-
mon thread in each is to promote the authority and legitimacy of what the
images symbolize. The widespread inundation of images that support the
notions expressed by the US political body intend to construct authority
(thus the consent of residents exposed to them) without the requirement
to demonstrate that they are appropriate and/or representative of the com-
munity in ethical, moral, or democratic senses; the images attempt to elide
entanglements of democratic representation by seizing some of the innate,
psychological responses (inferiority and subordination) that people tend to
have when in the presence of the style of imagery used. This type of irra-
tional influence has been termed “Charismatic Authority” by Max Weber
(Adair-Totef 2005). These are some characteristics that are common to this
school of visual image:3

Size Large Scale (Larger Than the Viewer) and Broad Scope

People have innate responses to large objects; enormous physical objects
have been termed “natural fear triggers” (Ohman 2010, 84). As the art of
the US political body is not generally presented in aggressive stances (with
some exceptions, such as the eagle and military art), the scale of the objects
 Art and Power  99
intends to arouse awe in the viewer—and its associated subordination and
relinquishment of rational interpretation. Unnecessarily enormous size is
common in Federal Buildings (Federal Architecture School), urbanscapes
(National Mall), fireworks displays, ship design (often battleships and air-
craft carriers and inclusively other marine craft of state use), stadia, statues
(Liberty, Gateway Arch, Mount Rushmore, etc.), and natural phenomena
that have been appropriated and used as art, such as mountains (Pikes Peak,
in particular), plains (sometimes of wheat), rivers (the Grand Canyon and
Mississippi), and oceans (on both coasts). This school of design uses size to
construct a specific and intentionally irrational behavioral response from
the viewer.

Color Dark Tones; Red, White and Blue

The human psyche is structured to respond to different color schemes with
certain behaviors. Color theory asserts that tones and tints of images can
influence mood (and thus comportment) in the same way that the size of
an object can provoke similar responses. Red has been shown to increase
metabolism, blood pressure and rate of breathing; it is often used to indicate
danger (in traffic lights, for instance). White, by contrast, is often delim-
ited as a symbol of safety and positivity. Blue, particularly dark shades, are
generally understood to symbolize depth and stability. Blue has also been
shown to slow metabolism, lower blood pressure, and suppress appetite; it
is often described as a “masculine” color in symbolism, one that is accepted
by males (Cardiello 2012; Wolchover 2012).
Dark tones are also important to state employment of color, particularly
in clothing worn by representative of the political entity. Black is frequently
worn by such representatives, such as police, judges, and diplomatic posts
(consuls). Black has been associated with aggression and, like size, intends
to evoke a subordinate response from the viewer. Height (above viewer)
and clothing color (usually dark tones) are often combined for this reaction:
judges and consuls tend to sit on platforms above the non-state individual,
in black robes or other dark combination, to charge the interaction with
the supposed superiority of the state office (Wright 2008; Cardiello 2012).

Symmetry Buildings, Seals, Urbanscapes

Gesalt Theory states that the humans organize reality in forms that are sym-
metrical, orderly, and simple. Symmetric constructions, particularly bilat-
eral images, can evoke a sense of completeness that is understood to be both
stable and harmonious (Tuck 2010). The art of the US political body often
employs symmetry to effect a constant and orderly sensation in relation to
the objects and what they symbolize. Such constructions often appear on an
enormous scale, such as in the National Mall, the White House, and parks
around monuments, and on smaller scale in oft-reproduced images, such
100  Art and Power
as the Five-Pointed Star, monetary currency, and state seals. Symmetry also
can suggest a sterile rigidity; this sense of inflexibility, in the context of US
political imagery, lends an anesthetized (and thus unchangeable) quality, to
the ideas that the images represent.

Iconic Person: Male, Apparently of European Descent, often

Middle-Aged (ostensibly Christian and English-speaking) as
Icon of the Community as a Whole
The omnipresence of a middle-aged man as an icon is an overdetermined
characteristic in the art sanctioned and commissioned by the US political
body. The repetition of such an image (be it of Uncle Sam, the supposed
Founding Fathers, or presidents 1–43) on currency, signs, posters, paintings,
monuments, mountains, webpages, and so on, underscores a nonrepresen-
tative power hierarchy that the US political body strives to maintain, as
expressed through visual media.

Blandness Lackluster, Unexciting Scenes

Much of the art of the US political body involves unenergetic, languid im-
ages that could be described as aesthetically bland. The plainness of such
scenes is constructed through apathetic expressions on the faces of usually
men of European descent, which are particularly common in supposedly his-
torical paintings. The dreary scene imbues the events treated with a sense of
certainty and inevitability—that these incidents were meant to occur, form
the destiny of the communities in the spaces treated, and are unchangeable.

Appropriation Motifs of Conquered Peoples as

Dominant Aesthetics
The US political body has appropriated a significant amount of iconogra-
phy, language, and cultural motifs from conquered peoples, and integrated
them as components of the dominant aesthetic. The employment of these
images attempts to interpellate them with the supposedly settled and stable
cultures of the dominant group; this occasionally involves projection of an
appropriated cultural good in a space where it is not useful or typical. For
instance, the cowboy hat is a device that is used to shade the head and shoul-
ders while on horseback; it was modified from the headgear common in the
south of Spain for use in the Americas. This article of clothing was adopted
by laborers in regions claimed by the Spanish and then Mexican political
bodies and was subsequently embraced by affiliates of the US political body
who resided in the same areas. This hat has been broadly appropriated and
is presented to represent the cultural interests of the US political body in
places that belay its functional purpose, such as on George W. Bush’s head
in Washington.
 Art and Power  101
Appropriation and the Creation of Nostalgia:
“History” Paintings
The art of the US political body, like its literary mores, strives to codify
the presence, action, and cultures of non-native peoples in the continental
space. It attempts to construct a settled, pacific, and supposedly historical
image of non-native peoples in the spaces claimed by the US political body
so as to legitimize the action of the conquering and occupying peoples. The
images are used as a form of storytelling, a visual form of narration that
imbues positive energies and supposed virtue to the existence and assertions
of the US political body.
The US political body has commissioned thousands of paintings, some of
which are intended to depict historical events, such as the presence of invad-
ing peoples and their interactions the communities they have conquered.
Penn’s Treaty with the Indians by Benjamin West, for instance, frames the
occupation of an eastern region of the continent by non-native residents.
The displacement of the native peoples is presented as a dignified, orderly,
and compassionate event. The anesthetized image of the treaty was com-
posed nearly a century after the event took place; it has sanitized the bloody
and contested occupation into an insipid glimpse of nearly expressionless
people. In this fictionalization, the newcomers are dressed in black and dark
tones and are positioned on the canvas above the Native Americans, who
are nearly naked (a near impossibility because of the climate of Pennsylva-
nia in November) and leaning down in subservience. The ease and indolent
nature of the scene expressly contradicts the horrific nature of the invasion
and conquest. This often-reprinted work frames the interaction between the
assailing communities and Native Americans into a pacific and sympathetic
exchange. It is on display at the Pennsylvania State Museum.
John Trumbull’s Rotunda Paintings in the US Capitol Building have
comparable storylines and use a similar blandness as the piece about Wil-
liam Penn’s fictionalized interaction with Native Americans. The character-
istic dullness of the Rotunda images attempts to infuse the representations
of domination and change with a sense of normalcy. The themes of these
works, arguably the most important art of the US political body, are the
forced acculturation of Native Americans (Baptism of Pocahontas), dec-
laration that the US political body is to be understood as the dominant
colonial presence on the continent (Declaration of Independence), first
European incursion of a river (Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto),
colonizers departing for conquest (Embarkation of the Pilgrims), a militant
invader joins another colonizing political body (General George Wash-
ington Resigning His Commission), European incursion by ship (Land-
ing of Columbus), surrender of colonizers to other invaders (Surrender of
General Burgoyne and Surrender of Lord Cornwallis). Possibly the most
ridiculous component of the Rotunda is the image of George Washington
dressed in a toga, which adorns the ceiling; Andrew Graham-Dixon has
102  Art and Power
called this painting a “truly absurd baroque flourish of a fresco” one that
shows the apotheosis of Washington “in his purple toga, being wafted up
to heaven. It’s a true deep-pan Peter of a picture” (“Art of America” 2011).
What is important to emphasize here is that these nonsensical depictions
are codified as esteemed events; they continue to be venerated; and they
continued to be taught in classrooms as historical—which is to say nonfic-
tion. The wall friezes in the same chamber emphasize the same preposter-
ously nonrepresentative take on the attempted cultural appropriation of
the continent.4
Another important historical painting commissioned by the US political
body is Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way (also known as West-
ward Ho!). This propaganda piece was commissioned in correlation with
the Homestead Act of 1861 and is displayed aside governmental chambers
in Washington DC. The image intends to attract citizens and other affiliates
of the US political body to colonize recently-invaded regions that had been
put under martial law, so as to facilitate the cultural cleansing of the space
into the cultural geography of the US metropolitan. The canvas explicitly
posits several phases of Cultural Conquest thus far discussed here, including
the arrival of

1)  Merchants Lewis and Clark

2)  Military Cavalry soldiers
3)  Political Affiliates Feral US affiliates (Families in covered
wagons constructing colonial settlement)

In a departure from the generally dull ambience of other state art, the people
treated in Westward the Course of Empire have enthusiastic, colorful expres-
sions; many gesture to the left (“west” as per the presumptive geographic
center) in celebration that non-native peoples who are affiliated with the US
political body are in that space. Unlike the Rotunda paintings and friezes,
this mural concerns the future: it treats an occupation and cultural cleansing
that in large part had yet to occur.5 (It was painted in 1861 when 97% of
the population of the US political body—i.e., citizens—resided east of the
Missouri River.) The US political body continues to actively propagate the
myths thus far outlined here; the official textual descriptions of these col-
lections in the US Capitol are laden with terms like pioneer (for colonizer/
feral affiliate), legendary courage (for inconceivable brutality), explorer (for
merchant), survey (for incursion), and settlement (for colonization). The
description of Westward Ho! on the US political body’s “Explore Capitol
Hill” website reads:

Emanuel Leutze’s mural celebrates the western expansion of the

United States. A group of pioneers and their train of covered wagons
are pictured at the continental divide, looking towards the sunset and
the Pacific Ocean. The border depicts vignettes of exploration. . . .
The [Course of Empire] mural’s border features portraits of pioneers
 Art and Power  103
William Clark (on the left) and Daniel Boone (on the right). William
Clark (1770–1838), accompanied by Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809),
led a federal survey of the Oregon Territory from 1804 to 1806, open-
ing the way for western settlement. Daniel Boone (1734–1820) explored
the Kentucky region and displayed legendary courage in battles against
the British and Indians. Beneath Clark’s and Boone’s portraits are quo-
tations from Jonathan M. Sewall’s prologue and epilogue, respectively,
to Cato, A Tragedy by Joseph Addison.
(“Paintings and Murals” 2014)

Citizen as Colonist: State Imagery in Spaces

Annexed since 1848
While much of the art of the political body’s imperial program had an ap-
propriative capacity before 1848, since the Guadalupe Hidalgo seizure,
the use of visual images to advertise and legitimize the colonizer’s social
prescriptions has been particularly acute. (The region in question is pres-
ently claimed by both the US political body and Mexican cultural affiliates.)
The metropolitan military forces (and later, colonists who were often po-
litical citizens) implemented their language, political systems, holidays and
sports, and created the image of a southwestern “citizen” in the likeness
of a colonist from the US political body. The “Great Seal” of Arizona, for
instance, has George Warren, a man from Massachusetts, holding a shovel
and pickaxe; the “territory seal” is Warren with a hoe. Both images have
inscriptions in English. In spite of continued metropolitan colonization
and constant legislative attempts to implement that language, the results
have been mixed. In 1911 fewer than 10% of New Mexicans could speak
English (Chisholm 1911, 523). In “Crossing National and Creating Cultural
Borders,” Thomas Weaver points out that prior to becoming incorporated
in the US political metropolitan as a state in 1912, Arizona’s political affili-
ation with was delayed because of “the high ‘Mexican population,’ which
was considered not capable of [US] citizenship” (1994, 46). In the course
of the US occupation of areas seized in 1848—which continues today—
non-US (Mexican, in particular) iconography, language, and cultural mores
have been systematically cleansed from the public sphere.6
Another aesthetic outcome of the US political body’s conquests since
1848, and inclusively prior, has been the appropriation of cultural symbol
and imagery from the subordinated peoples. Cultural appropriation itself
has been defined with several dimensions: exchange, dominance, exploita-
tion, and transculturation (Rogers 2006). During the military occupation
and ensuing cultural engineering of the spaces, two of these categories of
appropriation—dominance and exploitation—are of particular impor-
tance to state power. As the US political body imposes a cultural order
onto the conquered society (and onto immigrant communities), part of the
social superiority is constructed through incorporating the images of the
104  Art and Power
subordinate community; violent domination of one community or cultural
set over the other is a requisite condition for this phenomenon to occur.7
The appropriation of Native American icons by the US political body
has been (and continues to be) an important part of culturally engineering
the conquered spaces. The images common to institutional appropriation,
including Native American facial profiles, headdresses, clothing, and food,
are often fetishized and commodified by non-state actors (Kadish 2004).
The image of Kokopelli (a fertile Native American deity), for instance, has
been widely commercialized around the Southwest. The name and image of
this figure appear in restaurants, campgrounds, hotels, and on merchandise
sold at Walmart and other chains. Richard A. Rogers has argued that the
proliferation of this image “articulates intersections of gender, race, and
culture that simultaneously highlight and obscure primitive masculinity and
racial difference, enabling the use of Native American culture and spiritu-
ality to (re)vitalize Euro-American masculinity and promote (neo)colonial
appropriations” (2006). Such use of Native American cultural icons in mar-
keting masks the state violence, degrades the communities represented, and
perpetuates the physical violence of the state by waging a form of cultural
essentialism that further marginalizes the community and functions as an
endeavor to reduce their agency, except in the token, integralist capacity
that state institutions and their neoliberal offshoots often celebrate.

“Migrant Mother”: Codifying Movement as an

Acceptable Response to Poverty
Occasionally the US political body engages photographs as propaganda
tools that endeavor to sanction what are to be understood as acceptable
responses to poverty, drought, and other hardships. Images in this category
of state art are occasionally promoted on a large scale so that they may
transcend their localized, situational contexts and, thus, exist as supposedly
representative icons for the residents of the space in general; this form of
targeted, iconographic promotion by the political body attempts to reduce
the cultural myths as a whole down into one work—and sometimes down
into the image of a single person.
Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photograph of Florence Thompson—often
labeled “Migrant Mother”—was taken as part of the Farm Security Admin-
istration cultural program and has been widely celebrated by the political
body as an iconic moment of the twentieth century. The image codified
many of the myths of appropriation thus far discussed here and engaged
a new dimension of the narrative: acceptable responses to poverty. While
the migrant dimension may not be clear without external guidance of the
title (i.e. “Migrant”), when contextualized as a response to drought and
economic depression, the piece crystalizes the messages regarding the social
proprietorship of space where the mother is seated.
The US political body utilized (and yet utilizes) this image to institutional-
ize a set of targeted myths: it is appropriate—perhaps desirable—and also
 Art and Power  105
legally permissible for people of her apparent demographic (an ostensibly
English-speaking, Christian of European descent, and citizen of the political
body) to move from a place of hardship in the US political space (Oklahoma,
in this case) to another region within the spaces claimed by the political
body (in this case, California) where she or he may legally reside, work, and
participate in civic affairs. That action, moving to west through and within
places claimed by the US political body, is posited as an acceptable response
to hardship and strife, and for that, this picture receives great acclaim. The
“Migrant Mother” myth is demographically specific. The presumed demo-
graphics of the woman (ostensibly a citizen), her background (ostensibly of
European descent), and language (ostensibly English) and where she is and
came from (Oklahoma and California—both spaces claimed by the political
body) are of paramount importance when considering how this image has
been seized and promoted as a mythmaking apparatus.
Had Thompson chosen to move from Oklahoma to Japan, Mexico, or
Canada (places where many residents of the US political space moved to
escape poverty in the 1930s) instead of to California, the picture would be
ungrammatical—and the case of citizens who migrate outside the US politi-
cal space to escape poverty are universally absent from US political art. The
image only has relevance, meaning, and “beauty” as per its capacity to illus-
trate the cultural myths that the US political body desires to promote: it is
acceptable for some citizens in poverty to move—but only to another space
claimed by the political body.
“Migrant Mother” fits the cultural myths of Manifest Destiny and
offers some dynamic symmetry with the image of the ostensibly wealthy,
English-speaking and Christian male celebrated as “Founding Father”; that
situated, iconographic male figure is balanced by Thompson: the impover-
ished maternal character engaged in a migration and the supposedly Chris-
tian act of self-sacrifice (in contrast to the bountiful, static existence of the
“father”). The promotion of this specific demographic is salient to note:
Thompson’s presumed demographic is what makes her story and image
grammatical per the myths of the US political body. If Thompson had been
moving north from south of the political border, instead of west from within
the political space, and she were dressed in a serape rather than Midwestern
farmer vestments, as many in the US political space did at that time, the
image would not have been taken (or, at least, there are no pictures of those
demographics Lange’s reels). If Thompson had spoken Chinese, Spanish,
or a Native American tongue with her children, as many in the fields of
California did, her situation would have been the same, but yet no images
of those demographics exist in Lange’s negatives (save one, which I will
soon discuss). Lange’s employer, the US political body, used—and continues
to use—the photograph of Thompson as a soft-colonial device to establish
rights of movement, residence, appropriate language and religion, and suit-
able responses to poverty during life’s extreme situations. The message is
clear today as it was in 1936: if you are part of the desired demographic,
those freedoms exist, and performing the actions the state has sanctioned in
106  Art and Power
part through such images will be acceptable, legal, and perhaps “beautiful.”
And the dissemination of the photograph caused immediate action:

The photo appeared in the paper soon after that, and prompted
(guilted?) the Feds to send 20,000 pounds of food to the pea picker
camp in Nipomo. . . . So much more than a photo. She represents all
mothers who struggle daily to scratch the ground in what is still a man’s
world. Poverty always hits women and their children the hardest. When
you look through the millennia the mens (sic) get all the credit, but it
has always been the women and the mothers who have ensured our
survival.
(“The Face of the Great Depression” 2008)

This image is so famous perhaps because it captured the struggles of those

affected by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression more generally, which
raised awareness and produced significant monetary support. This was,
ostensibly, Lange’s intention when she took the picture as well, as she
believed that the image would inform the public about the predicament of
poor migrants; this situation made the picture, according to Ben Phelan, “an
instant classic of American photography,” an image that “helped so many”
(2014). These reports, nevertheless, fail to note that the image is part of a
targeted ethnocentric campaign, one that posits the suffering of some above
the suffering of others. This image codifies that movement through spaces
claimed by the US political body is an acceptable course of action—but this
is only the case for privileged demographics.

Demographic Ironies: Migrant Mother’s Mistaken Identity

Decades after “Migrant Mother” was published and years after the photog-
rapher had died, it was revealed that Thompson was not from the migrant
demographic that Lange imagined when she focused the camera on her and
the children. Thompson was born into poverty in an Oklahoma teepee in
1903 (Phelan 2014, 1); while it is unclear when she learned English, she
was likely not a US citizen when the picture was taken. (Native Americans
became eligible for citizenship eleven years before “Migrant Mother” was
taken, but the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 did not include those born
before the legislation was passed.)
And Thompson was not a recent migrant to California. She had moved
there in 1920, four years before the Indian Citizenship Act and sixteen years
before the picture was taken. Thompson was a poor migrant, though she did
not fit the idealistic demographic that Lange had in mind when she opened
and closed the shutter. It is unclear whether Lange would have put her cam-
era on Thompson in the first place had she offered her birth name instead
of Thompson, spoken to Lange in a language other than English, dawned
Native American vestments, or held her infant child in a cradleboard. While
 Art and Power  107
political citizenship, clothing or language, would not change Thompson’s
humanity, these symbols would influence how she fits (or does not fit)
into the cultural myths that the US political body was striving to promote
through widespread celebration of her image.
Despite Lange’s ignorance of Thompson’s background, the photographer
went on to enjoy fame and some fortune, and a Guggenheim Fellowship,
among other prizes. Thompson went on to carry her children around with
her in paper bags for several years while she worked the fields of the San
Joaquin Valley. Thompson said that she felt “exploited” by Lange and tried
to block the publication of the image. “I wish she hadn’t taken my pic-
ture. . . . She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a
copy. She never did” (qtd. in Gross 1991). The myths that were and are pro-
moted through the celebration of “Migrant Mother” were also codified and
institutionalized in literary disciplines—a notable example is The Grapes of
Wrath, which won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize.

Governmental Expressions of Community:

National Museums
National museums offer institutionalized presentations of cultural material.
The state-designed arenas display visual objects in an effort to create a form
of “knowledge”; the selection and exhibition of objects in a national gallery
presumes a center, and in this way a national museum subsumes whatever
objects are on display as already appropriated into the mythic narrative.
The process of cultural exposition has been described by Brian Durrans as
a method to

distort and hence mask the oppression of the cultures they supposedly
represent; and their ideological messages appear as “truth” because mu-
seums do not or cannot reveal to their publics the actual choices and
negotiations through which cultures are (mis)represented in particular
objects or displays.
(2005)

Museum objects are exhibited in an anesthetized, sterile form of staging

that is intentionally rebellious to interpretation; the viewer is not to ana-
lyze or interpret what is before her or him. This institutionalized back-
drop is a powerful site where, as Steven Conn has noted, “knowledge is
given shape through the use of objects” (2009, 5). The “knowledge” that
the objects fetishize is a version of history that generally celebrates the
myths of the US political body and minorities the images of “others” (e.g.,
non-affiliates thereof) who reside in the same space. The exhibition hall
is a place where this version of knowledge is given shape, character, and
context; the objects are visual cues that supplement the state’s cultural and
political narratives.
108  Art and Power
In this sense, regardless of the type of objects on exhibition at a national
museum, the institution is an indoctrination project: the version of “facts”
about the communities, cultures, technologies, arts, and histories of the resi-
dents of the continental space is codified by the museum into an institutional
“truth”; Conn has argued that the point of a state gallery is “to remind
people of what they already [should know] or that they knew. . . . They are
[also] there to tell people about things they may not know, things they have
forgotten or never learned” (2009, introduction). Perhaps more accurate,
the purpose of a museum is to construct a certain knowledge and type of
truth about the cultures of the communities claimed by the political body,
through visual objects.8
It seems an objective of these controlled cultural projections (in history,
art, language, industry, and the many other themes of national museums)
is to construct a center or an unhyphenated-American characteristic from
which the items on display are to be judged; this center–periphery relation,
this hierarchy among cultures (some belong; others are “different”) is the
purpose of exhibiting the objects in an institutionalized setting. As Conn has
observed, “the very notion of ‘difference’—defined at an altitude-defying
level of abstraction—is at the heart of the entire museum enterprise” (2009,
introduction).

Monumentalizing Dead Colonists

This state often monumentalizes certain objects, even dead bodies, as “his-
toric”—and thus introduces them as touchstones in the social narrative that
concerns the culture of the community as a whole. In 2012 a construction
crew in Deadwood, South Dakota uncovered the remains of a man (ostensi-
bly a colonist) who was buried there in the 1870s, before the area had been
integrated into the metropolitan as a state. National media and historic of-
ficials descended on the site, turning the finding into an archaeological and
cultural event.
Substantial public funds have been allotted to examine the body and
tomb; so far a team of archaeologists has found “99 percent of his skel-
eton, save for one tooth and a few small finger and toe bones.” The effort
to ascertain the circumstances of this man’s presence there has involved a
forensics teams from Atlanta, Austin, Fort Collins, and Dallas, and the state
universities of California and South Dakota. “Right here in Deadwood
we’ve inadvertently found this early pioneer,” Historic Preservation Officer
Kevin Kuchenbecker reports. “It’s remarkable. It’s beyond words” (qtd. in
Griffith 2014). The detail and comprehensiveness of the forensics under-
score the cultural importance of the area’s annexation by the US political
body; the celebration of these physical remains reiterates many state nar-
ratives about the invasion and subsequent colonization and attempted cul-
tural appropriation of the region. The skeletal remains denote that he was
 Art and Power  109
“5-foot-4 to 5-foot-8, white and 18 to 24 years of age at the time of his
death”; the report continues:

Dr. Lennard Hopper took digital X-rays of the teeth and jawbone of the
remains he has labeled ‘Jackson’ in his files. Those X-rays were sent to
forensic dentist Thomas David of Atlanta, whose recent report revealed
the man was a habitual tobacco user and that he chewed on his right
side, based on the wear on his teeth.
(Griffith 2014)

As tobacco consumption has a distinctive role in the culture of the coloniz-

ing community, the finding was particularly important to the researchers:
“That little piece right there, based on this one report, allows us to put a
plug of tobacco in his right cheek,” Michael Runge said. “That little piece
of evidence adds to the all-encompassing look of who this individual really
was” (qtd. in Griffith 2014). The study of the remains will continue: isoto-
pic analysis has been scheduled by forensic anthropologist Dr. Eric Bartelink
of California State University–Chico, an examination that will shed more
light on the man’s diet and places of residence. The South Dakota School
of Mines & Technology will carry out a spectral analysis of the tooth fill-
ings, and a team in Fort Worth will run a DNA breakdown. Angie Ambers
notes that “[r]esearchers will begin to put a face on the man who died of
unknown causes in Deadwood’s earliest days . . . [the research will deter-
mine] the man’s hair, eye and skin color.” There is also a plan to make a
cast of the man’s skull in order to realize a facial reconstruction. “What
we’re doing is taking the skeletal remains and piecing together the life of a
man who lived 140 years ago,” Runge commented. “We’re using modern
forensic technologies to help piece together the life of this individual” (qtd.
in Griffith 2014).
Why is the life of this individual so important? In 2006, the remains of
a man who believed to be “either an American Indian or Chinese man”
were found in Deadwood, not far from the remains of supposed colonist.
Terry Gray of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe led the reburial ceremony in Mount
Moriah Cemetery. No studies were carried out; no public monies descended
on Deadwood to parse the diet, clothing, or background of the man; no
forensic teams arrived from universities in distant states; and media outlets,
even the local news (save Indian Country News), offered almost no coverage
(“130-Year-Old Remains” 2010). Why aren’t studies carried out when the
state encounters remains of Native American or Spanish-speaking residents in
spaces claimed by the US political body? What if the remains had been found
beside a Koran or the Vedas, or if the headstone were inscribed in French?
If the remains were presumed to be of an African- or Asian-American, a
female, someone with a disability, or a non-hetero sexual; would they merit
the same consideration, expenditure, and widespread attention?
110  Art and Power
The ridiculous level of detail and privilege—even after death—given
to the supposed colonist gives the academic and forensic studies of the
human remains a color of celebration: the dead body affirms the state’s
myths and gives a nuance to the cultural narrative; for that reason it mer-
its state funds, attention from the national media, and, conceivably, the
construction of a museum in its honor. So work the cultural myths of
the US political body: an event is historicized and institutionalized, made
scientific and empirical, celebrated and placed into a museum. The dead
body has been appropriated as a state symbol—and as a piece of art:
its teeth, diet, and hair color are infused with meaning. The presence of
a man (but only a man, and only a man of his apparent language, reli-
gion, and cultural background) in that space is monumentalized by the
state. Its “importance” is to be repeated in museums and possibly history
books—celebrated as representative of the society of the spaces claimed
by the US political body.

