A Forgetful Nation

<div>In <i>A Forgetful Nation</i> the renowned postcolonialism scholar Ali Behdad turns his attention to the United States. Offering a timely critique of immigration and nationalism Behdad takes on an idea central to American national mythology: that the United States is a nation of immigrants welcoming and generous to foreigners. He argues that Americans' treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility and that this deep-seated ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of national identity. Building on the insights of Freud Nietzsche Foucault and Derrida he develops a theory of the historical amnesia that enables the United States to disavow a past and present built on the exclusion of others.<p>Behdad shows how political cultural and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known-J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's <i>Letters from an American Farmer</i> Alexis de Tocqueville's <i>Democracy in America</i> and Walt Whitman's <i>Leaves of Grass</i>-and lesser-known-such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country's violent beginnings including its conquest of Native Americans brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant aliens today particularly along the Mexican border.<br></p></div>