Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Capitalism, Imperialism, Race and Ethnicity, the Repressive State and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern America
- Chapter Two Counterformations to Capitalism, Imperialism, Modern America and Its Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern American Literature, Art, and Culture
- Chapter Three Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt: An Ethnographic Look at the Middle-Class, Individuated Subject in America in the 1920s
- Chapter Four Nick Carraway's Complicated Retreat from Modernity and the Construction of the Modern Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
- Chapter Five The African American Subaltern, Rearticulated African American Folklore, Modernity, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Chapter Six Trickster Narrator, Multinarrative Perspectives, and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded
- Chapter Seven Intersectionality, Inoperative Community, Trauma, Social Justice, and Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth
- Chapter Eight Theosophy, Plural Subjectivity, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood
- Chapter Nine Exile, Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Younghill Kang's East Goes West
- Chapter Ten Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Two - Counterformations to Capitalism, Imperialism, Modern America and Its Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern American Literature, Art, and Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Capitalism, Imperialism, Race and Ethnicity, the Repressive State and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern America
- Chapter Two Counterformations to Capitalism, Imperialism, Modern America and Its Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern American Literature, Art, and Culture
- Chapter Three Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt: An Ethnographic Look at the Middle-Class, Individuated Subject in America in the 1920s
- Chapter Four Nick Carraway's Complicated Retreat from Modernity and the Construction of the Modern Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
- Chapter Five The African American Subaltern, Rearticulated African American Folklore, Modernity, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Chapter Six Trickster Narrator, Multinarrative Perspectives, and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded
- Chapter Seven Intersectionality, Inoperative Community, Trauma, Social Justice, and Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth
- Chapter Eight Theosophy, Plural Subjectivity, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood
- Chapter Nine Exile, Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Younghill Kang's East Goes West
- Chapter Ten Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and culminating in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the United States had successfully formed a capitalist market system and an emergent consumer, imperial, colonizing, unequal, and inequitable modern society, where an oligarchy bathed in riches while the majority of Americans endured a series of national, economic, gender, and racial crises. The Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) and economic power for these decades offered economic and social freedom and privilege to middle- and upper- middle- class Anglo- Saxon, Protestant whites (mostly males), who never consciously acknowledged that they were beneficiaries of racial, gender, class, and imperial oppression and structural inequality.
Also, in these decades, the United States and its RSA and ISA— which are relations of power, practices, and actions— reduced “vulnerable” people of color, women, workingclass European immigrants, colonized indigenous nations, incorporated territories, and protectorate— that is, vulnerable to dispossession, poverty, insecurity, lack of agency, and harm— to second- class citizens. Through its RSA and its ISA, the United States exploited, devalued, marginalized, and denied justice, difference, and equality to women, the colonized, and people of color, who were repressed by circuits of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and gender bias. The relation of knowledge to power made it possible for the US grammars of normativity to support this way of structuring the world, which forecloses the possibility of thinking otherwise.
But throughout this period, series/ assemblages of vulnerable, oppressed, and excluded groups, different forms of subordination, gave rise to a variety of antagonisms, which were not held together by societal norms and values and which coexisted and developed on parallel planes and which, at times, communicate and commingle in their becomings. They existed as a corollary, as simultaneity of difference with their own internal becomings, reinventions. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann would characterize them as systems that are “operationally closed, […] relying entirely on internal operations.” These excluded groups, different forms of knowledge represent what Niklas Luhmann calls “functional differentiation” in modern society, where there is no hierarchal relation between each function system. These groups and forms of knowledge formulated conceptual formations, regimes of power/ knowledge, and challenged/ opposed this economically transformed, unequal and inequitable modern American society, showing the limits of this way of knowing.
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- A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and LiteratureAn Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation, pp. 35 - 68Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020