Monuments, Passports, State Seals, and Currency

There are many similar fetishizations that appear in other propaganda
images sponsored by the US political body, such as passports (and pass-
port applications), currency, seals, and traditional monuments. The
2016 US passports have eleven representations of ostensibly Christian,
English-speaking people (shown in spaces claimed by the US political
body), four landscapes, one Native American image, and one portrayal of
outer space. The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was an image of a
Native American holding a bow and arrow, saying, “Come over and help
us.” A coin in circulation from 1858 to 1909 had the image of a Roman
head (from the Philadelphia Museum of Art) in Native American head-
dress; on another occasion, the US mint produced a coin with the image
of a Sioux chief who was adorned with Pawnee headdress. Native Ameri-
can images occasionally appeared on currency in the twentieth century,
though many of the commemorating coins celebrate events in the coloniza-
tion process, including the veneration of the invasion of Missouri (1921),
cultural cleansing in the Western Territories (Oregon Trail, 1926–39), the
invasion of Kentucky (Daniel Boone, 1934–8), the invasion of Arkansas
(1935–9), cultural cleansing in Rhode Island and on Long Island (both
1936). A female Native American did not appear on any currency until the
twenty-first century (Wacks 2010).
The largest monument (aside from cityscapes and park malls) financed
by the US political body is Mount Rushmore, which enjoys National Park
status and its affiliated funding. The enormous monument stamps the
landscape of an area seized through a military invasion with the faces of
four colonial leaders. The nearby Crazy Horse Monument commemo-
rates Native American cultures of the area; it has received (and rejected)
offers federal funding: the amount offered for the Crazy Horse project
 Art and Power  111
by the US government was just over half of the amount granted for the
construction of the Rushmore propaganda images (“Crazy Horse Press
Release” 2003).

Non-State Sponsored Art of Empire and Patriation:

The Hudson River School
The myths of the US political body also appear in art not directly financed
by the state. For instance, the themes and subjects treated in some artistic
movements, like The Hudson River School, have very close parallels to the
cultural assertions of the US political body. The treatments in this school
are almost identical to the state-sponsored paintings thus far discussed in
this chapter theme, form, and occasionally, titles. Thomas Cole is gener-
ally understood as the founder of the movement; his work tends to em-
ploy: blandness, an iconic person or persons (nearly always male, ostensibly
English-speaking and Christian), attention to symmetry, and an enormous
scale. For example, in “The Course of Empire” (1833–36), arguably his
most notable series, is a group of three canvases that treat the three Phases
of Conquest and attempted cultural appropriation of the regions claimed by
the US political body: The Savage State involves Native Americans at the
moment when merchants (explorers) arrive in search of resources (Phase
I of the Cultural Conquest). This is followed by The Arcadian or Pastoral
State, which shows the same scene, apparently decades later, with a single
colonist—ostensibly an English-speaking Christian man—seated alongside
a river. The region appears to have been annexed already by the US politi-
cal body and placed under martial law, as the Native Americans are absent
(Phase II of the Cultural Conquest). In the third canvas, The Consummation
of Empire, the area has been swallowed by the invading culture, apparently
appropriated and thus integrated as a part of the metropolitan; the scene
involves many “progressive” and “civilizing” tropes, including the presence
of a new city with several characteristics of ancient Rome. This third paint-
ing offers a model of Phase III of the Cultural Conquest, cultural appropria-
tion: the landscape, peoples, cultures, and ostensibly languages and social
systems of the invading community have been broadly, if not universally,
implemented in the new space.
As Cole and the other artists of the Hudson River School did not receive
federal commissions for their work, the movement could be understood as
a supreme successes of the US political body’s system of social program-
ming: this group of artists (who were apparently inculcated in the cultural
programs of the US political body) ostensibly believed in or identified with
the myths of the transnational narratives to the extent that the aesthetic of
conquest appears in their work as a central motif precisely as articulated
by the political body. Thus, while collective identity performance for any
individual is a circumstantial phenomenon, heavily contingent on particu-
lar conditions, these canvases underscore the potential power of cultural
112  Art and Power
programming: the state aesthetic canons are re-codified in the art of those
who were exposed to them.

Movement
Many of the tropes thus far mentioned here in literary works are also found
in twentieth-century visual media. Movement around the spaces claimed by
the US political body—in particular, movement to California—has been a
prolific theme in television and film; it might be understood as a genre in it-
self. In television, for example, The Beverly Hillbillies, Beverly Hills 90210,
The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The Real World: San Francisco, and Going to
California each focus on members of the political entity (citizens) moving
from other regions to California. Many films, moreover, such as The Godfa-
ther (1972), Scarface (1983), The Karate Kid (1984), La Bamba (1987), Far
and Away (1992), Men in Black (1997), and Spanglish (2004) demonstrate
immigrant adoption9 of cultural rituals promoted by the US political body
as a central theme. In each of these examples, too, westward movement is
an active element in the dramas, and “freedom” is embodied by this process.
The ability to travel has a concomitant cultural relation: exercising cultural
norms of the US metropolitan establishes a character’s entitlement to move
within the space itself.
The images discussed here, whatever be their discipline, strive to create
nostalgia and emotion and to prescribe what and who a “true” cultural
citizen is (and who can potentially be) in the spaces claimed by the political
body. The state-commissioned images of empire are often symbols of legit-
imization, justification, and control. Movement and immigration in film,
“knowledge” construction in national museums, the demographics depicted
on currency and statues, and the other fetishizations discussed here could
be understood as what Edward Said called the “ominous trend” of “relent-
less celebration of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ ” between the construct of an
appropriate cultural citizen and the non (qtd. in Conn 2009, introduction);
the images have a potent emotional capacity and exist as part of the state
effort to effect these false senses of difference and to produce a cultural
myopia that the US political body strives to construct.

Notes
1. The construction of these images attempts to produce a sense of awe; in a state
of awe, the objects that produce this reaction are considered to be more pow-
erful than the individual viewing them. The US political body is not unique in
its employment of these tools to contrive a response from the viewer; since the
pyramids of Egypt, and inclusively earlier, these methods have been utilized for
these ends.
2. Many of the official documents published by the US political body—including
that of the Internal Revenue Service—is in Helvetica typeface, a font that some
have argued is intended to produce a subordinate (“do as I say!”) response from
the reader (“Helvetica” 2007).
 Art and Power  113
3. While this discussion generally treats state-commissioned images, some of the
same aesthetics here are employed by advertisers in promotion of commodities.
In this sense, the visual cues of the US political body are understood to have cor-
relations with power, positivity, and to be representative of the culture of the res-
idents. Such is the case marketing for Ford Mustang (and many pickup trucks),
McDonald’s, Coke, Monopoly, Bugs Bunny, many blue jeans and cowboy hat
manufacturers, Budweiser, Disneyland, and Lucky Strikes, among others.
4. The Rotunda Friezes is a similar nonsensical series of sculptures honoring the
presence of Europeans in the Americas. The titles include America and History,
Landing of Columbus, Cortez and Montezuma at Mexican Temple, Pizarro
Going to Peru, Burial of DeSoto, Captain Smith and Pocahontas, Landing of
the Pilgrims, William Penn and the Indians, Colonization of New England,
Oglethorpe and the Indians, Battle of Lexington, Declaration of Independ-
ence, Surrender of Cornwallis, Death of Tecumseh, American Army Entering
the City of Mexico, Discovery of Gold in California, Peace at the End of the
Civil War, Naval Gun Crew in the Spanish-American War, and The Birth of
Aviation.
5. Westward the Course of Empire addresses the scope of the cultural intentions
of the US political body, then and now: to appropriate the continental space
(and the cultures of the communities in them) under the controlling guises of the
imperial social system. The entire continent as cultural property of the US met-
ropolitan is a central theme: a Pilgrim upon a rock points toward San Francisco,
a city annexed in 1848 following the first US invasion of Mexico.
6. They thrive, though, amid the perpetual attempts to appropriate the communi-
ties through the forced cultural patriation system of the US political body. Ari-
zona is characteristic of other areas annexed by the US political body in 1848,
which include Texas, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Kansas, Oklahoma,
Utah, and Colorado.
7. The cultural material is often used by the conquering society as symbols of power
and supremacy; much of the cowboy iconography celebrated by the US political
body—including language, clothing, and food—was appropriated from Mexi-
can and communities of Spanish origin following the 1848 invasion. The terms
ranch (rancho), buckaroo (vaquero), dude (lo dudo), rodeo (rodeo), desperado
(desesperado), vamoose (vamos), lasso (lazo), and ten-gallon hat (tan galán),
among many others, derive from Spanish, and the cowboy outfit in general, from
stirrup to headgear, is an outcome of a similar process.
8. Native American as “primitive,” the “West as America,” and the exhibition
of the Enola Gay have been examined as ideological implementation through
museums (Conn 2009, introduction).
9. Interpreting aliens as immigrants in Men in Black.

Work Cited
Adair-Toteff, Christopher. 2005. “Max Weber’s Charisma.” Journal of Classical So-
ciology 5.2: 189–204.
“Art of America.” 2011. BBC. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017grbn.
Cardiello, Jay. 2012. “Color Control.” Shape 4 January. 1+.
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. 1911. The Encyclopedia Britannica. Vol. 19. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Conn, Steve. 2009. Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia, PA: University
of Pennsylvania.
Corsini, Raymond J. 1998. Encyclopedia of Psychology. New York: John
Wiley & Sons.
114  Art and Power
“Crazy Horse Press Release.” 2003. Crazy Horse Memorial, Spring. http://crazy-
horsememorial.org/news/spring2003/.
Durrans, Brian. 2005. “Museums, Representation, and Cultural Property.” Anthro-
pology Today 8.4: 11–15.
“The Face of the Great Depression.” 2008. Daily Kos 28 December. 1+.
Griffith, Tom. 2014. “Scientists Unraveling a Historic Deadwood Mystery.” Wash-
ington Times July 6. 1+.
Gross, Larry. 1991. Image Ethics. Oxford: University Press.
“Helvetica.” 2007. Dir. Gary Huswit.
Kadish, Lesley. 2004. “Reading Cereal Boxes: Pre-Packaging History and Indigenous
Identities.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-Present)
3.2 (Fall). www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2004/kadish.
htm.
Keltner, Dacher, and Jonathan Haidt. 2003. “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual,
and Aesthetic Emotion.” Cognition and Emotion 17: 297–314.
Ohman, A. 2010. “Fear Learning” in Stress Consequences: Mental, Neuropsycho-
logical and Socioeconomic, George Fink, ed. New York: Academic Presses.
“Paintings and Murals.” 2014. Explore Capitol Hill: Art 14 September. 1+.
Phelan, Ben. 2014. “The Story of the ‘Migrant Mother.’ ” PBS. www.pbs.org/wgbh/
roadshow/fts/kansascity_201307F03.html.
Rogers, Richard. 2006. “From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review
and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation.” Communication Theory
16.4 (November): 474–503.
Shiota, Michelle, Dacher Keltner and Amanda Mossman. 2007. “The Nature of
Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept.” Cognition and Emotion
21.5: 944–963.
Tuck, Michael. 2010. “Gestalt Principles Applied in Design.” Six Revisions 17
August.
Wacks, Mel. 2010. “Native Americans Have Appeared on American Money for
Over 300 Years.” PandaAmerica 28 October.
Weaver, Thomas. 1994. “Latino Legacies: Crossing National and Creating Cul-
tural Borders” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures of the United States. Nicolás
Kanello, Thomas Weaver and Claudio Esteva Fábregat, eds. Houston, TX: Arte
Public Press: 39–59.
Wolchover, Natalie. 2012. “Why Is Pink for Girls and Blue for Boys?” Live Science
1 August. 1+.
Wright, Angela. 2008. “Psychological Properties of Colours.” Colour Affects 16
January. 1+.
“130-Year-Old Remains Reburied in Deadwood.” 2010. Indian Country News 1
August. 1+.
6 Forced Acculturation

Immigration is a social and cultural construct that is deceptively difficult to

describe. The concept of patrias must be stabilized in order for patriots (or
cultural “nationals”) to exist; once the slippery and presumptuous supposi-
tions about community and an individual’s supposed sentiments of collec-
tive belonging are established (if they indeed can be established) a person
who moves from the fictional spheres of one polity to reside (ostensibly
permanently) in the new place receives a label that is charged with politi-
cal and cultural consequence: (im)migrant.1 The concept is at once cultural
and political. The assumptions embedded in such social constructions are
particularly problematic in the spaces claimed by the US political body, as
its claimed borders are rarely co-terraneous with cultural frontiers. This
chapter examines how the political body constructs immigration, legal and
illegal status; some of the cultural and social consequences for people who
are subordinated to “immigrant” status; and offers discussion on how the
visa system categorizes noncitizens into a hierarchy based on nation of ori-
gin, which results in a borderless, free entry to spaces claimed by the US
political body for some nationalities, while others are subjected to exams
and fees for the same right of movement.
Despite problems inherent to engaging the supposed cultures of politicized
spaces as a method to construct and prescribe (political, cultural, or other)
demographies, the migrant/citizen dialectic is the norm in both academic
and political approaches to understanding people who move from place to
place. Weihsin Gui, for instance, argues that movement cannot be discussed
“without reference to the nation, for most migration in our time involves
movement out of, across, and into nation-states—and nations, besides being
political and social entities, are also aesthetic creatures” (2014, 155). Gui’s
assertion is generally representative of the bases of migrant cultural stud-
ies as a field, as well as that of traditional American Studies: the myth that
national and transnational communities are, without qualification, suppos-
edly existent and different “aesthetic creatures” endorses the slippery notion
that people resident in politicized and nationalized spaces are definable in
relation to each other and to the supposedly existent cultural circumstances
that surround them.
116  Forced Acculturation
Codifying people and communities as (im)migrant/citizen in these ways
is an expression of social and cultural power. These notions about culture,
society, and the supposed differences between people have been codified into
legal statutes that maintain differential treatment based on national origin
(i.e., US citizen vis-à-vis noncitizen) is appropriate, lawful, and permissible.
The politicization of immigrants and their supposed antitheses (citizens of
the political body) into separate and unequal groups represents an impor-
tant component of the unifying discourse offered by the political body as a
way to understand an individual’s and a community’s social reality. More
specifically, the unequal treatment of the residents of the same space (which
is to say the supposedly existent immigrant/citizen social dialectic) functions
on several myths:

• The military, cultural and social appropriation of the spaces claimed by

the political body has putatively already occurred (past tense is active)
and this appropriation is (present tense is active) self-evident.
• The spaces claimed by the political body (and the cultures of the commu-
nities therein) have been purportedly seized, stabilized, and sanctioned
(past tense active) through a democratic process, and the governmental
expressions of cultural activity are (present tense active) appropriate,
representative, and egalitarian.
• The unifying discourse of culturally unhyphenated-Americanness, per
the imperial logic of the political body, is an appropriate model (and in
many cases, the only legal cultural performance) for newcomers who
would like to participate in civic affairs and eventually receive political
citizenship; the legal statutes delineate that no other cultural perfor-
mance (aside from the myths of unhyphenated-Americanness) will be
accepted or considered as a representative or permissible as a method of
communal participation.

The preceding notions are codified in the citizenship exam required for nat-
uralization. It is unlawful for a (im)migrant to dispute these myths.2 They
form some of the constituent parts of the imperial logic on which much of
the social and cultural policy toward newcomers is constructed. Citizenship,
or “a right to have rights” as it has been termed, maintains these privileged
histories and monocultural myths, which are unpacked as a legislative appa-
ratus to codify the social power of the imperial body. These cultural powers
are expressed and exerted in order to forge an unequal status for newcomers
to the spaces claimed by the political body; they also regulate the represen-
tations of supposed dissimilarity between the two imaginary sociopolitical
groups (citizens and noncitizens).
It should be a point of emphasis that many newcomers to the US political
space do not perform identity in correspondence to these cultural direc-
tives. Some are not interested in political citizenship and/or lack finances
necessary to take naturalization exams; others do not recognize the cultural
 Forced Acculturation  117
claims of the political body or reject the exigent social directives for per-
sonal reasons. Many millions who exercise a human right to move to the
spaces claimed by the political body from elsewhere (but lack an official and
recognized invitation sanctioned by the political body—i.e., an immigrant
visa or nonimmigrant visa) are excluded from US-community-membership
recognition of any kind, and these undocumented citizens are de facto ineli-
gible for naturalization and political citizenship.
The demarcation of some languages and aesthetics as “foreign” has
important outcomes for newcomers to the claimed spaces: Arlene Dávila
has located these controls as “trapped around notions” like “heritage” or
“notions of progress” (2012, 3). She argues that the dialectic inherent in
these manifestations constructs who or what should be central to the com-
position of the community as a whole, which, as a corollary, establishes the
demographics who are to be perennially “trapped” on the margins. The
political body exerts cultural power over spaces and in social arenas, in an
attempt to appropriate the configuration of the community and its cultural
symbols. These imperial legacies are the center of the cultural discourses of
the representations promoted by the political body and determine the nature
of the foreigner/non-foreign divide (2012, 1–3).3

Immigration and Cultural Power

Citizenship is a political apparatus that determines which residents of the
same space are to be excluded from participation in the civic affairs. In
order to partake in the public matters of the US political body (cast a vote,
hold public office, work for a public institution, etc.) a newcomer must first
conform his or her lifestyle and cultural action to the cultural prescriptions
of the political body; renounce any affiliation with another society; demon-
strate proficiency in the imperial language (English); indicate knowledge of
what the political body claims are important historical and cultural events;
and demonstrate knowledge concerning the figures who the political body
declares are important.4
Newcomers are required to demonstrate and declare their subordination
to the cultural ideals prior to any codified membership status (i.e., citizen-
ship),5 a circumstance which also ties the newcomer’s participation in civic
affairs—casting a vote, receiving certain forms of institutional support,
and so on—to these declarations of subordination. As the rights conferred
through membership status are legally bound to a newcomer’s ostensible
(declared, at any rate) subordination to the cultural myths articulated by
the political body, the supposed acculturation of newcomers through the
naturalization process is an important dimension of the organization’s
social power. The political body has constructed a purposefully precarious
situation (unequal rights and privileges) for noncitizens and seizes this vul-
nerable circumstance as an opportunity to attempt to manipulate behav-
ior. The political entity strives to achieve these ends through persuading
118  Forced Acculturation
newcomers to acculturate, which is rewarded (and sometimes required) by
the political body.
Both citizen and noncitizen are exposed and subordinated to the same
culturally engineered spaces and institutions. A fundamental presumption
toward the newcomer, however, is that she or he has an affiliation with
another community—thus, the legislative process toward civic participation
(i.e., naturalization exigencies) is generally waged through acculturation
(second-culture learning) rather than enculturation (first-culture learning).

Presumed Proprietorship of Space and Nationalized

Cultural Expression
Bruce Cole, Former Chairman National Endowment for the Humanities,
has argued the following: “Our nation is not bound together by common
ties of blood, race, or religion; we are united instead by our devotion to
shared ideals . . . immigrants—must learn our great founding principles,
how our institutions came into being, [and] how they work” (qtd. in “Citi-
zen’s Almanac” 2014, 101, emphasis added). The US political body pre-
sumes an a priori proprietorship of the cultures in the spaces it has claimed
and annexed, and this presumption functions as justification for the forced
(“must learn”) implementation of specific cultural ideals in the lives of those
who relocate to the regions claimed by the political body and would like to
participate in civic affairs. In this way, the political prescriptions of propri-
etorship (“our” nation, as it is described by Cole) and jurisdiction carry sig-
nificant cultural weight for immigrants, as their participation in community
affairs is tied to knowledge about them.
Language is an important pillar in the US political body’s naturalization
process. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1919 letter to the American Defense Soci-
ety asserts that it is “an outrage to discriminate against any [immigrant]
because of creed, birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s
becoming in very fact an American” (qtd. in Dobbs 2006, 209). Roosevelt
goes on to proclaim transformation to “American” status involves speak-
ing English, asserting that each newcomer should learn the language in
five years or be deported (Ingraham 2007, 44).6 Though such posturing
might be untenable today, linguistic manipulation has been a de facto req-
uisite for civic membership, as since United States inception as a political
entity, the citizenship exam is offered only in English.7 This policy occurs
in many regions that are not English speaking; Puerto Rico, for instance,
has a larger population than twenty-four US states do; 96% of islanders
are native speakers of Spanish, and 70% have very little or no knowledge
of English. Notwithstanding, immigrants to Puerto Rico must complete
the US citizenship exam in English (“Language Use and English-Speaking
Ability” 2000).8 In some part, because of these policies, the US political
space has been called “a cemetery of language” by Carola and Marcelo
Suárez-Orozco (2009, 136).9
 Forced Acculturation  119
Acculturation as Positive: Newcomers and
US Political Citizenship
While many who sit for naturalization exams have resided in the political
space for decades—occasionally longer than the government official who
gives the naturalization exam—the opinions of the noncitizen have no cur-
rency: in order to secure the most basic of civil rights, the individual must
adopt and declare a role of subservience to the culture as it is prescribed
by the state. Because of factors beyond their control, undocumented mem-
bers of the community lack even the opportunity to achieve this status of
secondary-subordinate (i.e., eligible for naturalization) by any means, and
thus exist in a tertiary state, with the looming violence of the state (deporta-
tion) always present.
The US political body strives to present the acculturation of immigrants
as a positive phenomenon.10 An overdetermined (and often unquestioned)
myth in many communities in the US political space is that immigrant adop-
tion of the dominant language, eating habits, family meetings schedules,
and so on is the optimal course arriving individuals. Many studies, how-
ever, demonstrate that acculturation can cause serious health afflictions. For
instance, more-acculturated noncitizen Latinos have been shown to suc-
cumb more often to substance abuse and smoking, and have a significantly
worse diet than non-acculturated cohorts. Also, more-acculturated moth-
ers tend to have lower birth weights, higher incidences of premature birth
and teenage pregnancy, and higher rates of undesirable postnatal condi-
tions. More-acculturated noncitizen Latinos have also been shown to suffer
from higher rates of episodes of psychosis, mental illness, and suicide than
non-acculturated cohorts.11
Despite these empirical findings, the US political body robustly supports
the falsehood that acculturation is comprehensively and universally positive.
This social and cultural myopia is purposed to subordinate the newcomers,
as cultural adoptions and attendant shifts in behavior may be understood
as symbolic of an individual’s subservience to and acceptation of the domi-
nant social systems. Occasionally this process involves the abandonment of
religious rites, leisure activities, and procreation modes. Potential citizens of
the US political body are required to terminate (or take an oath that such
behavior is to be terminated) polygamy, consumption of certain narcotics,
and many leisure activities,12 which are important cultural, social, and reli-
gious activities in other societies; a recognized political affiliation (citizen-
ship) with the US political body is contingent on this action.

