What is an "American" identity? The tension between populism and pluralism, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, has marked the United States since its inception. In The Divided States, leading scholars and critics argue that the US is, and has always been, a site where multiple national identities intersect in productive and challenging ways. Scrutinizing conflicting nationalisms and national identities, the authors ask, Whose stories get told and whose do not? Who or what promotes the idea of a unified national identity in the United States? How is the notion of a unified national identity disrupted? What myths and stories bind the US together? How representative are these stories? What are the counternarratives? And, if the idea of national homogeneity is a fallacy, what does tie us together as a nation? Working across auto/biography studies, American studies, and human geography-all of which deal with the current interest in competing narratives, "alternative facts," and accountability-the essays engage in and contribute to critical conversations in classrooms, scholarship, and the public sphere. The authors draw from a variety of fields, including anthropology; class analysis; critical race theory; diasporic, refugee, and immigration studies; disability studies; gender studies; graphic and comix studies; Indigenous studies; linguistics; literary studies; sociology; and visual culture. And the genres under scrutiny include diary, epistolary communication, digital narratives, graphic narratives, literary narratives, medical narratives, memoir, oral history, and testimony. This fresh and theoretically engaged volume will be relevant to anyone interested in the multiplicity of voices that make up the US national narrative.
Laura J. Beard is an associate vice president of research innovation at the University of Alberta. Ricia Anne Chansky is a professor of literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagueez, coeditor of the scholarly journal, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and editor of the Routledge Auto/Biography Studies book series.
Acknowledgments Introduction: Contested Lives, Contesting Lives Ricia Anne Chansky and Laura J. Beard Section One: Tracing Patterns Dakobijigaade mii miinawaa Aaba'igaade Gichimookomaanakiing: Tied and Untied in America Margaret Noodin Negotiating National Identity and Well-Being in US Black Women's Diaries Joycelyn K. Moody The Legacy of Conquest in Comics: Texas History Movies, Jack Jackson, and Revision Daniel Worden "Strange Juxtapositions": Elliott Erwitt's Visual Diary of Cold War America Steven Hoelscher We Have Never Been a Nation of Immigrants: Refugee Temporality as American Identity Elizabeth Rodrigues "A small flashlight in a great dark space": Elizabeth Warren, Autobiography, and Populism Rachael McLennan Indians in Monumental Places: Heid Erdich and Jeff Thomas Laura J. Beard Juneteenth Angela Ards Archival Intervention: Surviving the "Savage Splintering" in Deborah Miranda's Bad Indians Hertha D. Sweet Wong Section Two: Facing Forward Moving Beyond the Urban/Rural Divide in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home Katie Hogan White Privilege and J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy Stephanie Li) Getting Schooled: Responses to Education as Neoliberal Identity-Formation in US Life Narratives Megan Brown Disabling Birth: Prognostic Certainty and the Gestating Citizen of the Contemporary Midwifery Movement Ally Day Afterword Days of Reckoning: Prospects for Life Narrative 2020 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson Contributors Index
"Timely, relevant, and innovative. The editors have assembled a powerful chorus of established and emerging voices of auto/biography critics and practitioners of life writing to make a compelling argument for rewriting the nation's imaginary. By centering subjects who have been marginalized, erased, and excluded from traditional national myths, this urgently needed collection has the potential to become a canonical text."--Eva C. Karpinski, York University
