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 geographyall of which deal with the current interest in competing narratives, alternative facts, and accountabilitythe 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.

United States, United States of America

First, First Edition, PS, 2023

viii, 339 pages : 24 cm
Includes bibliographical references and index
Introduction: Contested lives, contesting lives / Ricia Anne Chansky and Laura J. Beard -- Dakobijigaade mii miinawaa Aaba'igaade Gichimookomaanakiing: tied and untied in America / Margaret Noodin -- National identity and well-being in US Black women's diaries / Joycelyn 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 -- 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 -- Days of reckoning: prospects for life narrative in the 2020s / Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

2024-08-23