Citizens’ Almanac: Codifying Acculturation as

Requisite for Civic Participation
One form of influence that the US political body attempts to exert on im-
migrants can be understood as a one-way “receiving” of cultural material
120  Forced Acculturation
and norms. This construct of forcing cultural modes on another is built on
the supposed superiority of the exerting society. The receiver or newcomer
may have no contribution or participation in this process; the ideas, lan-
guage, supposedly important historical and cultural figures, and other cul-
tural claims of the US political body are not to be interpreted or discussed.
This form of cultural imperialism, while nearly always unethical and occa-
sionally nonsensical, positions the receiver as an absolute subordinate. The
figures and events immigrants are coerced to demonstrate familiarity with
before becoming participating members of the community are compiled in
the Citizens’ Almanac, published by the US Citizenship and Immigration
Services. It is purposed to codify the state’s cultural norms so that it may be
a resource and guide:

for new citizens. It includes information on U.S. civic history, rights and
responsibilities of U.S. citizenship, biographical details on prominent
foreign-born Americans, landmark decisions of the Supreme Court,
presidential speeches on citizenship, and several of our founding docu-
ments including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
(2014, abstract)

The use of a first-person plural possessive adjective (“our”) here is indica-

tive of the myth that the ideas and norms of behavior articulated in the
text are recognized, accepted, and stabilized among the residents of the
spaces claimed by the political body. Of particular interest here is the sec-
tion of Citizens’ Almanac that offers a set of examples of appropriate
immigrant-behavior: each case illustration describes a person who has
ostensibly adopted the cultural and linguistic prescriptions of the political
body and performs (or has performed) those structures in public arenas.13
The cultural connections that the state attempts to appropriate and codify,
are brought together in this text:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and

abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or
sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen;
that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United
States of America against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear
true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the
United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncomba-
tant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the
law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direc-
tion when required by the law; and that I will take this obligation freely
without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, so help me God.
(Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States
of America)
 Forced Acculturation  121
Such documents exude an anachronistic quality, one that belies the cultural
realities of both resident communities and the newcomers to the spaces
claimed by the political body. Like the other promotional cultural material
thus far examined in this book, the naturalization text is nonrepresenta-
tive and propagates ideas that exclude many peoples and cultures. Under
what are termed “patriotic anthems and symbols”14 are songs exclusively in
English and icons that are understood to represent the community; under
the category “historical speeches”15 are seven discourses in English given by
men of European descent and one by an African American; there is no mate-
rial anywhere in Spanish, French, or any Native American language; there
is no material in a language other than English or composed by a person
who is not a native speaker of English. None of these speeches were written
or spoken by a woman. Conceivably, these are published in order to offer a
model of values and culture. They also function to establish “normal” as in
accordance with the characteristics therein, and thus, the immigrant-citizen
should—in reality, must—if not mimic, respect or at very least be aware
of these models. These forms of cultural imperialism are banal, indirect,
and often occur with subtly. The uncertainty of the immigrant circumstance
allows the imperial narratives to have a particular power; it is at once a form
of control for the political body to require that immigrants acculturate, and
it is also a relatively straightforward mode for the newcomer to affiliate with
a community that could ostensibly offer stability.

Model Immigrant Myths
There are specific behavioral expectations of newcomers to the spaces
claimed by the US political body—and these have been termed “model” im-
migrant myths. In Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational
South Asian Politics in the United States, Monisha Das Gupta expounds
on the shaping cultural and social effects of the programmatic norms that
organize immigrant behavior an acceptable/intolerable dialectic. “Buying in
the model minority image,” she argues, erases “the immigrant experiences
that deviate from the myth of success” (2006, 28). The myth of the model
immigrant is illusive, racist, and externally directed and defined; the end
coordinates for immigrant behavior attempt to channel the experience of
reality into hyphenated (and, thus, secondary) statuses, in function to their
supposed relationships to the cultural prescriptions of the political body.
The so-called successful or appropriate social performances that are avail-
able within the cultural system can be dehumanizing efforts to degrade the
personal autonomy of the individual. Das Gutpa has argued that these mod-
els of appropriate behavior for immigrants are demographically specific:
the South Asian paradigm allows rights only in function of one’s “close-
ness or distance from two dominant categories, white and black” (2006,
30). The system’s prescriptions of demographic-specific value make groups
122  Forced Acculturation
“entrapped in the incoherence that underlies racial thinking,” and allows
even the supposedly model immigrant a “liminal place” in the social order
(2006, 30).16
Das Gupta’s groundbreaking work in this field characterizes some of the
“alternative structures for collective action,” which exist as more organic,
democratic, and representative forms of communication. These initiatives
strive to establish voices and articulations of being outside the limits of the
behavioral and racial assignations afforded to immigrant groups by the
political body and its cultural arms. Her work takes on the problematic role
of so-called authentic cultures and the in-group etiquette complications that
accompany interpellation to external structures and examines other ways
toward “narratives of authenticity” (2006, 57). She calls out for newcomers
to the US political space to “question lived or idealized forms of citizenship”
in search of new, nongeographic ways forms of belonging (2006, 257).

Constructing Illegal Status: Visas and Programmatic

Stratification of Noncitizens
US political borders do not apply to all noncitizens in the same way—and
they have been used to regulate and socially engineer who enters the politi-
cal space by gender, sexuality (Luibhéid and Cantú 2005), age, social status,
employment status, nationality, and economic class (Herlihy-Mera 2015).17
A squall of immigration debate was stirred up in 2010 by SB-1070, a law
passed in the US state of Arizona which requires law enforcement to act
on suspicion that a person is in the US political space illegally. The first it-
erations of the law required police and other officers to request documents
upon “reasonable suspicion” of illegal presence. What constitutes “reason-
able suspicion” of immigration status? What is “illegal” presence?
When asked this question, Governor Jan Brewer, who signed the bill
into law, responded, “I don’t know what an illegal immigrant looks like”
(quoted in Keeanga-Yamahtta 2010). Regardless of what a person might
look like, by law, many demographics cannot be unlawfully present in the
US political space unless the person commits a felony. Citizens of Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, thirty nations in Europe, and a select few other
countries, are part of the “US Visa Waiver Program,” a series of laws passed
in 1986 that, despite being the political body’s principal immigration con-
trol, receives very little critical attention.18 While the Federal Protections
Against National Origin Discrimination states that it is “illegal to discrimi-
nate because of a person’s birthplace, ancestry, culture or language,”19 the
US Visa Waiver Program differentiates non-US citizens by national back-
ground, discriminating expressly against citizens of Latin America, Asia,
Africa, and nations of the Muslim majority. The waiver constructs the
potential illegal status but only for some nationalities. While SB1070 has
codified discriminatory profiling, the US Visa Waiver Program created the
profile when it went into law three decades ago.
 Forced Acculturation  123
Some waiver-program apologists argue that the law is not a form of eth-
nic or national discrimination because in practice it is based on financial
circumstances. (Discrimination based on economic status, heinous as it is,
is legal in the US political body.) “The Waiver Program is about economic
status,” notes Kevin Driscoll, representative of former congressman William
Delahunt (D-Mass.). “Poor countries are excluded” (2006). In this way,
SB-1070 and other immigration laws are aimed at these “poor” people, a
demographic excluded discrimination protection. To circumvent racial dis-
crimination inherent in the implementation of the new law, drafters of the
Arizona bill were forced to revise the text after waves of public outcry. The
secondary version prohibits “solely” using race to construct “reasonable
suspicion.” “It absolutely clarifies what the intent was,” said Paul Sense-
man, spokesman for Governor Brewer. “It’s undeniable now that this bill
will not lead to racial profiling” (qtd. in Riccardi 2010). Devising a protocol
to erase the presence of certain people from an area is a troubling idea—and
while the public opposition to SB-1070 has been somewhat effective, it falls
short of engaging the central problem: the US Visa Waiver Program’s sanc-
tioned unequal treatment of people based on their nationality.
As Driscoll’s comments make clear, the US political body treats noncitizen
peoples as commodities with varying values based on their citizenship; as
nationals of what he terms “poor countries” are to be excluded, those who
are more likely to control capital (i.e., citizens of wealthy states) are given
higher values and some basic human rights, such as the ability to move from
place to place without restraint, rights that are denied to people with lower
commodity values (i.e., citizens of poor states). The notion non-US nationals
are unequal and should have different rights based on their country of citizen-
ship is fundamental to the US Visa Waiver Program. (See Table 6.1 below.)
The Visa Waiver Program effectively abolished the border between the
US and waiver nations, while maintaining the exclusionary visa regime for
other countries. Waiver-nationals may enter the US political space at any

Table 6.1 Commodified Citizenships: US Visa Waiver Program’s National-Origin

Discrimination

Citizenship Visa required to be present in spaces

claimed by US political body
Europe (European  0%
Economic Community)
Australia, New Zealand,  0%
Canada
Asia  96%
Latin America (save  98%
Puerto Rico)
Africa 100%
Muslim-majority nations 100%
124  Forced Acculturation
time for ninety days (an unlimited amount of times) to search for employ-
ment, to conduct business, to attend cultural events, to visit family and
friends, or for any other reason with a passport. For the same right-of-entry,
non-waiver nationals are required to pass an in-person exam at the US con-
sulate or embassy with jurisdiction over their place of residence (this may
be in another country) to procure a nonimmigrant B1/2 visa. In 2016, the
visa application cost $160 plus $12 to schedule an exam; the fees are not
returned regardless of whether a visa is granted or denied. In some nations
75% of B1/2 visa applications are rejected.
During my stint on the faculty at Universidad del Azuay in Cuenca, Ecua-
dor, several colleagues and students applied for B1/2 visas to attend an aca-
demic conference in Florida. I accompanied them to the US consulate in
Guayaquil and spent several weeks there observing interviews and collecting
data from people who had just finished visa exams. I did surveys and had
conversations about some practical matters regarding the personal inter-
views, including the nature of the questions posed, the required documents,
and the language proficiency of adjudicators.

What Is it Like to Take a Visa Exam?

The US consulate in Guayaquil—a coastal city, 150 miles south of the
equator—has jurisdiction over much of the Ecuadorian coast and south-
ern highlands region. Each business day hundreds of candidates line up on
the street outside the building in direct sunlight. Cottage industries have
emerged to cool and shade applicants and aid with dehydration. One by
one, candidates file into the fore-chamber of the building where officers
register passports, take fingerprints and mugshots, and document that their
US$172 in fees has been paid in advance. The waiting time can be eight to
ten hours. Including travel to Guayaquil, for applicants from Cuenca and
points south, the process usually takes three days.
The examination rooms at the two US State Department missions in
Ecuador (Quito and Guayaquil) are actually booths. They are about six
feet high and three feet wide. A US foreign service officer sits on a platform
eighteen inches above the interviewee and behind a bulletproof glass divider.
Questions are via intercom. The exam is unremarkable: an applicant enters;
there’s a short greeting. The adjudicator looks him or her up and down.
Sometimes there is a question or two about their intentions in the US. In the
nine years I’ve studied these exchanges, the longest interview I observed was
about five minutes. Many are under thirty seconds. The body language of
the applicant indicates the decision immediately. Each adjudicator does up
to three hundred per day.

Adjudicators’ Lack of Language Proficiency

Visa adjudicator is among the entry-level positions in the Foreign Service;
interviewers are often new arrivals to the countries where they work. None
 Forced Acculturation  125
of the adjudicators I met or observed in Ecuador were fluent in Spanish,
despite conducting interviews in that language; only one demonstrated what
I would describe as a working proficiency. None would converse with me
in Spanish, despite my attempts to do so. Each had had at least five months
of language training, or about one semester of study, before he or she began
making visa decisions. Former Ecuador consular chief Ruta D Elvikis has
complained that many adjudicators cannot speak or understand the lan-
guage in which they interview:

Consular officers in the field would greatly benefit from additional train-
ing, even if only online . . . Post would further recommend that [adjudi-
cators] receive 30 weeks of language rather than 24. Solid knowledge of
language is absolutely necessary at the visa window and, despite the . . .
language programme, 24 weeks is sometimes not enough time.
(qtd. in Herlihy-Mera 2015)

Applicants are instructed to bring invitations to the US, pay stubs, employ-
ment contracts, property deeds, and similar documents. However, adjudica-
tors are not required to—and often do not—review them. Many arrive at
the consulate with stacks of economic and social documents, all notarized
and painstakingly prepared, and these are regularly not seen by anyone:
decisions are frequently based on the applicant’s demographic profile.

Visa Rejection Profiles

Adjudicators profile applicants by perceived age, gender, marital status, and
finances. Visa Officer Jessica Vaughn noted, “Because officers have a limited
time in which to make a decision—about two to three minutes . . . they must
rely on known or assumed patterns of behavior, or profiles, to help them
decide to issue or refuse a visa.” Profiles are based on how a person looks at
first sight. “It is very difficult for a young, single adult to qualify for a visa,”
said Vaughn, “and nearly impossible for someone who is unemployed” (qtd
in Herlihy-Mera 2015). She goes on to say that because officers have such a
short time to make a decision “they cannot investigate each applicant.” The
rejections, according to Vaughn, are based on assumptions because, in real-
ity, “posts have little hard evidence on which to formulate these profiles”
(qtd. in Herlihy-Mera 2015).
Three of my four colleagues who applied for visas were approved and
eventually attended the event in Florida. The rejected applicant was an
unmarried male who had just finished his studies. He was in his late twenties
and unemployed. He described the experience as “traumatic,” “belittling,”
and “dehumanizing.” Another colleague was a finalist for an assistant pro-
fessorship in the US state of Utah and required the same visa in order to
travel to the campus interview. He said he was far more nervous during the
visa exam than the job interview itself—fortunately, he was employed and
married when he applied. He eventually got a visa and the appointment.
126  Forced Acculturation
I discussed applicant-profiling with Gregory Keller, a vice consul and
adjudicator at Guayaquil (HM: Herlihy-Mera, GK: Keller):

HM: Decisions are often based on an applicant’s age and economic status?
GK: Yes. The unemployed and poor are generally not eligible for visas.
HM: People are rejected because they are unemployed?
GK: Yes and no. People are rejected because they cannot prove that they
intend to return to Ecuador. In an interview the applicant must
­establish sufficient ties to their place of residence, which is very dif-
ficult for poor or unemployed people to do. Ties are things like pay
stubs, property deeds—evidence that they would come back.
HM: Poor and unemployed Europeans and Canadians are not subjected
to this scrutiny. These people are rejected based on being Ecuador-
ian and single or unemployed. In fact the nationality determines a
person’s status. Is that right?
GK: We follow the law. We adjudicate Ecuadorians who apply for visas.
The poor and people in their 20s are often not eligible. People from
Europe and Canada are in a different situation.

Some officials in Washington have offered more nuanced takes on applicant

profiling. Public Affairs Secretary Timothy F. Ponce said that the procedural
uses of profiles “do not reflect official department policy” (qtd. in Herlihy-Mera
2015). Many adjudicators have levelled serious criticism of these visa poli-
cies: “There are no quality control measures,” said adjudicator David Semi-
nara, “evidenced by the fact that the State Department never requires posts to
conduct visa validation studies.” He said adjudicators “are evaluated on how
many applicants they interview and how courteous they are to applicants, not
on the quality or correctness of the decisions they make . . . managers value
speed over sound decisions” (qtd. in Herlihy-Mera 2015).

Responses from Interviewees

A general sentiment from interviewees is that the visa exams make people
feel degraded and insignificant. The decisions seem arbitrary and capricious.
“The consul talks to you like you’ve done something seriously wrong,” said
one woman. “We are treated like cattle.” Many said to me in person and
in written surveys that the adjudicators could not communicate in Spanish.
“The words the interviewer said were so mispronounced,” said one man,
“that at first I didn’t realize she was saying my name. The consul couldn’t
understand me at all when I spoke. I had to repeat every single thing again
and again.”
The most common comments in Quito and Guayaquil included the
following:

• Adjudicators cannot speak/understand Spanish well enough to make

informed decisions.
 Forced Acculturation  127

• Adjudicators act on whims.

• Decisions seem to be based on how the American feels that day.
• The interview is too short for enough information to be exchanged.
• Consuls are arrogant and speak condescendingly to applicants.
• Consuls do not allow applicants an adequate opportunity to express
themselves.20
• Consuls do not understand the local culture or language, and they often
misunderstand people because of this.

I asked State Department spokesperson Kenneth Chávez about the language

issue: “What might an applicant do if the adjudicator cannot understand
the language of the interview?” His response: “The applicant can re-apply”
(qtd. in Herlihy-Mera 2015). Reapplying, of course, is prohibitively expen-
sive and time-consuming and a previous visa rejection—albeit from an adju-
dicator who could not communicate in the language in which the interview
was conducted—is stamped onto all subsequent applications, making the
possibilities for eventually receiving a visa even more remote.
Tope Bada counsels African applicants on the workings of visa exams,
and he has reflected on the fragile nature of the exceptionalism afforded to
the consular officers, noting the binary nature of the interaction:

This issue will no doubt beg the question of who is actually exceptional;
the [applicant] or the consular. I do believe that the only person that
matters is the consular not because they are special but simply because
the system has been designed to make them appear as such. So, if the
consular makes an error of judgment and denies a visa, it’s still excep-
tional, if they issue a visa to a religious extremist wearing explosives
as diapers, they are still exceptional and if the visa is issued . . . by an
‘agent’, then [the adjudicator] is still exceptional. For the consular, it’s
always a win-win situation. Thanks to Uncle Sam.
(2015, 57–58)

Bada’s superb work on this subject includes some insightful reflection on the
procedure, particularly about the adjudicators’ decision-making tendencies:

Anyone will tell you that it is wise to give the consular the impres-
sion that they are all righteous and can do no wrong. . . . Sadly I must
agree . . . the consular does not want to hear the truth; they only want
an acceptable statement and in almost all the instances, what is accept-
able are lies and outright lies for that matter.
(2015, 77)

He continues:

The [applicant] might meet the entire requirements according to the

statutes of the INA but if the consular is unconvinced, in a bad mood
128  Forced Acculturation
or just not interested . . . the law is inconsequential. This might seem
as painting consular officers as feeble but then, I have seen enough to
know that the law is only quoted when they want to refuse the visa.
I have never heard a consular say ‘according to the section 101(a)(15)(f)
of the INA, you have qualified [and] . . . will be issued one accordingly
though I am not satisfied’ but I have heard such statements as ‘you qual-
ify for the visa but I am not convinced’ [and for that I reject the visa].
(2015, 79)

The false dichotomy between applicant and consular officer is among the
more appalling aspects of the exam: “you as the visa applicant have no say.
They expect you to pay your visa fee, queue up like a lamb to the slaughter
and take whatever decision is handed down to you without any contention
or question” (Bada 2015, 135). Bada argues that the legislative devices are
too ambiguous to function as designed, or perhaps they are designed with
ambiguity in mind so that the adjudicators, and thus, the political entity
they ostensibly represent, may evade responsibility for the unethical nature
of the procedure. One of these unclear mechanisms that is often used as
grounds for denying visas involves the applicant’s supposed intentions and
apparent ties to place of origin. A “tie [to place of origin]” notes Bada, “is
too ambiguous and lacking in clarity . . . Valid ties are not the best param-
eter to measure the long term intention [of an applicant]”; thus, applicants
who intend to visit a space claimed by the US political body as nonimmi-
grants per the political body’s own definition thereof, are often rejected and
subsequently have “no recourse and will be left wondering forever why the
visa was not issued when everything is genuine and the intentions are as real
as expressed during the interview” (2015, 134). Bada’s comments about
these circumstances are particularly sensitive to the ethical weight that a
consular officer must bear, as

[c]onsular officers are obligated to be prejudice in the line of duty.

Often, I have wondered about the moral burden of adjudication by
consuls who were former [visa applicants who became naturalized citi-
zens] and concluded it is all part of the way the system has been and
remained; warped.
(2015, 99)21

In the face of the institutionalized discrimination that is collectively waged

against people from his national (and, inclusively, continental) origin, Tope
Bada has poignant advice for others before they enter the visa exam room, a
circumspect view that strives to transcend the external controls: “Life is pre-
cious and an applicant should consider their dignity as part of the process.
Maintain your dignity” (2015, 17). Bada is not speaking as a visa counselor
in these phrases; he is recognizing the failures of the transnational system
and emphasizing that our humanity, which is precisely what that the system
strives to strip away, must be sustained.22
 Forced Acculturation  129
Candidates are often denied short-term entry not as a result of their own
shortcomings but because of the ethically bankrupt nature of the exam
itself. These controls are levied only against citizens of Latin America, Asia,
Africa, and nations of Muslim majority—visa-waiver nationals enter freely.
In this way, the US political body expressly prohibits individuals who fall
into these demographic brackets (based on age, finances, marital status, and
nationality) from being present in spaces claimed by the US political body
in an absolute sense. If such an individual were to exercise the same right of
movement as, say, a citizen of Australia, Canada, or France (who is the same
age and marital/financial status) and come to the US political space anyway,
he or she would be unlawfully present in the US—a form of status that is not
possible for waiver-program nationals unless a felony is committed while
in the US political space. The coarse reality is that the US has an extensive
profiling system that segregates non-US citizens into two groups:

1. those who can travel to the US freely, cannot be denied entry, and can-
not be unlawfully present in spaces claimed by the US body
2. those who are subjected to an expensive, time-consuming, and severely
flawed interview process; effectively this second demographic are the
only noncitizens who may be present in the US illegally.23

The cruelty of a visa exam is just one of several traumatic forms of cul-
tural and physical violence that is enacted on the non-waiver-program citi-
zen’s body. If a person disobeys their subordinate status in this neoliberal,
capitalist hierarchy, looming are incarceration and deportation, along with
other subtler forms of violence. This circumstance facilitates the exploita-
tion of these individuals, and mistreating them is understood to be wholly
acceptable—even desirable—in the system: Mitt Romney, for instance,
when he was a finalist for the top position in the political body suggested
that the conditions for non-waiver citizens should be made so wretched that
they “self-deport” (qtd. in Blake 2013).
Controls like the Visa Waiver Program aspire to design a society along
explicitly discriminatory ideals. Such class systems hinge on the belief that
people are fundamentally unequal: some work harder or are more talented or
are part of an exceptional group (such as a waiver nation), and therefore, they
deserve to be rewarded with labor privileges, access to institutions, material
goods, and rights of movement. The poor and underclasses are responsible
for their lack of success and for that they are to be marginalized by physical,
cultural, and social violence, including a specific legal statue—that is, “ille-
gal” status—that applies only to them. The body of the non-waiver citizen is
a location where these neoliberal transnational penalties are realized.24

Institutionalizing Inequality
While visa waivers confer what is termed as nonimmigrant status, the
privileges also facilitate a great deal of the immigration process for
130  Forced Acculturation
waiver-program nationals vis-à-vis the non-waiver national. The paperwork
and bureaucracy of immigration to the US political space would be complex
for a Briton or Canadian, or other wavier national, but the process is far
more difficult for non-waiver individuals, who cannot board a plane on a
whim to see if a city or town is of their liking before deciding to move there.
The waiver indeed simplifies many immigrant details (housing, transporta-
tion, contract negotiations, cultural orientation, and so on) and its terms
include many business actions, including job searches and interviews, and
short-term work that is not categorized as “labor.” While immigrant red
tape may be daunting for all, the package of migration in all professional
fields is streamlined for the waiver nationals as there is no prior reliance on
a visa (and all the costly, time-consuming, and unethical difficulties of their
procurement) in order to be present in the space itself.
The discrimination inherent to the waiver program has also been situ-
ated as part and parcel of membership in nations and nation-states. Kevin
Driscoll offered an apologist perspective on the unequal treatment of indi-
viduals based on their citizenship:

The nation has a right to control its borders. Entering a national terri-
tory, or the ability to work or study in the country, is not a right but a
privilege. And government has to answers to the people of the US and
no responsibility or accountability for non-US citizens.
(2006)

The right/privilege divide cannot be used to legitimize that person with

A citizenship is treated differently than person with B citizenship is. Those
are not reconcilable matters, and the US political body does, in fact, have the
duty—or, at least, all of its codified texts state that it has the duty—to not
discriminate (or treat differently) two people based on their nation of origin
(“Federal Protections Against National Origin Discrimination” 2000). The
waiver program is a de facto violation of those statues, as it discriminates
precisely on national origins.
In these ways, the use of the national system (and its presumed appro-
priation of spaces, identities of individuals resident in those spaces, and
their cultures) to organize people into communities cannot reconcile these
moral and ethical problems. The result is violence against the body of the
unprivileged (non-waiver) person, who is liable for arrest, incarceration,
and deportation for the same actions others may carry out legally with-
out penalty or restraint whatever. The national system privileges those who
enjoy, per their national origin, a high-ranked citizenship. These legal poli-
cies stratify non-US citizens who are within the political space—and out-
side of it—into separate and unequal legal categories. These categories have
reprehensible outcomes: those without documentation who reside in the
US political space are significantly less likely to have health insurance, seek
emergency medical care or police protection (and to report crimes to police),
 Forced Acculturation  131
and graduate from high school. Wages of the undocumented are lower for
the same employment—all of which accords with the US political body’s
national-origin-based categorization scheme.25

Acknowledgments
Parts of this chapter were originally published as “Visa Restrictions Limit
Academic Freedom.” University World News 2015. Issue 376 (17 July): 1+.

