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jaredpence's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting arguments about what binds the nation and gives them a sense of unity (whiteness? erotic energy? suffering and trauma?) and some compelling reads of canonical texts like "The Fall of the House of Usher," Moby-Dick, Whitman poems, and the Declaration of Independence. One of the significant arguments was that whiteness began to replace property ownership in the early nineteenth century as the defining characteristic of being American both as a circuitous way to justify chattel slavery (enslaved people could never have the kind of autonomy required of a citizen, a kind of autonomy that only those with property used to be able to claim) and racism (the logic of replacing property ownership with whiteness relied on the inability to legally enslave a white person, making whiteness equivalent to owning the property of one's self). After establishing this narrative of whiteness as a form of political legitimacy and autonomy and as having the potential for a unique affinity between strangers, he spends most of the book showing how texts pushed back against or moved forward the idea of affinity with strangers, and how texts resisted to varying degrees the use of whiteness as a national sign of belonging. As he points out at the end, whiteness is less explicitly used to define Americanness today than in the nineteenth century, but it made me think about how the logics of racism have evolved and are still relied on.
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