American Exceptionalism and the Remains of Race: by Edmund Fong PDF

In modern American political tradition, claims of yank exceptionalism and anxieties over its customers have resurged as an overarching topic in nationwide political discourse. but by no means very faraway from such debates lie animating fears linked to race. Fears in regards to the lack of nationwide cohesion and belief usually draw consciousness to looming alterations within the racial demographics of the physique politic. misplaced amid those debates are usually the extra complicated legacies of racial hybridity. Anxieties over the disintegration of the material of yankee nationwide identification likewise omit not only how they echo previous fears of subversive racial and cultural distinction, but additionally exorcise besides the altering nature of labor and social interplay.

Edmund Fong’s publication examines the increase and resurgence of up to date different types of American exceptionalism as they've got emerged out of contentious debates over cultural pluralism and multicultural variety long ago twenty years. For a short time, critical concerns of the strength of multiculturalism entered right into a number of philosophical and coverage debates. yet within the American context, those debates frequently ended in a reaffirmation of a few variation of yank exceptionalism with the resultant exorcism of race in the avowed norms and coverage objectives of yankee politics. Fong explores how this "multicultural exorcism" revitalizing American exceptionalism isn't easily a singular function of our modern political second, yet is as an alternative a recurrent dynamic around the heritage of yankee political discourse.

By situating modern discourse on cultural pluralism in the better body of yankee historical past, this e-book yields perception into the construction of hegemonic different types of American exceptionalism and the way race keeps to hang-out the contours of yank nationwide identity.