Notes
1. The charged meanings of migrant have become a divisive debate in Europe
recently: “It is not hundreds of people who drown when a boat goes down in the
Mediterranean,” notes Barry Malone, “nor even hundreds of refugees. It is hun-
dreds of migrants. It is not a person—like you, filled with thoughts and history
and hopes—who is on the tracks delaying a train. It is a migrant. A nuisance”
(2015, 1).
2. The immigrant cannot, for instance, offer an opinion on the validity of the
exam or his or her accuracy in representing the communities and the cultures
that it supposedly represents. The newcomer, despite perhaps many decades of
residence, is a de facto subordinate to the a priori prescriptions, and there is no
legal or statute that permits a noncitizen to disagree with the cultures posited as
representative.
3. Political citizenship is central to the power axis exerted by the US political body;
Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, has called citizenship, “a very, very valuable commodity,” and believes
that people will do whatever “they can to become citizens” (qtd. in Bahrampour
2009). Whether or not this is the case is not generally studied or interpreted,
and ostensibly nonfictional concepts like those articulated by of Meissner offer a
framework that legitimizes the cataloging of cultural and linguistic performances
that have been depreciated, stigmatized, and occasionally rendered illegal, as
subordinates; this de facto inferiority functions to facilitate the accumulation of
capital, power, and social and political domination of the group in control of the
cultural system.
4. The naturalization process also discriminates against individuals from specific
nationalities, cultural backgrounds, and the poor. “Regardless of where they
come from,” notes Jeffrey Passel, “adult immigrants are more likely to become
citizens if they speak English well” (2011, 5). Around half of those who are eli-
gible for US citizenship but are uncomfortable speaking English tend to natural-
ize. Mexican nationals are among the groups who are tacitly discouraged from
becoming US citizens, and of those eligible, they are approximately three times
less to naturalize as others who are eligible (Passel 2011, 5).
5. There are several exceptions; for instance, a person born outside the US political
space who has citizenship through jus sanguinis.
6. Roosevelt believed that Native Americans, regardless of language, had no claims
to land they inhabited.
7. The test requires applicants “to give up loyalty to other countries.”
8. Language has also been a principal mechanism for implementation of settler
control, even in regions already integrated into the metropolitan as states. These
governmental interventions in favor of settler language are particularly compli-
cated in Texas and the Southwest, places where English-speakers are historical
132  Forced Acculturation
newcomers. The region in question had been claimed politically by Spain and
Mexico for almost 350 years before US annexation; Native Americans have
resided there for several millennia. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848),
which annexed the territory from Mexico, was signed by Santa Ana while
US military occupied both Mexico City and the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Because the treaty was signed under duress and drafted far from the region itself,
with little or no input from residents of the divisive region, many understand
subsequent US colonization of the Southwest as an illegitimate enterprise, not
unlike what some consider “illegal” immigration to border states today (Brown
1997, 200–244).
9. In this sense, the US immigrant policies are also programs of cultural cleans-
ing. Over generations, residence in spaces engineered toward the myth that
specific cultures are appropriate (and sometimes, legal); where any articula-
tion of non-dominant culture is hyphenated, categorized, and repressed and
repossessed—can make people ashamed and embarrassed about their own back-
grounds, demographies, and histories. It is precisely that circumstance that the
state strives to create. It is a recipe for not only widespread acculturation but also
assimilation. And though it is critical a leap to assert that any people identify
with or believe in the transnational myths, immigrants and their children and
grandchildren, perhaps more than others, must live in the mythic performances
because these are requisite actions in order to participate in the civic affairs of
their community (through citizenship and its rights).
10. The overwhelming majority of depictions of immigrants in print and other
media financed by the US political body portray immigrant adoption of the
English language, eating habits, US-sanctioned leisure activities, and so on, as
positive phenomena. Individuals wearing beaming with smiles and pleasant out-
ward appearances, and these images are occasionally contrasted with images of
immigrants who have not adopted US norms as sad, depressed or dejected, and
sometimes they are represented as poor and marginalized.
11. Abraído-Lanza et. al 1999, 1543–1548.
12. For instance, brothels (in much of the US political space), cockfighting, con-
sumption of haggis or fugu are generally banned in the spaces claimed by the US
political body.
13. John Paul Jones (1747–1792) Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) William A.
Leidesdorff (1810–1848) Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) Joseph Pulitzer
(1847–1911) Frances X. Cabrini (1850–1917) Michael Pupin (1858–1935) Sol-
omon Carter Fuller (1872–1953) Albert Einstein (1879–1955) Igor Stravinsky
(1882–1971) Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) Knute Rockne (1888–1931) Irving
Berlin (1888–1989) Frank Capra (1897–1991) Dalip Singh Saund (1899–1973)
Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) Bob Hope (1903–2003) Subrahmanyan Chan-
drasekhar (1910–1995) Kenneth B. Clark (1914–2005) Celia Cruz (1925–2003).
14. “The Star-Spangled Banner” (1814), “America the Beautiful” (1893), “The New
Colossus” (1883), “I Hear America Singing” (1860), “Concord Hymn” (1837),
Pledge of Allegiance, the Flag of the United States of America, the Motto of the
United States, and the Great Seal of the United States.
15.
Farewell Address—George Washington (1796), First Inaugural
Address—Abraham Lincoln (1861), Gettysburg Address—Abraham Lin-
coln (1863), The Four Freedoms—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1941), Inaugural
Address—John F. Kennedy (1961), I Have a Dream—Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1963), Remarks at the Brandenburg Gate—Ronald Reagan (1987).
16. The controls often exclude performances that are culture- and nation-specific.
Alicia Schmidt-Camacho has argued that, because many of the legal policies of
the US political body strive to mark out Mexican language, culture and social
traditions as alien, illegal and sometimes criminal, many migrants of Mexican
 Forced Acculturation  133
origin “assert their full humanity in border crossings that confer on them the
status of the alien, the illegal, the refuse of nations” (2008, 1). The subordina-
tion of these communities resulted in, argues Schmidt-Camacho, a transborder
articulations of being, community, and culture, which thrive outside the state
and national prescriptions: “Migrants have also contested their deliberate sub-
jection to forms of racism and class domination that facilitated their removal
from the protected spheres of communal belonging and social life” (2008, 2).
17. Eithne Luibhéid has examined how female sexualities are prescribed to be cul-
tural and social threats to the interests of the political body, and specific, gen-
dered controls arise as a dimension of direct state control on border sites. In this
sense, “illegalization” is at once a classist, sexist, nationalist, patriotic, and racist
articulation of state power (2002).
18. Canada is not part of the Waiver Program but enjoys an equivalent status.
19. “Federal protections against national origin discrimination” 2001.
20. Tope Bada has noted that in Africa it is not uncommon to have an adjudicator
who “acts aggressively and will not even allow you to finish answering one ques-
tion” (2015, 76–77).
21. Bada has deftly observed that “consular officers are obligated to be prejudice in
the line of duty (2015, 148).
22. As visa exams do not occur in the US political space, there is no governmen-
tal regulation. There is no congressional oversight of visa procedures. In fact,
the State Department sub-agencies are not funded by taxpayers or the federal
government but by fees they charge non-US citizens for interviews and other
services. That means the $172 payment for a one-minute interview goes toward
the salary of the adjudicator.
23. Suffice it to say, if the US political body is to exist, it should treat noncitizens
uniformly. As the national conversation returns to immigration reform, the dis-
crimination inherent to the present visa system should be closely examined—and
the Visa Waiver Program itself should be given the protracted attention that it
has never had.
24. Beyond institutionalizing inequality and codifying a worldwide hierarchy of
nationalities, the visa procedure is prohibitively expensive, unfair and exclu-
sionary. It has many perhaps unintended consequences for cultural affairs,
academic studies, and social events: the law prescribes that only citizens who
are from specific economic, national and social backgrounds may participate
in social, academic, and cultural events in the US political space. US policy is
clear: noncitizens—who are not citizens of Visa Waiver Program nations—who
are poor, unemployed, or in their twenties cannot be present in the US political
space.
25. See “From Anecdotes to Evidence: Setting the Record Straight on Immigrants
and Crime” 2013; Gusmano 2012; Lilley 2013; Anderson 2010.

Work Cited
Abraído-Lanza, Ana F., Bruce P. Dohrenwend, DaiSy S. Ng-Mak and J. Blake Turner.
1999. “The Latino Mortality Paradox: A Test of the ‘Salmon Bias’ and Healthy
Migrant Hypotheses.” American Journal of Public Health 89.10: 1543–1548.
Anderson, Stuart. 2010. “Immigrants and Crime: Perception vs. Reality.” Immigra-
tion Reform Bulletin June. 1+.
Bada, Tope. 2015. Press F1 for Visa. Lagos: Basor Publications.
Bahrampour, Tara. 2009. “Number of Immigrants Applying for U.S. Citizenship Is
Down 62%, Report Finds.” Washington Post 12 September. 1+.
134  Forced Acculturation
Blake, Aaron. 2013. “Priebus: Romney’s Self-Deportation Comment Was ‘Hor-
rific’ ” The Washington Post 16 August. 1+.
Brown, Will. 1997. Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns. New York:
St. Martin’s.
“Citizen’s Almanac.” 2014. United State Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Das Gupta, Monica. 2006. Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational
South Asian Politics in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke.
Dávila, Arlene. 2012. Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neolib-
eral Americas. New York: New York University.
Dobbs, Lou. 2006. War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business,
and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How
to Fight Back. New York: Viking.
Driscoll, Kevin. 2006. “Interview With Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera.” Hyannis, MA, 18
December.
“Federal Protections Against National Origin Discrimination.” 2001. US Dept. of
Justice, Civil Rights Division. www.justice.gov/crt/legalinfo/natorigin.php
“From Anecdotes to Evidence: Setting the Record Straight on Immigrants and
Crime.” 2013. Immigration Policy Center, 25 July.
Gui, Weihsin. 2014. “The Migrant Longing for Form.” Pacific Coast Philology 49.2:
153–166.
Gusmano, Michael. 2012. “Undocumented Immigrants in the United States: Use of
Health Care.” The Hastings Center, 27 March.
Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. 2015. “Visa Restrictions Limit Academic Freedom.” Univer-
sity World News 17 July. 1+.
Ingraham, Laura. 2007. Power to the People. Washington, DC: Regenery Publishing.
Keeanga-Yamahtta, Taylor. 2010. “Arizona’s ‘Jim Crow’ ” The Socialist Worker 30
April.
“Language Use and English-Speaking Ability.” 2000. United States Census Brief.
Lilley, Sandra. 2013. “Latinos Are Less Likely to Report Crimes to Police.” NBC
Latino 7 May. 1+.
Luibhéid, Eithne. 2002. Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Min-
neapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
Luibhéid, Eithne and Lionel Cantú. 2005. Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizen-
ship, and Border Crossings. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
Malone, Barry. 2015. “Why Al Jazeera Will Not Say Mediterranean ‘Migrants’ ” Al
Jazeera 20 August. 1+.
Passel, Jeffrey. 2011. Unauthorized Immigrant Population: National and State
Trends, 2010. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center.
Riccardi, Nicholas. 2010. “Arizona Lawmakers Modify Immigration Law.” Los An-
geles Times 1 May. 1+.
Schmidt-Camacho, Alicia. 2008. Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in
the US. New York: New York University.
Suárez-Orozco, Carola and Marcelo M Suárez-Orozco. 2009. Children of Immigra-
tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
7 Transmedia Storytelling

The cultural appropriation of the regions claimed by the US political

body functions upon a set of behaviors (including language and other
social and cultural norms) that are disseminated as appropriate (i.e.,
unhyphenated-American and vetted subhyphenations thereof) through the
structures thus far discussed in this book. This chapter examines how these
cultural constraints are iterated in various—often considered non-artistic
and non-state—forms of media, such as traditional news outlets, advertising
campaigns, sporting activity, and digital spaces, such as social media and
search engines. These apparently non-state actors, which include individu-
als, corporations, and national network media, sometimes operate firmly
within the cultural filters of the state, but yet they are situated external to
the direct interventions of the political body.
The actions of these non-state spheres is apparently carried out with integ-
rity and benevolence, by choice and free will in a realm that, despite reiterat-
ing the cultural myths of the political body, is not affiliated therewith; Noam
Chomsky has argued that this occurs because the individuals involved “have
internalized the values” embedded in the cultural systems to such a degree
that the myths function as foundations in their situated worldviews regard-
ing culture and reality (qtd. in “Manufacturing Consent” 1992). In this
way, such cultural material could be understood as “free” and dynamic
within the limits of the already-established cultural filters: these constraints,
which exclude non-systemic narrative and aesthetics, are integrated such
that the constraints themselves are often unrecognized and unrecognizable
to those who employ them.

Non-Systemic Ideas and Major Media Outlets:

Mexica and Aztlán
The network media often engage in silent censorship, omitting movements
that reject the political, social, and cultural claims that defy the general
cultural prescriptions of the US political body. However, when this di-
rect censorship proves insufficient, the organizations often use strategies
like ridicule, mislabeling, and redirection of the attention of the public,
136  Transmedia Storytelling
in efforts to discredit any nondominant discourse. A salient example of
this phenomenon is the coverage of Mexica and Aztlán movements,1 both
of which question the cogency of US political claims to spaces and com-
munities in what is sometimes termed the Southwest. As is common with
other non-systemic topics, the major media methodically attempt to rel-
egate these ideas to “fringe” status through attack and denunciation. The
charges against these and other such movements do not generally address
the dissenting ideas—but, rather, they focus on the supposed demography
and character of the dissenters, who are often charged with being racist or
delusional people.2
The media attempts to control the messages of what may be understood
as legitimate ideas through these attacks. “[T]here are some fringe groups
out there calling for Reconquista,” notes Alex Koppelman, former politics
editor at the New York Times. “But that’s what they are—tiny, ultimately
insignifcant (sic) groups at a far fringe, being seized on to propagate the
ridiculous notion that this is some sort of mainstream thought” (2011).
While it is unclear why the mainstream nature of any movement would
influence its importance or validity, the purpose of Koppleman’s diatribe is
to attack “they” who support Reconquista, not the ideas or beliefs that they
express.3 He goes on to say that the Reconquista and Aztlán movements
“exist not in the minds of mainstream Mexicans but in the fever dreams of
white supremacists.” Koppelman also attempts to delegitimize the move-
ment by attacking CNN for mentioning Aztlán in its coverage (though the
movement was attacked and ridiculed by CNN, as well). “The only thing
CNN apparently considers regrettable here is that they broadcast a map
produced by the CCC; the fact that they were even looking for a map of
‘Aztlan’ (sic) in the first place escapes notice” (2011).
Mislabeling these groups “fringe” allows Koppleman to prefigure negative
connotations to the movements without amplification or reasoning. Such
labeling is useful for rhetorical attack, as the labels tend to be self-referential
and not evidence-based, and thus can re-propagate the system’s ideas with-
out any interpretation or dialogue with the non-systemic voices, in the most
concise of forms. These labels also have an emotional power that, when
coupled with authority that major media outlets portend to maintain, make
them useful for the repression of other ideas.
The scant coverage of these movements in The Washington Times very
closely mirrored Koppleman’s condemnation in form and content. Rather
than engage with the reasons why people hold non-systemic points of view
or interview leaders of the movements, Aztlán has appeared in The Wash-
ington Times in passing and only in the context of ridicule: “I can’t believe
you’re bothering me with questions about this,” said Nativo López, presi-
dent of the Mexican-American Political Association in Los Angeles. “I can’t
believe you’re bothering with such a minuscule, fringe element that has no
resonance with this populous” (qtd. in “Mexican Aliens Seek to Retake
‘Stolen’ Land” 2006). The idea here, as in other treatments of Mexica and
Aztlán in mainstream media outlets, is not to engage with the ideas of the
 Transmedia Storytelling  137
movements or to examine whether the cultural and political claims of the
US political discourse are appropriate: the purpose of mentioning their exis-
tence is to dismiss them through derision. The ideas of Mexica and Aztlán
are outside the terms framed by dominant spheres—and therefore, they are
to be marginalized by those media that uphold the system’s myths.
The suppression of non-systemic cultural ideas in the major media relies
heavily on framing ideas rather than discussion. The negative tones, a scant
amount of coverage, and inappropriate context allow the media to con-
struct disapproval and fear toward ideas that do not celebrate the domi-
nant discourse. A lack of comprehensive coverage, in particular, allows
the dominant ideology to remain in place: what we see on these outlets
is a world expressed through mainstream filters. As Michael Parenti has
pointed out,

[l]ittle is said about how the social order is organized and for what
purposes. Instead we are left to see the world as do mainstream pun-
dits, as a scatter of events and personalities propelled by happenstance,
circumstance, confused intentions, bungled operations, and individual
ambition—rarely by powerful class interests.
(2013, 29)

The range of discourse as laid out in the cultural engineering is the mitigat-
ing factor that shapes how a topic is discussed, what is treated, and to what
extent. Occasionally sparkling debate occurs within the limits offered in
systemic discourse (for instance, on abortion or gun control) but when a set
of ideas breaches the foundational myths of the US political space—these
may be regarding language, the presence of peoples or cultural systems in
a space, or failure to recognize the authority of the US political body’s cul-
tural claims—these discourses are resolutely belittled as “fringe” (a term
that often is used as a synonym as “unimportant”) and its supporters are
blasted by the most severe complaints (often racially based) that the social
norms of the dominant system will allow.

Advertising: Chevy, Ford, MacDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Sunday

Night Football
Many commercial enterprises appear to be strictly independent, capitalist
and market driven, but their advertising often has an important role beyond
consumption:

Advertising has an “agenda setting function” which is the ability,

with huge sums of money, to put consumption as the only item on the
agenda. In the battle for a share of the public conscience this amounts to
non-treatment (ignorance) of whatever is not commercial . . . the voice
of commerce becomes the dominant way of expression in society.
(Starkov qtd. in Poonia 2010, 75)
138  Transmedia Storytelling
As cultural citizenship in the US political space has been interpellated with
consumerism, how the products appear and in what context in large-scale
advertising is an important dimension of community building. While there
is some degree of market logic to how images of people and places are
engaged in advertising, the underlying foundation of marketing often cor-
responds very precisely to the cultural myths of the US political space. Mar-
keting campaigns sometimes attempt to seize the emotional power of the
narrative and relate it to consumer products.
Some marketing schemes adopt the specific symbols (eagles, statues,
faces, stars, names, and so on), colors (red, white, blue), maps (of the US
political claims), and other social tools as promotional apparatus. Like the
state-sponsored cultural interventions, advertising and marketing are forms
of communication used to encourage, influence, and manipulate the public
to take on new behavior or continue to perform some action—as the emo-
tion of the myth is an operative device in this manipulation, these pieces of
material culture function as an ancillary dimension of the story.4 While this
phenomenon occurs in almost all advertising in the US political space, this
treatment will discuss three fundamental components of the human experi-
ence: food consumption, movement, and leisure activity.

Coca-Cola
The promotion of the English language and the unhyphenated myths is a
firmly established practice in advertising to residents of places claimed by
the US political body. Coca-Cola, perhaps more than other food companies,
has used the myths to construct an emotional relation to a watery, sugary,
and caffeinated liquid for over a century, with lucrative results. The com-
mercial campaigns for this beverage have also changed within correspon-
dence to the development of state myths; recently, television commercials
for the beverage have expressed an apparent respect for diversity, one that is
framed by the state’s articulation of an appropriate cultural hierarchy. Dur-
ing the 2014 Super Bowl, Coca-Cola aired a multilingual commercial that
appears to embrace a multicultural and diverse supra-community (or series
of communities) that reside “from sea to shining sea.” The spot involved the
song “America the Beautiful” sung in seven languages, including English.
“The ad,” as Joe Rigney comments, “asks the viewer a simple question—Fill
in the blank: ‘as American as _________.’ ” He continues:

If you give the last answer, then the ad invites you on a little journey, an
audio-visual quest in search of American identity. With no more west-
ward land to conquer colonize settle, where is manifest destiny calling
us? What is the next frontier?
And the ad leaves no doubt as to the answer. Manifest destiny is call-
ing us to extend our commitment to liberty, equality, and democracy, to
add a fourth ideal to our Americanist creed: diversity.
(Rigney 2014)
 Transmedia Storytelling  139
Similarly, Sushmita, the girl who sang in Hindi in the commercial, said,
“The message that we’re sending through this video is so beautiful, that we
are all the same . . . We just have different backgrounds and that’s OK” (qtd.
in Lee 2014).
While the spot involves a range of cultural traditions and languages, the
structure of the commercial subordinates each to the English language and
other myths promoted by the US political body. Indeed, on close inspec-
tion, the clip manifests how the new multicultural and integralist vocabu-
lary tends to flesh out into an hierarchical scale: English begins and ends
the commercial (scaling the other tongues to the controlled spaces between
these ends), and English is the main language sung in the middle section
(between the two English–English ends). The amount of time English is sung
in the commercial amounts approximately to that of the other languages
combined:

5 second English
5 seconds Spanish
5 seconds Creole
10 seconds English
6 seconds Hebrew
6 seconds Arabic
6 seconds Mandarin
6 seconds Keres
11 seconds English

The advertisement contains thirty approximately two-second mini-episodes,

all of which ostensibly occur in spaces claimed by the political body; six-
teen are sung in English, and fourteen are sung in the other six languages
combined.

English
• Man dressed in a cowboy costume riding a white horse in the mountains
• Girl popping bubble gum

Spanish

• People in cinema
• Girl blowing dust from hand

Tagalog

• Girl behind wheel of car drinking Coke

• Surfers near the Santa Monica Pier
140  Transmedia Storytelling
Senegalese-French
• People break dancing

English

• Family in an SUV looking at the landscape; a man behind the wheel,

three of the four people in the car ostensibly have blonde hair
• People in a tent
• A girl standing facing camera
• A family around a table eating what appears to be Tex-Mex food
• Older man with cowboy hat

Hebrew

• Man in suit facing camera

• Two men in kippahs looking out a window

Arabic

• Women in head scarves approaching a food stand in an urban

China Town
• Woman in headscarf facing camera

Mandarin

• Child without shirt
• Child and man swimming underwater in a pool
• Hands grabbing bottlecaps in pool

Keres

• Asian man
• People roller-skating

Back to English

• Woman facing camera

• Girl in bathing suit
• People playing handball
• Elderly person’s hand over a child’s hand
• Men in kippahs drinking Coke
• Children laying down in leaves
• Woman dancing (from behind)
• Man in cowboy costume drinking Coke
• Children running in mountain scene
 Transmedia Storytelling  141
The subtitle of the last mini-episode reads “#AmericaIsBeautiful” in English.
This clip was shown in my classroom in Puerto Rico the day after it first
aired. Diana Sotomayor-Irizarry remarked: “¡Comienza con el Conquista-
dor llegando desde Europa!” (It begins with the Conquistador arriving from
Europe!) The clip is framed by one of the principal myths of the US politi-
cal cultural claims: a man, ostensibly of European descent, on horseback
in a mountain setting; the penultimate mini-episode returns to that image,
both of which are segments sung in English. The placement and structure of
the Coca-coca advertisement rehash that diverse cultural mores may in fact
(co)exist in this space, but they are understood—in both public and com-
mercial spheres—to be subordinate to and less important than the dominant
discourses of the US political body.5 While the new expressions of collectiv-
ity may be plural, they also repeat the supposedly enduring message: the
celebration of the dominant culture as the central force. All other cultural
action is in relation to the monocultural center.

Chevy: “About a Man and his Truck and the Bond

between Them”
In the last century the representation of man in a motorized vehicle has
supplanted (or come to be a complement to) that of a man on horseback as
an image of supposed freedom, liberty, and other cultural slogans. Perhaps
more than any other car company, Chevy has seized this image and ex-
ploited it; and, like consuming Coca-Cola, a central part of their marketing
campaigns attempt to interpellate the car/truck as symbolic of the cultural
myths of the political body. Driving (like consuming Coca-Cola) becomes
part of the “American Experience” and a representation of community
affiliation—and the logo for Chevy is modeled on the Christian cross.
An executive at Chevy has characterized these strategic campaigns as nar-
ratives “about a man and his truck and the bond between them,”6 a notion
that involves a pragmatic cultural initiative to determine action (driving and,
subsequently, purchase of vehicles) as an intrinsic part of the “American”—
but perhaps more accurate, human—experience. The campaigns interpellat-
ing Chevy, or the use of the vehicle in general, as an “American” cultural
activity accelerated after the government subsidized the construction of the
Interstate Highway System. The names of Chevy’s commercial campaigns
underscore this phenomenon:

See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet (1950s–1960s)

Building a better way to see the U.S.A. (early 1970s)
Baseball, Hotdogs, Apple Pie & Chevrolet (1975; 2006)
USA-1 Taking Charge (1983)
The Heartbeat of America (1987–1994)
Rock, Flag and Eagle (1985–1987)
From the country that invented rock and roll (1993–1997)
142  Transmedia Storytelling
An American Revolution (2004–2009)
Our Country, My Truck (2006–2007)
America’s Best Trucks (2007—present)

In the same way that other cultural apparatus construct normative exigen-
cies vis-à-vis the conduct of individuals, the proliferation of the automobile
is one of the most powerful manifestations of cultural interventions that
attempt to control and sometimes shift collective behaviors. The car compa-
nies were (and are) buoyed enormously by the Interstate Highway System
and the road system in general—both of which are publicly funded. The
reconstruction of distance and movement (in a sense, of reality itself) for
the residents subordinated to them are promoted by the state and its com-
mercial ancillaries as a positive, even “progressive” events. These physical
structures (roads, bridges, new town and urban layouts that they command,
etc.), then, create a radical monopoly on acceptable behavior: non-systemic
forms of residing in the same spaces are not only challenging but also pro-
hibitively costly and even unsafe (for instance, walking from place to place
on roads designed for vehicles). The emergence of the car companies as
dominant commercial forces benefits the assertions of the political body, as
the interests and intentions of both closely interrelate.7
The role of the physical spaces themselves, and their modification to facil-
itate vehicle use (and purchase), concomitantly creates a new arrangement
of community. As the nature of in-person communication (the fundamental
component of society and culture) is so radically altered by the manipula-
tion of this landscape, the vehicle has become in many ways a requirement
to live in the spaces claimed by the US political body. It has also become
a status symbol, a forum to communicate aesthetics and socioeconomic
status. As these cultural circumstances, by design or default, reiterate the
cultural mores of the US political body, Chevy and other companies have
commercial campaigns that celebrate this “development” in articulations
that are a very close parallel (and that secondarily support) the state’s more
direct cultural initiatives.

Sports: NFL Sunday Night Football

Sports are a form of theater. The broadcasts of the National Football League
(NFL) are among the most watched programs on television (in fact, they
have been the most watched programs in recent years); the flagship game
each week occurs on Sunday night—this prime-time slot tends to enjoy more
viewers than any other during the week. As with food and vehicle compa-
nies, the national football corporation interpellates the US cultural narra-
tives as part of the spectacle. The NFL’s promotional material about the
residents of the US political space attempts to avoid historicity in favor of
an idealist cultural project that reiterates the collective myths through sport.
The introductory segment of Sunday Night Football in many ways epit-
omizes the ideologically determined cultural imaging, so much so that it
 Transmedia Storytelling  143
borders on caricature. Dan Fogarty has observed, “This has to be a parody,
but it isn’t” (2011). The one-minute primer broadcast each week at the same
time is a pastiche of video clips that attempt to link football and the NFL to
the cultural (and political) expressions US political body. The lyrics of the
theme song—all of which are in English—begin, “waiting for the game that
bleeds red, white, and blue” with the political banner behind the singer (Car-
rie Underwood). As with many other cultural expressions of the US political
space, the song includes the words, “coast to coast,” and continues, “there’s
just one thing left to say . . . more than a game.” The song is complemented
by images of men playing football in archetypal, though non-football arenas;
players appear in a cornfield; on a cattle ranch; in Times Square; between
statues in Washington, D.C.; in a steel mill; in a desert; on a snow-covered
lake beside people ice fishing; on the mall in Philadelphia; and on Bour-
bon Street in New Orleans. The scene also includes the more direct cultural
images of the state without football or football players present: the Capitol
Building, Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial (at one point,
the singer is surrounded by US political flags and fireworks) frame the foot-
ball scenes, and the final image of the spot is an image of the US Capitol.8
As ridiculous as these tropes are, they form the central component of the
NFL’s most important (i.e., most-watched) telecast each week. The exag-
geration of cultural myth in this sporting organization commercial imag-
ing does have some direct links to the state itself, as the leader of the US
political entity (the president) mentions both the Thanksgiving games and
the Super Bowl in public discourses. Moreover, despite being enormously
successful in a financial sense, the public also funds the league through tax
breaks, free advertisements from the president and other public figures, and
also direct monies to individual teams (often used to build more profitable
stadia (Easterbrook 2013)). The cultural imaging of this sport and of the
league—as with sugary, caffeinate drinks, and motor vehicles—interpellates
the emotion of the myth as a resource for profits.

Digitizing Cultural Myth: The Futures of Colonization

Recent technological innovations have changed how we experience real-
ity and understand community. These have become not only a vehicle but
an intermediary of transnational myth, one that (like traditional colonial
cultural apparatus) attempts to control and shape the behavior of the in-
dividual exposed to them. While in some sense, digitized communities and
ostensible access to new ideas appear to challenge some of the fundamental
treaties of identity and community; the new media also have been seized by
political and commercial actors in efforts to reiterate the conventional cul-
tural discourse about the spaces claimed by the US political body.
Digital media bring new structures of imperial domination. In traditional
colonial complexes, identity is often articulated as a concept with (imaginary)
historical roots that shape the contemporary cultural action. The precise
forms in which identity prescriptions are articulated is in a transition phase,
144  Transmedia Storytelling
one that involves new—often online or transmedia—loci of self-construction
that are explicitly nonphysical (digital). These new iterations of material
culture, however, are not ahistorical: the dimensions of cultural interaction
that new forums provide are sites of cultural appropriation—and thus, their
forming effects involve the refashioning of collective identity myth. While
the dominant discourses emphasize the ostensible liberation and democra-
tization that supposedly derive from these media, the platforms are, in fact,
being appropriated by state and corporate interests in the same way that
the printing press and traditional publishing—once understood as liberat-
ing devices—have been largely appropriated by state controls in order to
marginalize non-systemic ideas.
E-colonial theory maintains that mass media images (in new, digitized
forums) attempt to engage conventional dimensions of myth such as the
English language, specific histories, and founding narratives, among oth-
ers. The new media function as an additional channel of implementation.
In practice, the new media put myth into practice through similar itera-
tions as traditional colonial complexes—saturation of specific language,
symbol, ideas, and so on coupled with the absences of material from other
cultural systems. These processes thus attempt to appropriate the nonphysi-
cal spaces (web pages, apps, mobile devices, and so on) as the domain of the
cultural norms of the US political space (McPhail 2008). Digital colonial-
ism attempts to create dependency on electronic and online communicative
devices, for information and social interaction, and thus, in the same way
that construction of roads and unwalkable city layouts have forced people
into automobile usage, the rise of hypercommunicative digitized circum-
stances interpellates freedom and social action with specific behavior, capi-
talist consumption, and use of physical apparatus that access digital spaces.
The ways that the myths are implemented through these digital spaces
is not significantly different from traditional media: the consumption-
as-positive frame that links myths of “freedom” as adherent components
of capitalist action, presented in an environment saturated with cultural
narratives of the US political body, is a central emphasis. In this sense, state
actors engage spectators’ exposure to these ostensibly egalitarian digital
mechanisms, over time, as an attempt to inform the viewers’ understanding
of reality. E-media socialization thus can function as a purveyor of common
roles and cultural behaviors. The enculturation (first-cultural learning) that
occurs through constant contact with the e-spaces functions to construct
identity: the new media are spaces of (trans)nationalization and patriation.
Much of the soft power of e-colonialism derives from consumerism and
the presumed benignity (and banality) of the media themselves. Consump-
tion or use of e-media is often understood as an individual choice, a circum-
stance that allows the dominant cultural narrative to be inserted into the
user’s purview as a seamless and unifying component of the e-experience.
While the individual may have an ability to change devices or service pro-
viders, the structural role of e-experiences has become embedded into how
people interact with one another and with the broader community, making
 Transmedia Storytelling  145
the structural concerns that relate to culture of paramount importance.
The subtleties of the communicative platforms attempt to shape how we
relate to the digital reality and to one another, and thus, the digitization of
the US cultural myths has a semblance to the edification of physical spaces.
The free and open media, then, are embedded in a capitalist and political
narrative than posits the spaces themselves as forums that lack a locus of
authority, an environment without ideology that is hegemonic or externally
organized. These fictions allow the tropes of e-participation as a device of
supposed equality and organic community development. These concepts are
attractive and provocative but fail to address the capitalist (and state) inter-
ests that infiltrate the structures themselves. Imagining e-spaces as disengaged
from their historical and cultural exigencies only re-imposes the traditional
cultural myths as reference points. These reiterate community as a geographic,
linguistic, or cultural idea, and are fictions that support the power of tradi-
tional discourses. Even the most ostensibly free spaces of e-existence, search
engines and social media, are often saturated with direct mythic structures.

Search Engines: The Social Power of Google

As search engines have rapidly become a standard part of digitized reality,
the social power of Google now eclipses that of many other institutions, and
google—while ostensibly a non-state entity—is among the most important
locations of e-myth implementation. The search engine locates a user by IP
address; when a user is located in the US political space, he or she is pre-
sented with a series of visual and textual iterations of the US cultural myths.
For instance, while specific country sites (e.g., Spain’s google.es) recognize
that these communities are multilingual and offer searches in several lan-
guages, the default setting for a user in the US political space (even in regions
that are not English speaking, such as Puerto Rico) is the English language.
Moreover, the US government’s set of national/Christian holidays is also
celebrated on the Google default page with images and sometimes textual
messages that propagate the state’s hierarchy of cultural importance; the
default page is also employed as a resource to promulgate specific identity
imageries, as it presumes that these concepts are relevant to users. The most
pervasive and recurrent images that are inserted into a user’s experience
express the terms of patriation (historical, cultural, and linguistic, among
others) as they are articulated per the US political body, actively celebrating
these myths as though they were positive, stable, and universal phenomena.
What might be more troubling than the cultural engineering of the default
pages is the manner that search results are manipulated. Google actively
collects information on all users, which includes information compiled from
specific IP ranges regardless if a user is logged in. (Each city, town, and
state has explicit digital signatures.) The engine uses these data to construct
a profile of users who search in those IP ranges and subsequently directs
search results toward assumptions that are based on the actions of other
users. This collectivization of search results interprets an individual’s search
146  Transmedia Storytelling
by his or her presumed demography (which is in part presumed via their
IP), and guides the results to specific sites that supposedly are relevant to
them. Determining and prescribing relevancy in this way makes Google a
primary player in the colonial rule of digital spaces, as the results are filtered
by language (any search in Spanish from a US IP results with an error mes-
sage and asks the user if he or she would prefer English-only pages), content
(pages are ranked according to profiling; new websites are ranked unfavor-
ably compared to established ones), and contents of searches are regularly
passed to CIA and FBI sources (Manjoo 2002).
Google also attempts to shape the reality of its users in more subtle ways.
The same keywords, for instance, will produce different results based on
specific indicators, and some have argued that the organization does this in a
way that confuses reality with the commercial potential of clicks. As Jeffrey
Katz noted in an antitrust hearing, “Google doesn’t play fair. Google rigs
its results” (qtd. in Lohr 2011); the results are, like Chevy and Coca-Cola,
driven by capitalist interests that are also interrelated with the cultural
expression of the political body. These situations are particularly dangerous
(and effective at myth-implementation) as people have been shown to rely
on Google’s technology with question, believing that the “best” result will
be among the first responses—and assuming that if something is not listed it
is unimportant or perhaps does not even exist (Maurer et al. 2007).
As the most-used website in the world, Google and its success are a result
of its adherence to the assumptions of cultural myths. Another forum of
cultural saturation involves the itemization of user preferences, “because
you like this, you’ll like this,” which is a central component of many plat-
forms including amazon.com, Facebook, and Netflix. The preference tem-
plate channels users into what they “should” desire and functions as a soft
control on cultural material. They reproduce ideas like language, holidays,
and so on, such that the limits of the e-system ostensibly represent the limits
of cultural existence. These forms of soft power subtly saturate e-spaces
with myths that benefit the discourses of traditional collectively and often
use very similar vocabularies of persuasion.9

Colonialism Redefined
E-media constitute an environment that shapes the opportunities for cul-
tural participation and attempts to affect human awarenesses, cultural un-
derstandings and sensitivities, and values. The new media (the Internet and
its reaches, more concretely) while an indiscriminate and non-mechanical
register, construct a continuous stream of expression: this circumstance sev-
ers it from the planted, time-spatial and moment-dependent nature of lit-
erature and other traditional material culture. This new immediacy sidelines
the older cultural expressions in favor of constant contact with information
streams. These new experiences with real-time iterations of traditional ma-
terial reframe “being” as contact with these data flows (a reality which,
 Transmedia Storytelling  147
some may argue, places conventional communicative structures and their
subjects into crisis). These new vehicles of exposure to canons, neverthe-
less, are informed by the traditional cultural expressions of the US political
space.
As is the case with physical spaces, there is little relative autonomy in the
virtual spaces where people interact with others; are informed about cur-
rent events; and engage in e-cultural activities. The cultural determinance
(or attempts thereat) remains intact and perhaps may be increased through
the passivity and apparent benignity of the new modes. This transition of
traditional modes of control (in language, certainly) into the new virtualities
in many ways has been imperceptible. The results are the same as traditional
cultural intentionality: the interlacing and interconnecting of people in the
format prescribed by the traditional powers exert specific social cues on a
multitude for its normative effects.
This new phase of imperialism deals with multiple access points for
implementation of collective fictions. New platforms can challenge con-
ventions but it is increasingly done upon platforms that have conventional
discourses already embedded in them. The amplification of a new voice or
a new idea, as in traditional publication modes, has a filter: the linguistic,
social, and cultural concerns in transmedia storytelling resemble traditional
modes of dissemination, with the same authority structures and controls.
While construction of identity appears to be ahistoric and separate from
bodily and geographic experience and is celebrated as such by many inter-
ested stakeholders, it may be another ethnocentric iteration of cultural
difference.

Notes
1. The National Mexican Front has expressed the following: “We reject the occu-
pation of our nation in its northern territories, an important cause of poverty
and emigration. We demand that our claim to all the territories occupied by
force by the United States be recognized in our Constitution, and we will bravely
defend, according to the principle of self-determination to all peoples, the right
of the Mexican people to live in the whole of our territory within its historical
borders, as they existed and were recognized at the moment of our independ-
ence” (“La total reunificación de nuestra patria” 2013).
2. The Republic of Lakota’s expressions of independence from the US political
space has also been generally omitted from national media outlets.
3. It is also by labeling them “fringe,” a term here which Koppelman appears to
employ as a synonym of unimportant.
4. In this sense, in the realms of corporate activity, advertising might best be char-
acterized as a form of institutionalized deceit.
5. On the Coca-Cola website they have each singer singing the complete song; the
first one is in English and the last in Senegalese French (“It’s Beautiful” 2011).
6. Qtd. in Halpert 2011.
7. That the car companies received enormous public funding to avoid bankruptcy
after the crisis of 2008 only redoubles the myth that the community itself could
not exist without the automobile.
148  Transmedia Storytelling
8. The introduction has varied slightly each season from 2006 to 2014; each year
the clip involves different players and slightly different scenes, though the song
and general theme of the treatment is the same.
9. The traditional complexes use the presence of cultural material as a default guide
for collective existence, and this combination of saturation (traditional myths)
and exclusion (of non-systemic thought) attempts to organize the community as
a whole into these patterns of desire.

Work Cited
Chomsky, Noam. 1992. “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.”
Dir. Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick.
Easterbrook, Gregg. 2013. “How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers.” The Atlantic Octo-
ber. 1+.
Fogarty, Dan. 2011. “Is NBC’s Sunday Night Football Intro With Faith Hill the
‘Worst Intro in the History of Television?’ ” Sportsgrid 19 September. 1+.
Halpert, Julie. 2011. “Chevy’s Most Enduring Advertising Campaigns: How the
Ideas Took Root.” Advertising Age 31 October. 1+.
“It’s Beautiful’: Coke Debuts Inspiring Ad During Big Game.” 2011. Coca-Cola
Journey. 1+.
Koppelman, Alex. 2011. “CNN Stands By Lou Dobbs’ Racist Fantasies.” Huffing-
ton Post 25 May. 1+.
“La total reunificación de nuestra patria.” 2013. Frente Nacionalista de México
Siglo XXI.
Lee, Jolie. 2014. “Coca-Cola Super Bowl ad: Bilingual Girls Explain Meaning.”
USA Today 5 February. 1+.
Lohr, Steve. 2011. “Google’s Competitors Square Off Against Its Leader.” New York
Times 12 September. 1+.
McPhail, Thomas. 2008. “eColonialism Theory: Hegemony and the Role of Ameri-
can Media.” The Global Studies Journal 1.2: 45–54.
Manjoo, Farhad 2002. “Conspiracy Researcher Says Google’s No Good.” Salon 29
August. 1+.
Maurer, H., Tilo Balke, Frank Kappe, Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer, Stefan Weber
and Bilal Zaka. 2007. “Report on Dangers and Opportunities Posed by Large
Search Engines, Particularly Google.” Institute for Information Systems and
Computer Media, Graz University of Technology Paper, 30 September.
“Mexican Aliens Seek to Retake ‘Stolen’ Land.” 2006. The Washington Times 16
April. 1+.
Parenti, Michael. 2013. Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader. New York:
City Lights Books.
Poonia, Virender. 2010. Advertising Management. New Dehli: Gyan Publishing
House.
Rigney, Joe. 2014. “What That Coca-Cola Ad Tells Us About Americanism.” The
Federalist 5 February. 1+.
8 Colonial Problems, Transnational
American Studies

The damage that identities have done [has resulted in] the end of human
community.
—Said (2000)

The transnational state is the realization of a utopian dream. Like all para-
dise constructions, it treads on a proclaimed emotional and cultural supe-
riority, an imagined unity, and a supposed natural (or divinely anointed)
status. The maintenance of that social location is waged through penalties
upon those who fail to recognize the cultural pretensions of a dominant
group (generally in power through violence, not democratic initiative) and
the social authority based thereon. The transnational iteration relies on the
national frameworks, nuanced so that they appear to be inclusive and rep-
resentational, but the same fragility underlays the transnational scope: while
ostensibly emancipatory, on close inspection the division of myth only re-
hashes the hierarchy and inequality of the capitalist neoliberal nation-state,
with modified and hyphenated or hybridized elements.
The inner problem is twofold: (1) a community linked to geography and/
or culture is inherently presumptuous. Cultural communities do not gener-
ally begin or end with any relation to the territorial prescriptions assigned
to them by political bodies, migrations occur constantly, and the cultural
orientation of each individual should be understood as external to and not
defined by external controls; (2) the cultural associations that supposedly
bind the residents of the space to one another into a stable social unit are
too malleable and circumstantial to maintain the exigencies articulated by
the nation and its transnational subordinates.

The Limits of Transnational Performance

That identity is a fluid phenomenon, informed by social and cultural condi-
tions is also a pillar of Queer Theory. The prescriptions that attempt to or-
ganize gender/sexual and cultural identities into rigid categories also derive
from power relations embedded in formal and informal social interactions.
150  Colonial Problems
The concept that mutually exclusive transnational identities (recognized, sit-
uated experiences of reality drawn from supposed subnational affiliations)
could exist is not unlike the suppositions necessary to maintain prescrip-
tive gender categories: transnational identity and its codifications in mate-
rial culture cannot signify without the externality of preconceived myths.
A serious shortcoming, then, both in traditional takes on sexual/gender and
transnational identities, is that their controls, limits, and resultant subjec-
tivities are external to the individual; a person’s relation thereto, or lack of
relation, is externally imagined and articulated. In this sense, even struggles
against such labels, toward hybridities or forms of diversity (with externally
defined groups and demographies), in some ways serve power, as the new
multicultural knowledges function to sustain some of the same repressive
social regimes. A supposedly transnational performance or piece of material
culture may be understood as a reiteration of a hybridized myth, and as Ju-
dith Butler observes, the preexisting structure yet “regulates and constrains”
the nature of the act (1993, 2). As they have done in gender studies, these
reflections problematize the emancipatory power and reach of the transna-
tional and its hybridities.
The transnational’s theoretical weaknesses, then, are similar to those of
traditional gender prescriptions, in that the fictions of both are limited to
the performances offered by the category. Transnational performativity may
be expressive, but it fails to constitute meaning beyond the recursive con-
tingencies of the collective, presumptive bases and lacks the grammars to
appreciate extra-group (or non-group based or oriented) action and emo-
tion. In light of the muddled nature of being that stems from the theoretical
shortcomings of the transnational, and other group- or geography-based
forms cultural inquiry, transnational approaches should be nuanced if not
abandoned in consideration of other descriptors and modes of being that
are, or may potentially be, more sensitive to individual agencies.1
These theoretical entanglements seem insurmountable. The presumption
that residence in a geographic space ineludibly relates to or informs one’s
sense of identity or community, even in a hybrid sense, is a critical tradi-
tion that generally goes unquestioned—and among its consequences are the
untenable presumptions of the transnational as a cultural container. These
circumstances call for new critical avenues that elide the inadequacies of
hybrid approaches to cultural and social being (with their inclusive and
exclusive influence on rights, group affiliations, and so on). These should
begin with new vocabularies and grammars of being that are not docu-
mented by modern and postmodern approaches, that are overlooked by the
transnational, and that have the potential to complement an understanding
of humanity and the specific and individual dimensions of its conditions:
these should be the tenets that inform after-national criticism. It is time
to unplug American (and other area) Studies from geographies, languages,
citizenships, collectivities, cultures, and political molds, and their emancipa-
tions of already power.
 Colonial Problems  151
The enemies of collective identity policies are often cosmopolitanism and
curiosity, contrahistorical thinking, and individuality. When a more atom-
ized, individual approach to a text or the work of an author is employed as a
critical apparatus (instead of a cultural, national or transnational approach),
linking a text to wider body of literature—such as American literature or
one of its subhyphenations, and their geopolitics—because of its language
or material therein, it becomes clear that such nomenclatures have expired:
the presumed stability of hybrid cultural bases falls short as a representative
metric of the communities (and/or individuals) that they pretend to signify.
The community spirit—the central binding element in such approaches—is
a slippery if not counterintuitive slope.

The Search for Universality

Even in scholarly spheres, radical emancipatory movements are almost
always underground, external to the system’s traditional measures and
channels. The way that social cues are organized by the academy oc-
casionally mirrors neoliberal, capitalist cultural prescriptions that allow
other ideas about community to function only in opposition. Today this
generally means institutionalized academic treatises often land some-
where between neoliberalism and its postcolonial constructions; between
capitalism and equality; between man and woman; between this and that.
Epistemological (and institutional) a priori control of “this” and “that”
allows power centers to also maintain subordination of those in between
spaces.
In the context of already-appropriated in-between spaces, Homi Bhabha
has argued that “The time for ‘assimilating’ minorities to holistic and
organic notions of cultural value has dramatically passed. The very lan-
guage of cultural community needs to be rethought. . . . ” (1994, 251). It
has been over two decades since Bhabha’s landmark text gesturing toward
post and transnational paradigms, and though a brief vacillation toward
postnational articulations of community stirred in the 1990s, its footprint
has been largely extinguished by the transnational, despite its serious the-
oretical flaws. Rodica Mihăilă has interpreted Bhabha’s approach as one
that “involves the transnational and the translational, revises the relation of
binary opposition not only between the First and the Third Worlds but also
between center and periphery. It, therefore, systematically subverts holis-
tic definitions and nationalistic syntheses as it problematizes boundaries”
(2011). Reading Bhabha’s refection as purely trans (not post) national, how-
ever, only reproblematizes the circumstance:2 the myth of multi- or hybrid
cultural communities as emancipatory results in a circular articulation of
the postcolonial, transnational state. This is due to the fact that robust,
comprehensive non-national and non-transnational articulations of com-
munity have in large part failed to materialize on the horizons of cultural
theory. Such a circumstance, however, is not an excuse to continue thinking
152  Colonial Problems
transnationally. Do trans approaches effectively describe the disparate
nature of how people experience realities and perform sentiments? And to
that end, what is the role of material objects, languages, cultural systems,
and their codifications in the life of an individual? While the codified struc-
tures of collective and geographic communities are founded in fantasy, the
transnational approach requires that the (also imaginary) spiritual links that
each individual supposedly has and maintains with others have relevance,
and foregrounds that imaginary. Such frames are burdened by serious theo-
retical glitches that embed them in the purely nationalist discourses they
endeavor to supplant.
In defense of such approaches, Gunter Lenz has argued that the cultural
expressions

are no longer seen as happening between, or among, stable,

territory-based (national) cultures or subcultures, but as two-way,
or multiple-way dynamic cultural processes and transculturations in
force-fields of sharp political asymmetries and confrontations and of
the different ‘spatial imaginary’ in a globalizing world.
(2012, 4–5)

A theoretical problem that looms unanswered around such attempts to

refigure “territory-based” cultures is that these trans-approaches (national,
cultural, communal, diasporic, and so on) remain situated on the pre-
sumed stability of the territory-based myth essences; they add a compara-
tive and dialectic dimension to the dialogue, but the center remains. This
circumstance appears to be acknowledged by some scholars, as Gunter
continues:

That is, transnational American Cultural Studies ask us to redirect our

critical perspective back to the specific, the concrete workings of the
politics of American Cultural Studies. This can only be done if our criti-
cal discourse is empowered by the different self-reflexive extensions and
revisions of the concept of culture as projected in the different discourses
referred to and their critical potential and by a more cogent engagement
with the political workings of ‘culture’ in American democratic society
in a world of globalization.
(Lenz’s emphasis 2012, 4)

The comparative component of this theoretical shift does not detach itself
from the hindering reality that trans and modified conceptualizations of
cultural groups are yet cultural groups. This reduces the trans- trend to a
self-referential base that is rooted in the supposedly stable, territory-based
myths it strives to displace. While such a theoretical move gestures toward
redefining the epistemologies of “culture,” it does not strive to detach “cul-
ture” from geographic prescriptions of social demography; perhaps for
 Colonial Problems  153
this reason, Lenz also emphasizes his belief that in these trans- shifts, the
nation-state and its boundaries are not discardable.3
While the transnational engages a form of consciousness and reality con-
structed in large part to circumvent national and patria myth, the Trans-
national Turn in American Studies only remobilizes mono-“Americanism”
and its subgroups—and thus its presumptive constituent bases. Donald
Pease has noted that the transnational relies on “an encompassing geo-
politics of knowledge” (2011, 1) connoting that the “ ‘transnational’ only
makes sense within a specific historical context” (2011, 3). Thus, the func-
tion of the transnational and transpatria perspectives is articulated through
the national imaginary, which, as Donald Pease notes, “prevents the closure
of the nation” (2011, 5). Transnational presumptions should be understood
as unstable critical bases because identity performances are demonstrably
more fluid, malleable conditions than what might be understood as “usable”
knowledge. In this way, the transnational and other forms transpatriotism
are burdened by their motivated reasoning; the individual’s actions may
appear to have agency, and the approach may read as a reasoned one, but
the group-based dimension of the interpretation makes the structural out-
comes and end points predetermined.

Transnational Distortions
Transnational American Study is an exercise in distortion. An interpreta-
tion of identity, material culture, or community through the limits of such a
frame cannot maintain the new articulations and performances of selfhood
that accompany the digitization of reality or the diversity of contemporary
communities, nor does the constant renaming within existent transnational
structures allow sites of individual agency that recognize the fleeting, cir-
cumstantial nature of selfhood and identity. The attempts to open the focus
by hybrid and hyphenated shifts have resulted in new labels—often just
as rigid—that resituated individuals in new demographic interpellation and
subordination to the same center: the unhyphenated “American” material
culture, person, community, and so on.
The true power of American Studies as a field derives from its author-
ity to control what may be understood (and therefore sanctioned and dis-
seminated) as legitimate knowledge about the cultures of those who reside
in spaces claimed by the US political body and other areas it supposedly
influenced in a “global” or “worlded” sense. The institutionalization of
the present iteration of transnational American study portrays the political
space as an already-colonized, stable, and supposedly appropriated space, a
verity that functions in part through the cultural production (texts that are
ostensibly academic and nonfiction) of scholarly communities. While the
transnational strives to disentangle the imperialisms of national and patri-
otic knowledge, not only do the extant structures remain—but any “new”
ideas are also dependent on them.
154  Colonial Problems
Academic Structures and the Exigencies of Neoliberal,
Capitalist Universities
Many academics who work in these disciplines have articulated serious
doubt on the nation-state and its prescriptions as apposite axes of investi-
gation: why, then, does it remain such an overdetermined force? A glimpse
at the nature of the institutions that produce the investigative material in
question might provide some insight on the absence and dismissal of post-
national and non-national study. The relationships and interdependencies
between scholarly ideas and nature of the institutions that produce them
have been described in the following ways:

• Confidence in formal education and cultural study as positive

phenomena;
• Confidence in the academy as medium of ideas;
• Confidence in ideas from the academy;
• Dependence on financing of educational institutions;
• Dependence on governmental aid for research and teaching;
• Academic dependency on these structures in their articulation of
legitimate ideas
(modified from Alatas 1999)

While the academic freedom enjoyed by tenured scholars allows some

the latitude to function outside of these structures, the percent of faculty
who have access to tenured status is rapidly shrinking because of the rise
of the corporate university and its attendant adjunctification of faculty. In
order to enjoy tenured status, faculty must first go through a rigorous pro-
bation period that involves service, publishing, and teaching, all of which
presumably realized within “acceptable” forums of inquiry and scholarly
approaches, so as to substantiate one’s skill in an already-institutionalized
academic environment. (When coupled with graduate studies, this stint until
tenured status often amounts to 16–18 years.) As the career options, partic-
ularly in the Humanities, are limited in the academy, this circumstance ben-
efits the conservatism of re-engaging transnational approaches: non-tenured
scholars of all stripes are in a precarious situation that commands adherence
to existing structures rather than taking on new and radical non-national
approaches.4
American Studies, then, can and often does function—perhaps unwit-
tingly and unwillingly—as an iteration of colonial power by legitimizing
and delegitimizing thought around the preexisting structural ideal that situ-
ates the existence of the US political body (and its present and past cul-
tural conceptualizations) as an acceptable idea, one that informs peoples’
lives, and sense of culture and being; this idea is the fundamental center
of discourse (myth) reiterated by the transnational. The prescriptions of
identity, cultural proprietorship, and related social material thus rely on
 Colonial Problems  155
formal educational institutions, including scholarship produced therein, as
institutional endorsements of the colonial idea of the space; these have rig-
idly organized the resident communities into dialectical (or “relational or
comparative” as per Radway)5 of normative and colonial models, which
delimit the approaches, even those that question these characterizations, to
the same allegory: that the national (and thus transnational) narrative must
be understood as an appropriate venue of inquiry because the nation and
its imaginaries supposedly inform the lives of those who reside in spaces
claimed by the political body. Whether or not this indeed occurs is not an
appropriate question: it is understood as self-evident.6
The transnational is also immensely popular because it is a somewhat
straightforward approach that offers a constellation of arenas to engage
inquiry; it thrives because transnational analyses are abundant, relatively
simple, and do not challenge the power that locates them as acceptable.
As Pease observes, “[e]ach contextualization of the transnational supplies
a provisional meaning for a signifier whose significance solicits endless
recontextualization” (2011, 6). The transnational is a robust and acces-
sible opportunity to rethink relationships and produce “new” mate-
rial, but the composition of these conclusions and their associations are
restricted to top-down and trans/national-based (and therefore repetitive)
reflections.
Transnational American Studies is bound to these limits. It attempts to
map immense sociopolitical and cultural discourses, literary and artistic
tendencies, and a broad hegemonic state system of linguistic and aesthetic
norms, to a series of supposedly competing or supposedly dialectic ideol-
ogies. These ideologies and aesthetics and their points of opposition are
codified and consequently sanctioned as acceptable areas of thought, in part
through academic studies. John Muthyala has outlined the critical map as
one that strives to

tease out, make visible, name, identify, contextualize, and read or de-
liberately misread the official symbols, events, and narratives in order
to effect displacements and realignments among the subject, scene, and
errand—thus reinvigorating them with new meanings
(2012, xvi)

The operative idea here is that the counternarrative uses the original nar-
rative as a source of opposition, an approach that (possibly inadvertently)
controls the latitude of discourse and therefore the agency of the actors
examined; they only exist in relation to the prescriptions of the original
(national) narrative. Such an approach only sanctions the myths of the origi-
nal system. The institutionalization of these ideas canonizes the composi-
tion of how the space and the cultures of its residents are to be understood,
and, in this way, American Studies—despite transnationalization—has not
emerged from the canonic national prescriptions of the past.7
156  Colonial Problems
The Psychology of Culturalized Spaces
and their Intentional Identities
Aside from the shortcomings of employing cultural groups and their pre-
sumptions in criticism, the empirical reports on identity and behavior (and
thus material culture that supposedly codifies sentiment) do not generally
match the structures of contemporary area studies. In the context of the co-
ercive cultural directives of the US political body and other similar political
entities, it may seem that authorship of one’s own cultural being becomes
lost in a web of physical and social structures that intend to direct behavior
and emotion into specific patterns:8 and in this sense, the results of an inten-
tional cultural system, such as that of the US political body, must be closely
scrutinized. Do deliberate cultural systems function as designed? Does isola-
tion within a web of socially and culturally engineered spaces produce the
prescribed imaginary relationships and identities?9
Despite the intentionality of a cultural system, studies in social psy-
chology and cultural neuroscience demonstrate that the way that an
individual behaves is not necessarily reciprocal or even consistent with
their surroundings or presumed demographies. It appears that collective
identity is significantly more fluid and circumstantial than how these phe-
nomena tend to be treated in cultural criticism. Cultural neuroscience is
a nascent field that examines the cerebral variances in chemicals and elec-
trical signals in terms of specific social and cultural situations. The field
investigates how cultural complexes shape how our brains function and
secondarily, how behavior relates to these plasticities; the field has been
described as “well poised to provide supporting evidence as well as novel
insights into the role of culture in thought and behavior” (Rule et al.
2011, 111). Cultural neuroscience and cultural psychology are interre-
lated, and they often employ similar clinical methods (Wyer et al. 2009,
introduction). The predominant model from reports in both fields posits
that identity and collective sentiments are situational, contingent upon
surroundings, and greatly dissimilar even among people from the same
cultural and social cohorts. In “Self-Identity in Sociocultural Contexts”
by Shihui et. al., how we perceive ourselves is described as “modulated
by sociocultural contexts” and, when two members of the same presumed
cohort are examined in the same context, how the circumstance shapes
self-perception was found to be “significantly different between partici-
pants”; thus, the responses to the same cultural canons “vary tremen-
dously” (Shihui et al. 2011, 65).10
The inconsistencies in cultural experience have been shown to be even
more profound in multicultural contexts. In the measures of neural activ-
ity for individuals performing the same cognitive task (locating north on
a map or constructing a hexagon with toothpicks, for instance), there
are quantifiable variances among those examined who “had been primed
with different cultural knowledge” (Gladzeter 2006, 242). Moreover,
 Colonial Problems  157
it has been shown that the same cognitive task is performed and pro-
cessed differently in the brain when a person realizes the task in a differ-
ent language or cultural context.11 In “Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic
Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition,” Y. Hong et al. have
demonstrated that “specific pieces of cultural knowledge (implicit theo-
ries)” can be understood as “operative in guiding the construction of
meaning from a stimulus” (2000, abstract). The symbolic stimulation
from a cultural canon, and thus an individual’s perception of and rela-
tion thereto, is contingent on the ways that the relations are accessible in
the mind; the accessibility (and, thus, the meaning of the cultural canon)
varies among places, times, company, and other factors. Another problem
regarding the presumed cultural relationships unpacked in transnational
approaches is that “individuals possess more than one . . . cultural mean-
ing system, and . . . a given cultural knowledge structure operates as an
interpretive frame only to the extent that it is cognitively accessible and
applicable to the stimulus situation” (Hong et al. 1998, 1536). That the
nature of the communities in the US political space are multicultural and
the reality that individuals have more than one system of social action in
the mind further complicates the notion that the political body’s program
of cultural engineering has significantly influenced the identities of those
who are exposed to it.
An exigency of cultural identity (even the transnational) is relational sta-
bility. While an intentional cultural system may have some level of signifi-
cance, the fetishizations of the dominant group and its transhyphenations
are relevant only in precise circumstances. In the case of each person subor-
dinated to those canons, identity is multivariate: “the salience of one [iden-
tity] over the others varies across situations and across time” and “in some
situations, the order [of dominance] switches, and one of the other identities
becomes more salient” (Mio et al. 2008, 20). Thus, in order to locate the
importance of a transpatriotism or another cultural identity relies on sup-
positions of relationships that are not always available or corroboratable.12
That these scholarly approaches are entrenched in the academy may relate
to some of the characteristics of Western culture itself: “Westerners may be
more likely to see themselves as possessing fixed traits regardless of what
situation they are in” (Rule et al. 2011, 111).
Intentional cultural systems do not create stable communities. The reports
in multicultural psychology and cultural neuroscience refute that such sys-
tems yield a constancy of sentiment (and thus affiliation) that is necessary
to perceive the residents of the US political space as a united and common
people; when the transnational and patriotic sentiments exist, they are con-
tingent upon specific, ephemeral contextualities that are not universal and
not always accessible. But yet this structure is the field imaginary of Ameri-
can Studies: that these grouping mechanisms and their dialectics are the
most appropriate way to study the cultures of individuals in those spaces is
the foundation of the discipline.
158  Colonial Problems
[Trans/hyphenated-]American as a Conditional
Adjective: National Myopia and the Complications of
Transnational Study
In light of these empirical reports, “Americanness” and its subhyphenations
(as bases of cultural identity) should be understood not as intrinsic, stable
characteristics—but as conditions that are the result of exposure to canons
of culture in specific spaces and at specific moments;13 the condition is un-
stable and fluid to the extent that the concept ceases to maintain meaning
when extricated from the complexes that produced it. The concept of col-
lective identity and the associated appropriations of rights and perceived at-
tachments that stem from them—that is, national and transnational systems
and their hierarchies—should also be understood not in terms of stable,
constancy but flux and multiplicity; the assertions of authority that underlay
these systems is too irregular to be applied as a metric for individuals.
This view of personal identity (a transitive engagement and condition
dependent on surroundings, rather than a determined nature or charac-
teristic) does not to refute that particular and conventional identity struc-
tures affect selfhoods. Nevertheless, a more permeable and dynamic critical
model is useful because collective action is individual action collected, and
even transnational grouping models have difficulty avoiding the reduction
of individuals to unstable groupings, desires, sentiments, or essences that
often (in fact, always) depend on presumed dialectical relationships. At best
social relationships and their identities may be described as temporary sen-
sations; consequently, the expressions of these conditions in criticism should
gesture toward “[trans/hyphenated-] American” and comparable terms as
temporary and conditional adjectives.
This situation amounts to something of a critical divide, as the logic of
the Transnational Turn in cultural studies emphasizes an individual as mea-
sured against or in relation to several dialectic structures, as a base for inter-
polative value. “Americans” and the subgroups thereof, even (or perhaps
especially) understood to be those who have had such ideas internalized,
become somewhat unreliable as well, as does the idea of [trans/hyphenated-]
Americans as a unit of inquiry. Attempting to unite, on an immense scale,
the national or transnational factors, and the inherent limitations associated
with such terms, belies that these affiliations are not static manifestations or
realities; thus, the continual reliance on a national label, even when transna-
tionalized, is in many ways incongruent with how humans create, perform,
and iterate identity.
These concepts have profound consequences on transnational (and
identity) theory in general. As behavior (cultural performance here is the
behavior in question) has been shown to function in concert within mul-
tiple cultural and identity spheres, not just in resistance or in support of the
hyphenated (or subordinate) pair, transnational inquiry as it currently exists
lacks an important dimension of circumstantial awareness. This elasticity
 Colonial Problems  159
of identity performance in a sense requires a disengagement from the stan-
dard balkanized (other-oriented) approach and instead should understand
the “[trans/hyphenated-]American” not as an unchangeable or concrete
notion, or even as an opposition or relation to the dominant sphere but,
rather, a conceptualization that is dependent upon provisional positions.
The dominant sphere, moreover, ceases to be primordial: if not dismantled,
it is re-perceived as a common projection or a meta-idea that is external and
subordinate to an individual’s circumstances.

Cultural Appropriation of America and the Instability

of Cultural Myths
In an applied sense, the theoretical shifts mentioned here address the ways
that the US political body exerts cultural force upon the residents of the
spaces it claims: the inundation of symbol, language, and images that in-
tends to promote a specific pattern of behavior, aside from being nonrepre-
sentative and not established through voluntary affiliation, relies on identity
assumptions that do not precisely correspond to how our minds perceive
sentiments. The empirical reports reframe some of the basic assumptions of
the relationships that people have with culture, including concepts like na-
tions, transnations, and patrias. This implies that the cultural appropriation
of the US political space as it is often articulated in American Studies, even
in the Transnational Turn, is a much more fragile and unstable idea than
how it is often imagined. Whatever be the affiliation or identification, broad
transnational or national abstractions should be understood as momentary,
intangible and unpredictable, and therefore of modest critical traction.14
In a larger sense, an inner problematic exists within the terms of investi-
gation: What is the goal of using Cultural Groups as a forum of scholarly
inquiry? If an investigation aims to produce knowledge in a collectivist vein,
the statements rely on epistemological obligations about the composition of
the group. When we examine the constancy of the assertions underlying the
conclusions, the stability of the base is put into dispute by empirical work in
other disciplines. The salient element of “what is the nature of culture” from
a collectivist stance must also subsume why that nature is supposedly stable
for the conclusions that a scholar moves to maintain. Many national, trans-
national, and other group-based ontological approaches pivot on an imag-
ined group stability that empirical reports dispute—and thus, the dialectics
that those approaches often employ have a criterion of evidence issue.15

Toward a More Atomized Cultural Analysis of Individuals

and their Circumstances
The group approach loses integrity the further one moves into
extra-disciplinary comparisons. Studies in sociolinguistics report that the
structures of narrative composition, for instance, differ in measurable ways
160  Colonial Problems
based on several contextual cues, such that the situational prompts are
thought to influence not only the ways text is used to relate ideas but also
has a shaping effect on ways on how the ideas exist in the mind of the au-
thor. Studies in neurology gesture toward perceiving brain chemistry of the
author (and, conceivably, the artist, the sculptor, the cinematographer, and
so on) as a variable that depends on the circumstances of when and where
the thoughts are forming in the mind. The implications denote that the main
agents of the narrative (including narrative aesthetics, as in artistic creation)
process may be much more profoundly shaped by the culture of where the
text is composed; place and time; health or physical conditions; and even
sounds and other actions occurring in the location of composition, than the
presumed cultural-grouping affiliations.
When the circumstantial nature of identity and affiliation occupies a more
central position in critical interpretation, concepts like patriotism, (trans)
nationality, and cultural identity in general lose traction. Moreover, as our
communities are multicultural by nature, these data should be foundational
in how we understand culture, community, and social action, regardless
of the location and demographics that surround the subject. The presence
of many markers and sources of being renders the uniform and unifying
intentions of the cultural system to comparative impotency alongside the
multiplicities produced from contemporary society. The identities that a
person may suppose and perform, and the relative importance that might be
attached to them, are in continual flux because of personal and situational
changes in their perceptions of the world and in the composition of their
external surroundings.
Personhood, in this way, should be understood to arise from relations
between intangible sites (such as emotions and sentiments of belonging) that
derive from engagement with others and tangible markers that are some-
times linked to physical entities, such as climate, imagery, size, movement,
and other concepts that, over time, develop individual symbolic qualities that
are characterized by an impermanent, fleeting nature. Breaking down the
national or transnational approach to another degree, an individual commu-
nity member is a composite and a contextualization of these factors mediated
through behavior like language, literature, and art. Thus, perceiving art and
literature as representative of societies and communities requires a critical
leap from what the psychology of identity demonstrates, a reality which com-
plicates scholarly tendencies to group individuals as assumed societies (e.g.,
“[trans/hyphenated-] American” authors) and therefore read their work as
interpellated as part of a whole (which may be a hyphenated entirety). The
individual and her or his society are interrelated in a more complex fashion,
one that is often rebellious to such grouping, because of the fluid, plural, and
shifting nature of personhood. In a more atomized take on cultural figures,
critical discussion should stem from circumstances and context, and a salient
new hypothesis, given these data, might involve understanding the person
and their work as multiplicity, flux, and ephemeral glimpses at local circum-
stances rather than grounded in presumptive relational ties.
 Colonial Problems  161
As culture (and, perhaps more important, cultural identities) is a slippery,
malleable phenomenon, any inference linking an individual to culture; or
a geographic space to culture; or a community to culture, is to repeat the
shortcomings of the social systems of the present—and fails to address the
source of the inequalities that they initiate. In this way, nation-states (and
transnational critics who, willingly or not, use national their centers as mate-
rial) often overlook the associative obligations that stratify peoples who are
subjected/subordinated to and categorized by these myths. Couched as the
multicultures of the status quo, or a departure from the status quo, these
approaches also fail to recognize how people perform cultural acts, inserting
external narratives as a centers of discourse.

After Pronouns (We and They), Possessive Adjectives (Ours

and Theirs), and their Cultures
The universal bonds assumed by cultural groups are often mired in abstrac-
tion. And the composition of contemporary cultural and critical systems do
not generally allow discussion about how presumptive the concept “we”
vis-à-vis “they” in fact is, but yet the boundaries of the groups themselves,
which is to say that the obsolete distance between the terms (or imagined
groups) they and we is the center of the problem. There is no “we” or “they”
beyond fleeting and ephemeral sentiments—but Western social systems
(often based on the nation or transnation, religious or linguistic presump-
tions, or racial and ethnic community) use such concepts to justify death,
poverty, murder (and murder by poverty), and other forms of inequality.
The concepts are so thoroughly protected in contemporary cultural and so-
cial paradigms that, for many, one humanity has already been supplanted by
(or into) “we” and “they.” Be the idea of the term based on religion, citizen-
ship, language, place of residence, political affiliation, or something else, the
notion is restrictive, nonrepresentative, and anti-democratic.
The dilemma of the future involves how to group the terms of commu-
nity. Using we and its inherent referent to they confines the categorization
and constructs hierarchies, intended or not, that move the discourse away
from structures that respect the universalities of human existence. Using
nongeographic and noncultural, nonlinguistic, nonreligious, nonsexual/gen-
der, and nonracial we, however, as is argued in the next chapter, liberates
the term into a forum nonrestriction in comparison to existent wes and their
embedded hierarchies and demographic inequalities, could be understood as
a corrective measure because, in a sense, it is a universality, one that is not
bound by many of the inherent shortcomings of unpacking geography or
culture as presumed metrics (or proxies) of community feeling.

Completing a Theoretical Move toward Postnational

Communities
In humanistic approaches that involve new ways to perceive reality and
community, there is no control group. There are no objective conditions
162  Colonial Problems
against which to examine a claim. A great deal of this book has dealt with
identifying the primary components of transnational and transpatriotic
systems of meaning (often spaces saturated by programmed cultural can-
ons), and reflecting on whether they are internally stable and effective in
their intentions, questioning if their assertions maintain credibility under
scrutiny—or not. That these bases have been found, in this analysis, to be
theoretically untenable and, thus, unstable grounds for cultural study (and,
secondarily, imagined community structure) does not represent a failure in
previous scholarship but an opportunity to think in new ways.
In these situations, a scholar begins wandering into new philosophies and
aesthetics. New ways of thinking can commence as reconsiderations of dis-
crete or repressed feelings; we wonder about new codifications in arenas like
political and community structures, about the lag involved in implemen-
tation, and the self-protective structures that strive to maintain the status
quo. Then begins a more qualitative approach: how would a non-national
base of community, identity, culture, and society articulate belonging, being,
emotion, and selfhood? Would there be histories? Should scholars rethink
supposedly grand moments in human history as a function of the new scale?
(Is the new scale indeed “new” or has it been concealed and repressed?)
Comfort with the status quo is often expressed by deriding new ideas as
utopian. Labeling a new approaches naïve and idealistic is a purposeful and
charged method to discard a conceptual change without discussion of it.
And many people and communities, perhaps fittingly, enjoy and benefit from
transnational prescriptions and their controls. But these national and trans-
national walls are perhaps more illogical than nongeographic approaches
to community because of the presumptive nature of the legitimizations
employed to maintain them as cultural registers. (Trans)national identities
and communities are perhaps impossible to measure with precision: map-
ping universalized concepts like language, cultural action, social tendency,
and so on, which are generally necessary to maintain these identities and
the communities that supposedly stem from them, are inherently inaccurate,
burdened by external controls and presumption. A logical conclusion is that
these constructions do not exist in the ways that they are described (more
accurate, prescribed). However, (trans)national statuses as legal, social, and
rhetorical constructs have very real consequences for human beings—and
they have been as controlling measures to determine rights for individu-
als and communities for centuries. The concepts of freedom and equality
have been articulated through and are contingent on an individual’s (trans)
national status. These concepts have serious material consequences, too: the
continued and intentional income gap between community A, B, A/B, and C
(these variables could be based on constructions like race, gender, language,
place, citizenship, and so on), derives in large part from the transnational
status, linked to geography and charged with hyphenation, subordination,
and hierarchical in-group and out-group inequality.
 Colonial Problems  163
Support of New Agency within Existent Structure
Many scholars strive to work within the system’s controls in order to im-
prove conditions for oppressed demographics. Jack/Judith Halberstam has
argued that these initiatives are “alternative ways of knowing and being
that are not unduly optimistic, but nor are they mired in nihilistic critical
dead ends” (2011, 24). While part of the argument in Halberstam’s work is
structured toward the entanglements of sexual and gender prescriptions, the
seminal concepts he/she deftly expresses are applicable to new realities and
ways of knowing that could nuance the transnational as a mode of study
and articulation of being. Halberstam argues that structural constraints can
be attacked from within through a process of purposed misremembering
and failure:

forgetfulness can be a useful tool for jamming the smooth operations of

the normal and the ordinary . . . forgetfulness becomes a rupture with
the eternally self-generating present, a break with a self-authorizing
past, and an opportunity for a non-hetero-reproductive future.
(2011, 70)

Moreover, embracing failure can be engaged as a performative act that

“recognizes that alternatives are embedded in the dominant and that power
is never total or consistent” (Halberstam 2011, 88). Such approaches can
be fecund activist tools as they have the capacity to muddle the structures
themselves and, perhaps, provoke reflection from the controlling, conserva-
tive demographics about the system’s shortcomings (which is to say inherent
congruency) and the inequalities that it causes.
Jodi Melamed has also sought new forms of personal agency by way
of collective actions that strive to nuance the neoliberal, racist, capitalist
rationality that frames the social interactions of the status quo. She is par-
ticularly critical of the commodification of difference, which has become
a method to appropriate and subordinate the interests of nondominant
groups—a process that is also embedded in the transnational turns in social
and cultural knowledge. She supports thinking about ways to undermine
the patterns of difference that function as social controls (in order to decol-
onize our notions of difference) through collective action. “Dialogue and
engagement will normalize how things are,” she notes, “unless it is done
with a commitment on all sides to end oppression as it is being identified”
(2014).
The corrective approach Melamed articulates relies on altruistic and com-
munitarian action from demographics who would, conceptually (and, in a
sense, unavoidably), lose social and cultural power as a result of the struc-
tural changes they would ostensibly implement voluntarily. This is the bur-
den to bear for any solution situated within contemporary structures: the
looming problematic is a serious and perhaps insurmountable one. Any offi-
cialized policy text that comes into existence (and codifies change) should
164  Colonial Problems
be understood as tangentially (if not directly) related to the interests of the
institution publishing the text. By restricting the horizons of change to exis-
tent structures, it is foreseeable that when any phases of a new reality are
to be articulated, the dominant players will subtly and imperceptibly—and
perhaps unintentionally—engage the terms of accord in such a way that
allows any new elements to be eligible for eventual commodification, appro-
priation, and exploitation. That should be, in effect, the expected course—as
has occurred with the once-ostensibly-liberating minority discourses and the
transnational. As Víctor Figueroa has argued, “[t]o oppose power is still to
be defined by power” (2013, 77), a maxim that yet applies when power is
hybridized and being opposed collectively. In circumstances like these, the
aphorism in Spanish says, “si no hay más remedio, ‘hay que desmontar el
sistema’ ” (Poleo 1996, 64).
Resistance that is articulated from within constraints of the system
makes possible forms of change that the vocabulary of the structure has
provided. In the present articulation of transnational, neoliberal rational-
ity, the vocabularies of confrontation and struggle are too narrow to be
emancipatory—and codes of tolerance often internalize cultural difference.
Personhood must be rearticulated from a separate metric, one that elides
the enclosing reach of transnational and neoliberal structural failures. The
notion of who is and is not a member of society must be broken and reimag-
ined in ways that undo the limits of existent cartographies; these ideas must
be unthinkable, ungrammatical, and perhaps appear expressly and purpose-
fully utopian from within the system’s reality prescriptions. They must seize
material from and obey the voices who are negated by the status quo, and
link them together in new ways. These ideas have been planted already; as
Das Gupta’s study makes clear:

. . . participants in my study ask activists and scholars to imagine pos-

sibilities at which most balk: that rights to not have to be contained
within borders . . . that national membership does not have to be the
coveted goal . . .
(2006, 257 emphasis added)16

The nongeographical community structure to be discussed in the next

chapter engages the voices in Gupta’s study, as well as the inner parts of a
solution offered by Jodi Melamed, one that breaks the fundamental com-
ponent of difference as it exists in the status quo: she asserts that in order
to transcend the limits of the contemporary knowledge and rationalities,
we should “expand our sense of collective being” (Melamed 2014). By
renewing and rearticulating how we understand the relationships between
humans; by decoupling identity, community, and collective spirit from the
pretexts of geography and culture; by new vocabularies and knowledge
of the human condition; and by new aesthetics, senses of community, and
being—can the problems of the neoliberal, transnational prescriptions be
emancipated.
 Colonial Problems  165
New Agencies and Nongeographic Communities
They are able to inhabit two worlds simultaneously . . . human communities,
in other words, are becoming at least partially detachable from geography.
—William McNeill (1995, 304)

Where “we” end and “they” begin is at least partially detached from geog-
raphy. The category of “we” is widened. Or—perhaps the crucial point—it
keeps jumping about.
—Annemarie Mol and John Law (2005, 639)

Many contemporary structures, despite their trans-natures, have colonial

footprints that often celebrate and tacitly empower Eurocentric values. Eu-
rocentrism, though widely renounced within the academy, yet maintains a
comprehensive place in educational and social institutions, including the
accepted critical tendencies and theoretical approaches in cultural studies
(Herlihy-Mera 2015 “After Hispanic Studies”). Eurocentrism is, in part,
a product of the exigencies of cultural disciplines that have been divided
into an Area Studies basket. If (or, perhaps, because) these disciplines are
absorbed into a geography-based form of cultural study, or hybridizations
thereof, the transnational narratives they produce hinge on imaginary cul-
tural geographies and their untenable unities. Detaching our theoretical
bases from the implied belief that identity and community are linked to
geography gestures toward the abandonment of European (and Western)
culture as preeminent loci of importance, and makes possible a move to-
ward a more atomized and universalized, and for that democratized, form
of study that is more sensitive to individual agency. Placing individual action
in a privileged space over the presumptions of geography (and its undue
weight on cultural dynamics) in a sense liberates peoples from the burdens
of contemporary critical and theoretical paradigms, their derivative hierar-
chies and colonialities.
If such a radical nongeographic critical move were to occur on a wide-
spread scale, the transition would likely be accompanied by a crisis period
during which the academy would restructure vocabularies of discussion on
the present and past, the modes of cultural authority, the undercurrents
that inform cultural performances, and the composition of cultural com-
munities. A conviction to abandon area and geography-based approaches
as exceptional players in cultural study would undo some of the imaginary
glories of the past that are presently institutionalized—and make possible
new aesthetics, communities, and autonomies. Using a new, democratized
and egalitarian nongeographic structure, conceivably, would forge a new
articulation of being that is more attuned to the cultural demographies
of peoples around the globe. The present overemphasis on the transna-
tion (and its European and the Western ties more generally), their cultures
and languages, would cease to crowd out other sensitivities and redirect
attention toward new connections or potential oppositions, which would
166  Colonial Problems
complement (or perhaps replace) the “this place”/“that place” binary that
our contemporary cultural structures command.17

Postnations: Abandoning the Transnational Model

Patrias, nations, and transnations, however they are studied, iterated, or
performed, are a form of containment. In the scope of the empirical reports
noted here on identity, selfhood, and the composition of material culture,
the perception and study of the cultures of residents of the US political space
should shift away from the supposed dynamics of the group and toward the
circumstances of the subject. New modes of study should consider more
closely the life events, age, place, and time of the composition in their tracts
of investigation. In order to attune the studies toward new forms of situ-
ational awareness requires a disengagement of literary and artistic tracks
from their conventional channels of comprehension.
A new study of people and their cultures should build a vocabulary of per-
spectives that respect the engagement and disengagement with community;
the nation and transnation have become so embedded in the contemporary
academy (and popular imagery financed by the state) that other forms of
being are elided—or rejected as utopian (though the national and trans-
national are utopias, certainly). If we are presumed to be (trans)national
beings, already patriated from supposed exposure to cultural canons, there
is to be no horizon of new inquiry. These guidelines through which we are
instructed to imagine must be broken: expanding the critical horizons about
being and identity will allow new criticisms, articulations of community,
and comprehensions of the human condition. The dimensions of the new
inquiry should focus not on supposed conditions (i.e., national and trans-
national status and their expressions) but on practices of engagement that
involve new forms of intercourse and being; some key discourses in new
forms of understanding the self should return to the defining characteristics
of human nature, such as biology, mortality, and how we grow as spiritual,
cultural, and physical beings. The postnational argument in the next chap-
ter is not a resurgence of a Paradigm Dramas of the 1980s but a departure
from a widely maintained assertion about non-homogeneity; the ephemeral
nature of identity renders contemporary social structures presumptuous
and, therefore, they should be reframed toward close contextual readings of
people that are contingent to more empirical, sometimes biological, bases.

Notes
1. Judith Butler has also argued that, because of the ways that language precondi-
tions thought, the already-existent underpinned meanings, categories, and con-
trols embedded in language specify that language speaks us toward (and perhaps
into) these supposedly stable forms of existence (1990, Ch. 1). These ostensibly
stable states of being and experiences of reality—that is, the transnational labels,
be them unpacked as nouns or adjectives—like gender prescriptions, are formed
 Colonial Problems  167
through a “signifying economy” that locates (and hinges upon) an “illusion of
asymmetrical difference” between individuals (1990, 103). Lauren Berland and
Michael Warner have argued that “the institutions, structures of understanding,
and practical orientations . . . make [the dominant order] seem not only coher-
ent,” but also ordinary, primordial, and indisputable (1998, 548). The promo-
tion of specific performances as ordinary, be them articulated as a gender or
transnational reality, is the apparatus that sets the center of cultural system;
codifies “ordinary” performances as supposedly stable, existent, and representa-
tive; and relegates all other actions to subordinate status. Eithne Luibhéid has
described these external frames as “the standard to which everyone is expected
to aspire” (2013, introduction).
2. What is possibly most valuable about Bhabha’s approach is his attention to
the contrivance of cultural community. The transnational is burdened by the
non-organic “construction of culture and the invention of tradition” (1994,
248). While affiliation, emotion, and kinship are natural to the human condi-
tion, the markers of community organization, as noted by Hobsbawn, “rest on
exercises in social engineering which are often deliberate and always innovative”
(1994, 76).
3. “They reflect on and deconstruct the focus on the nation-state without pre-
maturely discarding its boundaries as obsolete in political analyses, and they
address the intra/multicultural diversity and hybridity of U.S. culture(s) and
transnational interactions in a time of globalization and relocalizations” (Lenz
2012, 6).
4. This is also the case for research funding, as the National Endowment for the
Humanities and other public sources of monies generally function within such
imaginaries.
5. See Radway 1998.
6. In academic studies within the national-scholarship frame, manifestations of
material cultural are understood to be representative of a community as a whole.
In this way, American Studies as a discipline, or the study of art and literature
(and other material) should be understood to function as a device to appropriate
(and thus control) culture, as well as a social mechanism to establish representa-
tive images, narratives, and characteristic protagonists (and the study thereof)
for the communities of the US political space.
7. It is unclear why should scholarship should continue to be structured in these
forms. Have the nationalism and transnationalisms been internalized so thor-
oughly by the residents of the spaces claimed by the political body that these
controls are appropriate? Are the canonic prescriptions of culture reiterated
in the transnational of such immense importance? What precisely foregrounds
those myths and relegates post- and non-(trans)national ideas? The emphasis on
the transnational realities has only rehashed the cultural imperialism of the past
and re-institutionalized it, nuancing its implementation.
8. Slogans of freedom and enlightenment values are inserted as sanctioning meas-
ures, though even the automobile—a machine often promoted as a modus and
symbol of freedom—only redoubles that state-sponsored patterns of “develop-
ment” generally require that one have a vehicle in order to carry out the most
fundamental components of existence—such as the procurement of food, as resi-
dences are increasingly distant from markets. The freedom to choose to not have
an automobile is restrictive because of these physical realities. This is also the
case of cultural action. Using a non-English language in public, as discussed in
Chapter 2, is not always legal and cannot be used as representative, regardless of
the linguistic maps of the community in question.
9. The multicultural nature of contemporary communities and the new formations
of identity in digitized realities complicate a theoretical reliance on traditional
168  Colonial Problems
dialectics of cultural groups (this is also the case for transnational iterations
of being). And there are more serious theoretical complications to reliance on
patriation (or culture itself) as an axis of identity. John Muthyala has described
such a system as one that functions by:

Determining life and death [and] controlling all realms of life itself; that is,
empire exercises its power through administering social life by bringing all
aspects of life under the domain of observation, classification, and digitization,
and by intertwining the various strands of the social, political, cultural, and
economic in complex and pervasive ways. Its power extends through all realms
of social existence, and because of its reach, empire presides over the magni-
tude of entire groups, classes, masses of people, and their living environments.
(2012, 45)

10. For instance, see Multicultural Psychology: Understanding Our Diverse Com-
munities (2008) by Jeffrey Mio et. al.; Multicultural/Multiracial Psychology:
Mestizo Perspectives in Personality and Mental Health (2010) by Manuel
Ramírez; and Multiculturalism as a Fourth Force (2013) by Paul Pedersen.
11. It has been argued that “similar cognitive tasks may be processed rather differ-
ently by individuals in different cultural contexts” (Zhang et al. 2006, 77).
12 Not unlike quarks, cultures are ephemeral and have the capacity to reshape
themselves when scrutinized. The study of them, in this way, can have a modify-
ing effect on the composition of the culture; cultural groups are slippery slopes
of grouping because of the fluid nature of human experience.
13. The verb to be is somewhat complicated in English in that it has just one itera-
tion that, through context, is interpreted to refer to a condition or a character-
istic. In this sense, a person may be “American” but not “an American,” as the
concept is adjectival.
14. In Laura Esquivel’s 2006 novel Malinche, Malinalli, an indigenous woman dur-
ing the second phase (martial law) of the cultural conquest of México, notes,
“Sin imágenes, no hay memoria” [Without images there is no memory] (2006,
17). This detail speaks to the footprint of cultural place-making, a process
that—in the fifteenth century as now—engages images as a signifiers of colonial
dominance. Helene Weldt Basson has unpacked what is in many ways a postcul-
tural and postgeographic interpretation of Malinalli, locating her performances
and cultural interactions in the novel as a method to fill “in many historical
gaps” in the traditional approaches that are bound to conventional demographic
presumptions; by a focus on how her status as a colonized and subaltern offers
multiple overlapping and occasionally conflictive perceptions of reality (2013,
15). Weldt-Basson situates Malinalli as representative of recent trends in post-
colonial theory and criticism, which maintain that a person “cannot be simply
grouped” because different people “do not share a single perspective” (2013,
19). While there are many realities and many truths about those realities, the
transnational and other geography-based approaches strive to reduce these to
singular—though sometimes hybridized singularities—and their knowledge. The
subordinate sociopolitical situations of semi-fictionalized (she is based on an
historical figure) characters like Malinalli and historical peoples, is due in large
part to the hierarchies derivative from geography-based prescriptions of being
and identity.
15. When the composition of the cultural group is scrutinized, the fabric of unity (and
thus the theoretical approach) comes apart because the relationships individu-
als have with one-another have been presumed. Transnational American Stud-
ies as a relational concept fails to contain the inherent instability of terms like
 Colonial Problems  169
American, its hyphenations, or the circumstantial and fragile nature of assumed
cultural relationships. The transnational turn sometimes offers multiple ontolo-
gies, which can be fertile grounds for innovation and elucidation of new realities.
16. The system is itself an aesthetic: that grouping people by their supposed ethnic,
cultural, racial, and/or linguistic affiliations and relating these ties to concepts
like geography are appropriate methods to imagine communities. The myths
that derive from this aesthetic sanction inequalities, poverty, and other physical
and cultural violence that are avoidable.
17. In some ways the overarching tone of the transnational is counterintuitive—as
the deconstruction and destabilization of traditional centers of meaning through
hybrid registers also re-institutionalizes the traditional myths (albeit uninten-
tionally), which is an inherent shortcoming that is built into the extant theoreti-
cal vocabularies. In those realms of reality, emancipation and its reaches remain
controlled by nonrepresentative and nondemocratic spheres of authority. Non-
geographic thinking would offer a more attuned form of cultural reading that
would lend greater subtly to individuality and engage forms of emancipation
that are untenable and yet ungrammatical in the status quo. The discussion here
has been informed by Anibal Quijano’s “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism,
and Latin America” (2000, 533–580).

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9 Imagining New Communities

Are there modes of belonging that can be rigorously non-nationalist?

—Butler (2007, 49)

We need to imagine new forms of belonging, which in our kind of world are
bound to be multiple rather than monolithic. Some of those forms will have
something of the intimacy of tribal or community relations, while others will
be more abstract, mediated and indirect . . .
—Eagleton (2003, 21)

When the idea of “citizenship” came into view—and was linked to the mate-
rialization and formation of the nation-state in secular north Europe—it en-
forced the formation of communities of birth instead of communities of faith.
But at that time, the imperial and colonial differences were already in place,
and both were recast in the new face of Western empires. The figure of the
“citizen” presupposed an idea of the “human” that had already been . . . man
stood for human being (at the expense of women, non-Christians, people of
color, and homosexuals).
—Mignolo (2006, 312)

Should Age be a central parameter in a new system of imagined communi-

ties? This chapter explores a global community organized around such a
concept: regardless of languages, religions, traditions, and preexistent ter-
ritorialities of surroundings, those born to a calendar year form a global
community. As a rigorous after-national archetype, an index established on
Age could eliminate some inherent shortcomings of traditional collectivi-
ties, shortcomings that stagnate cultural growth and interaction, construct
inequalities, and distort appropriation of and access to public resources.
After an examination of the stratifications caused by contemporary cultural
paradigms, this discussion argues that Age could and perhaps should re-
place conventional axes of affiliation and identity as it offers a more univer-
sal, common experience as a register. As an alternative to the national and
transnational; the religious, linguistic, and ethnic; and the geographic and
cultural, the broad-based fraternity of an Age system could elide some of the
demographic discriminations of the present and gesture toward a universal
community.
172  Imagining New Communities
The ideas considered here should be understood as introductory and con-
ceptual. In the same way that the contemporary transnational utopias (and
their codified stratification of communities) came into being over many cen-
turies; an Age—or any other nongeographic—remapping of reality struc-
tures would be a gradual and, in a sense, a piecemeal process occurring over
many centuries. The purpose of this discussion is not to organize a near-term
replacement apparatus that could be applicable within the contemporary
transnational exigencies; rather, the purpose is to note that an Age (or other
non-transnational) system would be no more illogical than the geographic
prescriptions of contemporary social and cultural structures, to consider
new grammars of being and existence, and to reflect on their outcomes as
potentially emancipatory perspectives on the human condition. The course
of this argument locates conceptual bases for nongeographic aesthetics and
examines the communities and cultural uniquenesses that would stem from
them. This conceptualization, then, is a discussion of a separate and discrete
“field imaginary,” to use Pease’s term, of an Age-based perception of reality,
selfhood, culture, and community.
Contemporary global community structures are constrained by a bina-
rism rooted in an imaginary difference between peoples (these constructs
are often categorized and codified into nationalities and transnationalities,
political citizenships, or other imaginary cultural, geographic or ethnic
divisions). An individual’s assigned group membership (cultural, political,
ethnic, or other) is rarely achieved through a voluntary affiliation, yet it
has a significant influence over an individual’s access to public resources,
employment opportunities, rights of movement and civic participation, and
so on. These circumstances have stratified the human experience around the
globe into a polemic hierarchy that has occasioned vast differences in public
health and life expectancy, political and economic wellness, access to health
care and education, and other metrics of life experience. The differences
are often sanctioned through cultural myths that attempt to justify (and,
thus, in a sense rationalize) the grossly disproportionate circumstances of
certain communities. The social Darwinist view at the center of the national/
capitalist system maintains that people are different (and these differences
allow some to be successful and cause others to fail). These myths have been
constructed through varying cultural paradigms that are broadly unques-
tioned, and for that, much of the arrant inequality around the globe does
not amount to a serious ethical crisis to many members of the demographics
who control the system. In general, in the transnational capitalist approach,
the presumed “differences” between people are necessary for the neoliberal
system to maintain itself.1 Capitalism and the nation-state system hinge on
the principle that people are unequal: some work harder or are more tal-
ented than others and therefore “earn” privileges, rights, material goods,
and standard of living. In order for the system to function, people must be
understood as fundamentally scaled and unalike—therefore, the manifested
social hierarchies and imbalanced systems of human rights (privileges for
 Imagining New Communities  173
some), is understood only as a logical outcome of the intrinsic disparities
between people. The capitalist system (and the apologist takes that defend
it) is built on this imaginary inequality.
Transnational states unpack the cultural programs discussed thus far in
this book to construct ideas like “we” and “they” without recognition of
the obsoleteness of those terms when iterated with geography as an identity
proxy. The pronouns and myths that stem from them have been seized by
the transnational and neoliberal state, and these political entities dedicate
immense resources to linking emotion to these pronouns. Laws and political
controls strive to organize peoples based on these false divisions; they cod-
ify the contradictions in the cultural programs that inhabit the nation-state
and its policies. The nation-state (its pronouns and inequalities) strives to
become a fundamental component of how people experience reality, a prob-
lem that is much too profound to be remedied from within the system.
Marxists often pair capitalist failures with a centralization that uses
a masterplan to achieve a horizontal political future. Some critiques of
Marxist approaches to renewing human conditions involve its unintended
outcomes, such as the authority of the Master-signifier, which can supplant
the horizontal ontology with a vertical scale. Critics might argue that the
problematic discourses of hierarchy would be embedded in any implemen-
tation of Marxist modes, thus nullifying the utopian intentions and social
equalities. A flat ontology based on Age, however, would potentially elide
some of the problems that Marxist detractors outline—because the group-
ing scale would be universal, nonterritorial, and postcultural (which is to
say that some of the traditional social constructs such as race, gender, class,
place of birth, linguistic/religious background, and so on would be avoided
to an extent). Engaging Age as community precludes these traditional dif-
ferentiators and reallocates power-centers globally and locally. Such an
ontological shift in human grouping would not require the emergence of a
new form of class awareness because Age already exists as a fundamental
part of social and cultural consciousnesses. (It’s not commonly recognized,
however.) As the transnationalist restrictions would be abandoned in an
Age framework; cultural expression and even economic landscapes would
be rearticulated in alternative ways. In this way Age gestures toward a
human geography without the inequalities of contemporary social and cul-
tural constructs.

Why Age—and Why Age Now?

In social theory regional boundaries and other sharp demarcations no longer
have much appeal. There are too many of them, they are too porous, and
they interfere with one another to produce too many complexities. . . . [We
need to address] their paradoxes, their leakages, their fractionalities, their
practical enactments, and their variations. Boundaries may be about geo-
graphical spaces, ‘here’ and ‘there’. But they may also be about identities,
174  Imagining New Communities
‘me’ and ‘you’. Often the two have been linked: ‘far away’ has been made
to coincide with ‘different’, ‘proximity’ with ‘same’. But this link no longer
works . . . The character of ‘self’ and ‘other’ has started to unravel. It is no
longer assumed that geography and identity map onto one another. And
the resulting complexity—self, other, here, there—defies the cartographic
imagination. How can we think this well? How to find good images for
boundaries?
—Annemarie Mol and John Law (2005, 637)

Themes in literary and cultural criticism move in and out of focus, influenced
by wider social trends that sometimes derive from sciences like psychology,
ecology, and physics; or through periodic drifts in sociopolitical arenas like
democracy, sexual orientation, and gender equality. As the nation and its
transnationalities have been the dominant social construction of recent de-
cades and, inclusively the last few centuries, a shift to an Age perception of
community would likely nuance both production and analysis of material
culture in a similar fashion. The relatively recent advances in communica-
tive technology—air travel, Internet, cellular phones, GPS, and so on—have
already modified conventional notions of place and time, peoples, and com-
munities, and the circumstances are ripe for a uni-human community para-
digm that is robustly apolitical and acultural. Such a transformation would
command new cultural and community perspectives in the same way that
the rise of the transnational community has resulted in new citizenship and
migration laws, economic models, and educational pedagogies.2
When mapped in relation to the concepts firmly wedded to liberal demo-
cratic mores such as participatory citizenships, tensions between postmod-
ern virtualities and new institutional structures, such as one based on Age
(which could be normative, like the transnational), appear to obstruct the
potential implementation of any such new systems. Nevertheless, there are
precedents for such fundamental sea changes in social and cultural orienta-
tion.3 In previous collective revolutions, the fundamental shifts in human
communal orientation reappropriated community symbols, political voices,
public goods, and other social devices, and these radical transitions would
undoubtedly occur in the move toward an Age community as well, and
would reach even the most basic human structures, like time and spiritual-
ity, procreation and death (and the ceremonies that envelope them), as the
most fundamental links of the civic body would be in flux.
The embedded idea here is a conceptual one: in the same way that the
nation-state (and more recently the transnational ideal) was disseminated
over centuries and was fairly aberrant to any coherent organizational frame
(Held 1995, Ch. 3), the implementation of the shaping characteristics of
the next community framework will likely also be protracted. This or any
other non-national treatment strives to open the limits of collective dis-
course beyond the contemporary centers of meaning: the centers of social
and cultural power, as they related to civic identity concepts (that broadly
 Imagining New Communities  175
exist in the transnational system) were outlined in Clifford Geertz’s semi-
nal study, “Primordial and Civic Ties” (1994). His work delineates some
identity limits that have been adopted and adapted into political construc-
tions around the globe. Geertz argued that five categories of affiliation can
be understood as the general bounds to modern communities: (1) assumed
blood ties (i.e., imagined ethnicity), (2) language, (3) religion, (4) region,
and (5) tradition. The collectivities regularly employ these indexes in the
creation of identity constructs. However, when we scrutinize the conse-
quences of these prescriptions, the labels and their associated groupings are
unsustainable because of multiple human experiences of the same reality
(Morose 2011, 248). When taken to their logical conclusion, each dimen-
sion and affiliated grouping results in inequality and thus disproportionate
access to resources and civic participation (Rycroft 2013, 1–16). Another
problem with contemporary postnational discourses is a lack of deviation
from these conventional cultural paradigms; this circumstance has generally
limited “new” or “postnational” community dialogues to rearticulations
of the traditional and existent centers of power—such as what occurs with
the transnational—without addressing the structural problems of the system
itself.4
“After”- or “non-” national (rather than “post”) inquiry might be a more
suitable term for an Age community inquiry, as post-realities tend to coex-
ist with the previous circumstances—as is the case with the modern and
postmodern. An After-national reality would be one in which the traditional
dimensions of identity (i.e., narratives of imagined geography, language,
spiritual orientation, ethnicity and shared history, and so on, as articulated
by Geertz) are abandoned as new structures of “we” and “they” emerge,
concepts that exist without the weight of the signifying codes in the previ-
ous system.

After-National Communities: On the Construction

of New “Differences”
No idiom has yet emerged to capture the collective interests of many groups
in translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilisations and postnational identi-
ties. Such interests are many and vocal, but they are still entrapped in the
linguistic imaginary of the territorial state . . . This vicious circle can only be
escaped when a language is found to capture complex, nonterritorial, post-
national forms of allegiance.
—Appadurai (1996, 166)

The word community derives from the Latin commŭnităs or commŭnis,

which reduces to two roots: cum and uni, literally “with oneness.” Oneness
has been constructed through language, religion, place; the national (and,
by relation, the transnational) concept grasps this part of the human con-
dition (a predisposition toward grouping) and exaggerates and exploits it
176  Imagining New Communities
(Hurley 2005, 208; Newman 2011, 20). Those who control the dimensions
of the group—that is, what symbols index identity, what language or reli-
gion guides a system, and so on—wield immense social power. In rare cases
were these cultural questions, on symbol, festival, ritual, and so on, dia-
grammed through democratic mechanisms—and thus, the (trans)national
cultural reality tends to be one dominated by the canonic prescriptions of
elites (Wan and Chiu 2010, 40–45). Those who do not follow a prescripted
behavior and cultural pattern (defined by the controlling few) are minori-
tized into “others” (Herlihy 2011, 1–3). “Others” have been excluded from
social dialogues, economic resources, and political representation, which is
a serious factor in the widespread poverty through the world. Could a new
cultural framework, one that employs a new concept of “oneness,” be a
corrective measure?
Grouping is an instinctive trait (Graves 2002, 5; Johnson and Earle 2000,
Chs. 5–8). The contemporary systems of cultural identity were forged in a
period predating this hypercommunicative, distance-less reality that is char-
acterized by an interconnectivity that was neither possible nor conceivable
in the very recent past. The dimensions of the current cultural systems are
without appropriate grammars for the composition of the contemporary
reality, in part because they were conceived and developed in a period pre-
dating these circumstances. While our inherited cultural phenomena are
sometimes beautiful and occasionally compassionate, they are structured
on a reality (one of distance, isolation, and “difference”) that does not cor-
respond to the mores of communication and other shifts in perception of
reality that have been brought on by recent technologies. In this way, trans-
national and geographic-based iterations of identity and community, in gen-
eral, are case studies of cultural lag.
An Age-based paradigm attempts to disentangle the preexistent gram-
mars of imperialisms and immobility, of transnationalism and its discon-
tents, of the established social networks, their reach, and their exclusions.
Age as a reference of grouping would subvert many contemporary
unethical (non-egalitarian) applications of social and cultural power. The
concept approaches a universality of human experience through the biol-
ogy of the maturation process. As Alasdair MacIntyre notes, “[h]uman
identity is primarily, even if not only, bodily and therefore animal iden-
tity” (1999, 8). While there are other universals in the human condition
(consumption of food, respiration, sex drive, death, and so on) seizing a
shared dimension of contemporaneous experience offers an extensive new
approach, one that would reduce the current number of collectivities to
around 110, or the general life expectancy of the oldest people around
the world. Situating people through a universal circumstance (and/or a
biological condition if we consider Age as such) provides a common reg-
ister that negates some of the inherent deficiencies in national and other
collective paradigms.
 Imagining New Communities  177
On New Identity Structures: Shared Cultural/Life
Experience as Selfhood Narrative
In human language, fraternity.
—Derrida (1997, 11)

We should interpret Age as a social tie through a hypothesis: new collectivi-

ties should be oriented toward dimensions of being that offer more stability
and equality than contemporary paradigms. What groups are most stable?
What groups are most equitable? An argument in favor of Age registers
would be the premise that familiarity, camaraderie, and companionship
are strongest and most stable among people the same Age. If we perceive
a shared Age as a marker of balanced relations and organize societies on
such stability, a secondary concern arises: How does a stable relationship
originate; how does it develop and grow? We define ourselves through our
contacts and vice versa, and the matters of construction and perception of
these social ties are layered and complex. Many relationships are based on
shared experiences (Dwyer 2000, 6–15). We tend to understand, respect,
and appreciate those with whom we share meaningful life events—and this
phenomenon creates a sometimes unspoken affiliation that confers a dimen-
sion of stability and constancy to a relationship. In the same way that the
transnational idea constructs imagined shared histories and underscores
them through cultural ceremonies (these would include public rituals that
celebrate certain concepts, heroes, values, and so on), Age as a new structure
would construct links that bind strangers to one another through a more
universal index. Thus, in an after-national paradigm that abandons tradi-
tional rites, what shared events might replace the dimensions of the previous
collectivity?

The Metalanguage of Life Events and their Social Bonds

While “theory of friendship” case studies often apply Aristotelian frame-
works, there is a rich foundation of contemporary studies that investigate
empirical and situational factors that increase and decrease social ties; some
of these reports outline the stages of such relations and interpret a diverse
set of variables on the construction of companionship. Many of these stud-
ies underscore equality, similarity, and shared experiences as definitive com-
ponents in strong relationships (Spencer and Pah 2006, Chs. 1–3; Dwyer
2000, Ch. 1). In Politics of Friendship, Derrida notes that “[i]n human lan-
guage, fraternity” (1997, Ch. 9). Employing the stages and events of life
as a language, the ties that bind us to those of our Age are numerous and
powerful. Looking further into these ties of amicitia, several terms abound:
similarity, proximity, empathy, attraction, attitude, liking, matching, in-
teracting, reciprocity, and commonality (“Theories About Friendship”
2011). The contemporaneous experience of life events—such as puberty,
178  Imagining New Communities
first sexual relations, marriage, death of parents/grandparents, childbear-
ing, and so on—creates a form of equality through shared experience, and
thus, many of the dimensions here expressed are important factors toward
friendships. The profound life events that we share with those of our Age
community, then, link us into a metaphoric community bound by our com-
mon, simultaneous, or nearly simultaneous life matters. Even in the case of
nonfriendship, moreover, experiencing the same events at the same moment
of the lifespan could be described as a forum for similar comprehension
of those events, which, while potentially outside labels such as friendship,
could be described as greater mutual understanding among those of the
same Age, compared to others.
A shared period of puberty is of particular importance to emphasize in
the formation of identity (Szalavitz 2013, 1+). It is during this biological
phase that we forge many important dimensions of our identity such as
native/dominant/“first” language; aesthetic preferences in music, literature,
film; interest in leisure pursuits; and comprehension of behavioral and cul-
tural norms. Our sociolinguistic identities mature (i.e., formation of mother
tongue) as do our bodies during this crucial phase of life (Mufwen 2001,
12). Regardless of the existent politicization of culture, distance and group-
ing, people across the globe share a similar exposure to, for instance, musi-
cal trends during this decisive period of development; in a worldwide Age
community, the shared aesthetic preferences in many cultural disciplines,
which relate to the styles and fashions that occurred during one’s pubes-
cent era, would be powerful dimensions of cultural unity for the group as
a whole (Szalavitz 2013, 1+). (This phenomenon already occurs, certainly,
though the transnational grouping controls are invested in the appropria-
tion of these affiliative dynamics, a process which explicitly discourages
broader concepts of community that do not rearticulate the presumptive
center of transnational cultural power.) This extended aesthetic unity would
be particularly relevant in a hyperconnected reality without borders or tra-
ditional social divisions.
Many historical events are also understood as life and identity mark-
ers. The Kennedy Assassination, the Blizzard of 1978, 9/11, and so on, are
recounted as anecdotes (“when [event] occurred, I was in [place]”) and they
are also commemorated annually in the media and through material culture
such as film, narrative, music, and other tracts (Keren and Herwig 2009;
Simpson 2006; Ashplant et al. 2000). Experiencing a watershed cultural
moment through the filter of a specific moment in the life span differentiates
the experience of the same event from others who were older or younger
when the event occurred (Skakum 2007); thus, our biological register deter-
mines to a certain degree our perception of an event, creating commonality
of understanding among those in our Age group (Matthews 2000, 305).
These concepts form a metalanguage of human experience that we share
with those born to the same period and thus who experience their life events
in the same way.
 Imagining New Communities  179
New Social Institutions
The institutionalization of Age communities would offer a rich backdrop
of collective events, narratives, and symbols, one that is comparable to con-
temporary frames. There could be competitive teams in sports and games,
based not on region or political affiliation but Age, which would compete
against other Age teams. The Olympic Games, the World Cup, and other
similar events could transition to Age dynamics with facility. Age-based he-
roes would emerge from within the group: achievements, honors, accom-
plishments; record holders (in sports and games) within the community
would stir internal recognition. Moreover, competition with those from
other Age sectors would construct another dimension of the group narra-
tive in the form of rivalries—and possible affiliations. Furthermore, in the
same way that cultural figures are celebrated in national paradigms, salient
musicians, authors, and artists would form a discourse of Age-based pride
and potential (Eriksonas 2004, 1–17).
In such an organization, the preexistent political territoriality (often based
on location) would be modified and/or abandoned. The members would be
reorganized democratically (universal voting rights and public representa-
tion), have access to the same resources (education, health care, and infra-
structure) without consideration of region. Each Age community would
have an internal democratic structure, with delegates (number of represen-
tatives based population of each Age community) who would participate in
a global governing body. As certain Age communities contract in size over
time—through growing old and eventually death—group representation
in the political structures would be shifted accordingly without manipula-
tion, allowing the social body to be appropriately representative within a
world governing body. In a world-governing body, the number of voting
members per subgroup would relate to its number of constituents—that is,
the number of people per Age group. Such interests would not be modifi-
able as the number of members of an Age group is a fixed figure. Such a
representational structure would allow our political systems to function in
greater concert with community values, as in principle the representatives
themselves (being of the same Age as their constituents) would share a more
profound comprehension of the group’s identity; therefore representatives
would act in closer synergy with the needs of their Age community (Melzer
et al. 1999, 1–11).5

Cosmopolitan and Creolized Age Groups

Reconceiving community through Age has a direct intimation toward the
concepts of cosmopolitanism and creolization. Age communities would
likely function in a complementary fashion to those concepts as our
self-perceptions and registers of identity would expand and develop (Davis
2000, 5–9). It would, nevertheless, attack the inherent social capital requisite
180  Imagining New Communities
for cosmopolitanism, allowing its agencies of identity to form in a more
fluid and common state. The leveling influences of the Age system would
foster a new cosmopolitanism, one that no longer hinges on preexistent
resources (generally, capital) for generating distance between self (generally
defined through place identity or sociocultural status) and “other” realities.
As traditional cosmopolitanism generally relies on education, travel, and
other types of multicultural exposure as foundations, an Age system could
subvert those—often capital-based—constraints, thus opening the broad
identificational concepts of cosmopolitanism to a greater latitude of peoples
(Michael 1996, 35–51). Indeed, an Age index is constructed on modified
cosmopolitan values, concepts that are agencies of creolization by their very
nature (Stewart 2007, Ch. 1).
In this sense, creolization should be perceived as a perpetual process that
all people engage throughout the life span (and it perhaps should be under-
stood as such in the present system). We are constantly in this process in
contemporary paradigms, but some of the controls of contemporary col-
lective affiliation actively counteract the process by attempting to channel
individual sentiment toward transnational ends. In some ways contempo-
rary geopolitics are exclusive in their very composition—and by reframing
the mechanism of the group, our achievements (or, opening the possibility
of achievement to a broader scope) would be a shared process. In the trans-
national groups, we are urged to identify with people at great distances with
whom we have little in common and will never meet; the same would occur
in Age discourses, though with more representative outcomes because of the
shared experiences inherent to Age culture (Anderson 1991, 7). The imag-
ined cultural connections in Age systems will not be limited by geography,
language, religions, and so on; the new imaginary identificational links that,
because of their universality, have the potential to be more meaningful and
more equitable (Cerra and James 2011, Ch. 10).

Age: New Exceptionalisms?

Cultural identity (and thus material culture, or the codifications of cultural
identity) would be at the center of any utopian reorientation of the human
experience.6 Age as a community metric will be accompanied by a rich the-
oretical unpacking. Exceptionalisms might emerge in Age-based societies,
and the nature of the inter-period power could provide provocative and
compelling topics of study. For instance, at twenty-five to twenty-nine years
of age, Hatshepsut, Napoleon, Einstein, Oprah, Michael Jordan, and many
other notable people rose to their places of social and cultural prominence.
One might argue that later in their life spans, these figures could not match
or surpass their respective achievements between ages twenty-five and
twenty-nine—and that their fame and power in later years was an imagined
and remembered one; by age fifty these immense figures were no longer con-
tributing to and revolutionizing their respective fields: their images continue
 Imagining New Communities  181
to outstand as icons because of their achievements during a few sparkling
years (Hepworth et al. 2010, 216–221; 362).
Taking these examples as a guide, as members in a given Age-community
approach these years in the life span (25–29), a shared confidence in their cul-
tural power—understood through past Age-community examples—might
surge, provoking an upwelling of action in the respective vocations of the
group-members. In the same way, as other Age communities recede from
those years, a transfer of power to the next generation might be facilitated
(Castells 2011, Ch. 5). Moreover, as the Age communities arrive in new
periods, their collective perception and expectations of themselves could
shift accordingly, allowing for new Age-based aesthetics to emerge. Each
period of the life span would have a distinct form of achievement: following
the physical pursuits, risk taking and hyperactivity of youth, at a certain
moment in the life span (which would be rigorously studied empirically and
culturally), these expectations would shift toward mentorship, guidance,
and other intellectual pursuits (Castells 2011, Ch. 5). A shift from physical
(such as childbearing and other corporeal activity) to intellectual pursuits
(mentorship and reflection) would be valued and embraced in new ways.7
Narratives would emerge from every Age bracket, which, in turn, would be
meaningful guidance for those arriving in a new period of life. We would
have a well-defined model before us that outlines the transition, offering a
set of expectations, for which we could prepare and thus engage the transi-
tion as an empowering event (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1981, 130).
An important dimension of Age communities to emphasize is their
cross-group equality (a characteristic impossible in the current sys-
tem because of myths like the distance between man/woman, here/there,
national/foreigner): in an Age system, each demographic will experience
all other demographics, relegating difference in an absolute sense. In mak-
ing “difference” (as it is articulated in traditional senses) unmanageable
and in a sense a systemic impossibility would greatly limit the existence of
exceptionalisms—at least of the grounds for the transnational exceptional-
isms that saturate the status quo.8

Age: A New Discipline in Cultural Theory

Using Age as an axis of cultural inquiry is a concept that would offer many
rich scholarly outcomes; it is perhaps the most applicable dimension of
this discussion, at least in the near term and in function of contemporary
(within-present-system) relevancies. A dialogue on reading the cultural spec-
ificities that emerge and develop throughout the lifespan could offer enrich-
ing new ways to interpret language, literature, art and thought, among other
humanistic tracts. For instance, when we compare an author’s or artist’s
creation at twenty-five to his or her work at fifty, what differences charac-
terize the aesthetic transitions? Are there linguistic, thematic, or cultural
shifts that are perceptible across those from different Age divisions? How
182  Imagining New Communities
might we relate these changes to the physical and intellectual maturation
processes, life events, and changing social expectations of the author? In-
vestigating writing, art, music and other cultural disciplines as a function
of Age will result in a vast array of new analytical qualifiers, and likely an
enhanced appreciation for the work itself. These would be nongeographic,
exclude the exceptionalisms of the transnational turn, and they would open
new and intriguing ways to read cultural tracts from throughout history
(Carmichael et al. 1988, 238–245).
A scholarly turn toward new forms of community will likely precede
any political or popular cultural manifestation of the same. Discussions of
Age and other nontraditional social structures signal a greater awareness
of the population’s sectors around the world who are currently repressed
and excluded in historical and cultural senses, overshadowed by those more
properly situated in current power networks. These issues transcend art and
literature, moreover, and speak to how scholars and communities construct
and reflect on the idea of identity. When one travels to a far-off and suppos-
edly different cultural reality, someone born to the same year as the mover
has potentially stronger ties—given opportunity to develop—than with a
person who is fifteen years senior or junior from the same cultural region
(B. Newman and P. Newman 2011, 261). This Age dimension of identity
already exists, though it is systematically discouraged in favor of contem-
porary mores.

Age-Paradigm Outcomes: Creating a Usable Future

The social-leveling that would accompany Age-based communities would
allow universal access to resources and thus a more inclusive approach to
many fields—including education, art, business, science—that is currently
unachievable because of the severe inequality between regions and specific
demographics within regions (Brym and Lie 2009, 402). Such opening of
shared resources would likely stimulate collective reflections in fields like
technology, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, and many other disciplines,
resulting in new intellectual collaborations (Armwood 2007, 1–22).
The aesthetics shifts inherent to an Age community might be the most
important achievement of such a structure. The system that celebrates non-
representational accumulation of capital could transition to one that holds
representation, balance, equality, and diversity as benchmarks, a shift that
would distinguish collective power, fraternity, equality, and participation.
In a larger sense, the current emphasis on “competition” as the mainstay in
Western values (which is underscored in capitalism, many applications of
the democratic process, institutional admissions procedures, hiring norms,
and so on) might shift toward “balance.” As humans are limited to cor-
poreal bounds, unlike language or class, the physical and social matura-
tion process of adolescence, childbearing years, middle age, elder status,
and so on are shared, a focus on Age would be a mechanism to break the
 Imagining New Communities  183
political and cultural borders that presently divide (and place into a want-
ing power hierarchy) equal peoples. Complementing if not overshadowing
transnational, worlded, temporalized, ethnocentric, regional, linguistic and
other identificational archetypes, Age gestures toward new unities that undo
traditional affiliations and considers pan-human relations with greater sen-
sibility. Fostering these fraternal dimensions of selfhood would be broadly
enabling in a cultural and sociopolitical sense, as the supermajorities cur-
rently excluded from dialogues on the environment, economy, culture, lan-
guage, among other topics, would enjoy a civic voice in the new community
(Scher 2011, 178–186). Age as a cultural system could potentially contain
some of the immense problems embedded in the transnational system—and
thus implement a broad-based equality—as a central part of a solution to
the after-national quandary. Age communities would be open to many chal-
lenges that the contemporary systems cannot overcome.

Notes
1. The disparity around the globe troubles even the most industrious and entre-
preneurial of the capitalist system. Recently a group of philanthropic capitalists
(a contradiction of terms in itself) have initiated “The Giving Pledge” in which
billionaires promise to transfer half or more of their fortunes to others.
2. Western governments have significantly modified citizenship legislation in the
postcolonial period (near all of Europe, for example, has adopted jus sanguinis);
governmental control of movement has increased markedly since 1986 (see US
Visa Waiver Program and Schengen agreements); the dot-com boom-busts and
new migratory labor sources have reshaped economic models, especially in bor-
der areas; and web-based, interactive activities are rapidly changing the class-
room as a learning space.
3. Throughout history many such revolutionary movements were localized, but
their significance had a broad impact that shaped geopolitics. For instance, the
Athenian Revolution, the Helot Slave Rebellion, Boudicca, the Zanj Rebellion,
the Morisco Revolt, the Maya Rebellion, the Sioux Uprisings, and the Arab
Spring reframed the cultural and social dynamics leading to widespread transi-
tions beyond the limits of the revolts themselves.
4. At the MLA Convention in Seattle in 2012, a panel dedicated to this topic
was “Postnationalism: Comparative Theories and Practices” brought together
around the question: “What comes after the nation?” However, without excep-
tion the speakers’ ideas on the topic were reiterations of Geertz’s dimensions of
collective identity.
5. The potential economic outcomes of Age systemization could be controversial.
When our societies fall into financial crises, it is often the youth—who are gener-
ally understood to be in the most active period of their lives—who suffer from
a greater degree of unemployment and its accompanying reduction of capital,
opportunity, life prospects, and, of course, demoralization (Farès and Tiongson
2007). Some scholars have argued that neoliberal systems should rearticulate
our economic system according to an Age framework when positions are scarce,
and that employment could be granted first to those comparatively early in the
lifespan, as these demographics represent the future. This Age-based discrimi-
nation against those nearing retirement has been defended in the context that,
the present system openly discriminates against the youth who have equal or
184  Imagining New Communities
superior qualifications as those already in the seats of employment (Barry 2007).
As Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times has argued,

[s]hifting from old to young would bring down wages and would also solve
the executive pay problem in one shot. Almost all the people earning gro-
tesque amounts are over 50—getting rid of them would mean CEO pay
would come thumping down . . . experience can be overrated; in any case,
I’m not advocating giving huge jobs to children, but to those in their 40s,
who have 15 or 20 years’ experience, which is surely just as good as 30 or
even 40.
(2012, 1)

Kellaway has also argued that all workers over fifty should resign—and couches
her response to apologists narratives that argue experience is irreplaceable and
that those at the top have risen there through merits, thusly: “surely [there are]
younger people who are good too. Anyway, I might bend the rules to let some
ageing superstars—of whom there are very, very few—stay on” (2012, 1). If
an Age system were appropriately integrated, however, some of these concerns
could wane and possibly disappear, as the community itself would perceive this
transition from employment (i.e., “working life”) toward another stage of life as
a positive conversion for individuals and for the broader community (Hicks et al.
1991). To focus our culture on Age would revolutionize our self-expectations, a
reality that would radically reshape many of life’s important rituals—retirement
among them.
6. Any new articulation of status that is outside the conventional (trans)national
prescriptions will (and perhaps should) read as illogical, utopian, and so on, just
as the status quo continuing in perpetuity is illogical and utopian. So in a sense,
thinking in new ways requires confusion, doubt, and uncertainty. That Age may
appear confusing or a muddled quality of being here could be understood as a
strength of the argument, as it demonstrates their distance from the status quo
and its great problems.
7. There would also be some serious obstructions to the realization of this concept.
New forms of discrimination could emerge based on Age groups, and the unwar-
ranted power accumulation that currently exists could reemerge in new forms.
In order to subvert these possibilities, the politicization of this social structure
would require a capital management scheme that is broad-based, democratic,
and representative. Definition of capital and authority would be essential tenets
to describe when scripting a legislative document; authority, as it is tradition-
ally constructed, should be an untenable phenomenon. Social influence and its
related outcomes should be held in plurality, diversity, and representation.
8. New unforeseen exceptionalisms would arise, nonetheless, though their sorting
of power and control would be a protracted process, contingent on demands
that are greatly different from what are unpacked as domination metrics in con-
temporary structures.

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Index
acculturation as positive 119 – 22
adjunctification 154
ahistorical 144
anti-democratic 161
antiexceptional/antiexceptionalism 6
antiracist 55, 69
area studies 5, 16, 156, 165
assumed-demography-as-identity 49
Aztlán 135 – 7
biopower 49
border studies 5 – 7
canonization 59 – 70
Christian monogamy 5, 60
CIA 146
citizen as colonist 103
Coca-Cola 137 – 8, 141, 146 – 7
coexistence 56, 175
collective-action framing theory 31
colonialism 23, 144, 146
coloniality ix, 169, 170
color theory 99, 138
community building 138
contrahistorical approaches 151
cosmopolitanism 151, 179 – 80
co-terraneous 115
creation of nostalgia 101
creolization 179 – 80
cultivation theory 13, 18
cultural appropriation 2, 11, 34, 40 – 2,
45, 60, 63, 65 – 6, 102 – 3, 108, 111,
135, 144, 159
Cultural Conquest 12, 14, 22 – 3,
31, 35, 39, 45, 60, 62 – 5, 69, 102,
111, 168
cultural engineering 12, 21 – 3, 35, 39,
45, 103, 137, 145, 157
cultural neurology 4, 9 – 10, 16, 58,
156 – 60
cultural psychology 4, 9 – 10, 15 – 16,
58, 98, 156 – 61, 174
cultural soldiers 41, 56, 61
cultural violence 2 – 3, 16, 32, 169
de-culturation 3
dehistoricization 61
de-linguicization 3
demographic criminalization 44
diversity ix, 25, 44, 49, 138, 150, 153,
167, 182, 184
emancipation 150, 169
enculturation 3, 15, 118, 144
English-only US laws 38
Eurocentric/Eurocentricity 4 – 5, 165, 169
exceptionalism ix, 5 – 7, 11, 33, 44, 60,
127, 129, 165, 180 – 2, 184
FBI 29, 146
feral affiliates of US cultural myths
(American Adam) 15, 63, 74 – 5, 102
field imaginary 4, 33, 157, 172
fort cities 24, 61
Frontier Thesis 5
geography-as-cultural-proxy 31
globalized transnationalisms ix, 57 – 8,
152 – 3,  167
Google 15, 145 – 6
group-based identity 1, 9, 153, 159
Heritage language 37
horizon of being 11, 13, 55, 164,
166, 167
hybridities ix, 150
188 Index
iconic person 100, 111
imaginary communities 26 – 7, 33, 44,
54, 56, 91, 116, 149, 152, 156,
161 – 2
imaginary histories 22 – 3, 33, 37, 47,
63, 69 – 70, 83, 143, 152, 165
institutionalizing inequality 129 – 31
jus sanguinis 131, 183
mapping 9, 11, 39, 162, 172
March Madness (NCAA basketball
competition) 28
martial law 23 – 4, 61, 102, 111, 168
Marxist approaches 173
Mexica 135 – 7
model immigrant myths 121 – 3
monuments 3, 14, 24, 34, 47, 53 – 4, 62,
99 – 100, 108, 110, 143
multiculturalize 4
naming 13, 52, 59, 70, 78, 85, 153
National Book Award 6, 70, 73,
90, 107
National Endowment for the
Humanities 118, 167
national museums 107 – 10
national myopia 158 – 61
national prizes 5 – 6, 14, 43, 57, 62, 68,
70, 74, 107
neo-culturate 3
neoliberalism ix, 7, 42 – 6, 49, 55 – 6, 69,
73, 104, 129, 149, 151, 154, 163 – 4,
172 – 3,  183
NFL 137, 142
ongoingness, social and cultural 4,
10, 88
Oscars 6
Paradigm Drama 166
passports 110 – 11
patria-system 25
patriation, process of 1, 3 – 4, 15 – 16,
20 – 1, 111, 113, 144 – 5,  168
place-design 32
postcultural 1, 89, 168, 173
postgeographic 1, 89, 168
postnational 5, 7, 18, 88, 151, 154,
161, 166, 175
predatory hyphenation 44 – 5
prestige 27, 41, 96 – 8
pronouns, use of 66, 78, 161, 173
psychology of culturalized spaces
156 – 7
Queer Theory 149 – 53
racialized rightlessness 45 – 6
re-institutionalization 16, 167, 169
relational nationalisms/
transnationalisms ix, 2 – 3, 6 – 8,
10 – 11, 13 – 14, 18, 21, 54, 59, 155,
157, 160, 168
search engine 135, 145
settler-American myths 26, 42, 56,
64 – 5
shared cultural life as selfhood 177 – 80
slogans 40, 141, 167
social Darwinism 63
Social Death 45 – 6
social engineering 3 – 4, 24, 26, 31, 167
soft power 34, 39, 53, 144, 146
state-commissioned cultural material
15, 97, 112 – 13
Sunday Night Football 137, 142
Super Bowl (American football) 28,
138, 143
temporalized transnationalisms ix, 5,
57 – 8,  183
tenure, academic 154
usable experience 8, 21
US military 39, 61, 65, 132
US Visa Waiver Program 122 – 3
visa exams 123 – 6
visa profiling 125 – 7
War on Terror 3
worlded transnationalisms ix, 5, 57 – 8,
153, 183