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For many baby boomers, the word “plastic” immediately evokes the 1968 movie The Graduate when avuncular advice to young Benjamin Braddock—“Just one word: plastics”—conveys the materialism and falseness of suburbia. Although plastics already had shaped American life for decades, Braddock would have grown up in a world in which Formica, vinyl, Styrofoam and fiberglass were considered not only replacements but also improvements. Yet, as Jeffrey Meickle shows in his American Plastic: A Cultural History (1995) this triumph would end, even while plastic remains the stuff on which America is built.
“Plastic” refers not to a single chemical family/ process, but to the malleability of these synthetic compounds—facilitating curving styles in 1950s and 1960s decor and becoming a metaphor for shifting identities. John Hyatt derived the first plastic, celluloid, from pulped cotton in 1869. Unmelting Bakelite, identified with art deco, was synthesized by Leo Backland in 1907. Other plastics became commercially available through US corporations like Du Pont and Goodrich by the 1930s; some, like nylon, “went to war” were diverted to military goods in the Second World War.
The peacetime demand for nylons was only part of the plastic wave that shaped not only new suburbs, but also Disney’s house of the future in Tomorrowland. Plastic goods with bright colors, original lines, flexible shaping and “easy” care—for a home without servants—became ubiquitous. They were also cheap and disposable, whether diapers or fast-food packaging. They democratized luxury in household goods, fiberglass boats and vinyl siding.
Yet, 1960s reactions against consumerist abundance meant that baby boomers also identified plastics with the banality of suburbia and postwar growth even as they profited from it. Many championed returns to natural materials: cotton Indian prints rather than plastic seat covers, or ceramic rather than melmac dinnerware. The difficulties of the “natural”—care for silk, linen, leather—fitted the opulence of the 1980s when a “Teflon” president, against whom charges never stuck, occupied the White House. Plastics became negative metaphors for older generations, lower classes and falseness.
Plastic also became an environmental enemy. Campaigns have focused on the sheer bulk of enduring plastic waste as diapers filled up landfills or the rings around beverage six-packs were cited in the death of aquatic life. At times, figures have been overstated and focus on product rather than process (ignoring, for example, the energy required in sanitizing cloth diapers). Nonetheless, fast-food servers and merchants have offered paper as an alternative.
As Meickle notes, this conveys cultural schizophrenia. Information technology comes sheathed in plastic—no one expects a teak computer—reinforcing an identification of plastic with the future. Plastic infrastructures—pipes, joints, shoe soles, linings and enhancements—also underpin natural facades. Indeed, vintage plastics—Bakelite radios, nostalgic toys, etc.—became collectible “authentic synthetics” in the 1990s. Plastics define the American century then, not only in material conditions, but also in cultural interpretations (and concealments) of everyday life.
Industry:Culture
For much of American history, trade policy has meant protection of domestic resources and fledgling industries through tariffs and controls on importation. In the postwar period, however, a stronger America has lowered its own trade barriers substantially while using trade as a carrot and stick, reducing barriers globally in order to open markets internationally to US goods, agricultural, industrial and intellectual, and to affirm special relationships (“most favored nation status”). Economists, on the whole, tend to favor free trade, foreseeing greater efficiency and long-run benefits.
Global trade increased more than fourteen-fold from 1950 to 1998, contributing to improved standards of living/consumption for many in the US and abroad. This growth also has resulted in a large persistent American trade deficit since the 1970s and diverse reactions from the American people to arrangements made by both the government and multinational negotiators under the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, first signed in 1947) and the WTO (World Trade Organization) that has replaced it since 1994/5.
America’s undamaged industrial and agricultural infrastructure allowed it to capture a preeminent place in global marketing in the postwar period, which was eventually undercut by its own development practices and investments that created cheaper, more efficient manufacturing abroad. Hence, former enemies Japan and Germany have become major sources of the trade deficit along with neighbors Mexico and Canada (under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement) and new Asian industrial nations.
By contrast, the US ran a surplus with Europe until 1991, and maintains this relationship with Britain and the Netherlands. Trade balances may be affected by limits and subsidies (in the case of the European Union and Japan) or by weaknesses in local currency and markets that undercut buying power (Canada, Mexico, Asia). Trade wars may be raged through such apparently unlikely products as bananas (with Europe) or film (with Japan).
Relations with China have created especially thorny issues.
Such imbalances in manufacture and trade cost jobs in the United States, even when they involve offshore investments of American corporations and miultinationals, leading unions to charge that profits and consumption are being traded for workers’ lives. Issues of environmental conditions of the non-US workplace, child labor, respect for intellectual property, morality and political regimes and related topics have also been brought by critics to debates over trade as moral policy.
Many of these issues were galvanized in the debate surrounding NAFTA (1994), which 1992 third-party candidate Ross Perot characterized by a “giant sucking sound” of jobs going to Mexico, but which nonetheless gained approval with solid bipartisan presidential and congressional support. To some extent, NAFTA built on years of special relations among the three North American states, including many measures for development of the Mexican American borderlands. Critics both before and after passage have challenged its impact on employment and wages, both in the US and an increasingly polarized Mexico, as well as failures to protect the environment and human rights equally under the agreement.
Frustration with the impacts of such agreement spilled out into days of civil action at the WTO meetings in Seattle, WA in 1999. Unions, environmentalists, anarchists and other citizens from the US and abroad joined in to protest both policies and domination of trade by this international group. Thus, trade became a popular as well as political issue in a new way for the nation and the world.
Industry:Culture
For much of its history the FBI has been linked inextricably in the public mind with its first director, J. Edgar Hoover. Since the 1970s, critics have highlighted many of Hoover’s excesses and introduced periodic reforms. But, with his passing, the agency reshaped its public image without examining some fundamental questions about the relationship between a police organization and a democratic society. Praising Hoover for creating a strong law-enforcement agency the organization has been slow to eliminate all of his unconstitutional practices. Subsequently it has used some of the same fears that created Hoover’s organization to forestall change, calling it into question in cases like its assaults on militias and on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX, as well as its responsiveness to outside oversight.
The FBI’s roots were planted in the aftermath of the First World War, a period of widespread violation of constitutional rights in the name of national security. Anxieties engendered by the 1917 Russian Revolution, concerns about domestic radical organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the association in the mind of many Americans of socialism and anarchism with immigrants, allowed AttorneyGeneral A. Mitchell Palmer, and his assistant, Hoover, to undertake widespread arrests and deportations. The first “red scare,” however, was insufficient to provide legitimacy for a large federal police organization. The fears of the early 1920s gave way to late 1920s complacency. During the early 1930s, therefore, the organization’s director, Hoover, turned to another stereotype of immigration, the identification of immigrants with organized crime, for his bureau’s meal ticket. In this process he was helped significantly by the efforts of Hollywood in the early 1930s, and particularly the movies of James Cagney (Public Enemy, 1931), Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar, 1931) and George Raft (Scarface, 1932), depicting dangerous, larger-than-life gangsters. Lined up against these villains were Hoover’s G-Men (1935). The FBI director undertook a massive publicrelations campaign to create an image of the federal agent as fearless and incorruptible, presenting his agents as clean-cut, white and middleclass men. Events like the killing of Dillinger became public spectacles, virtual lynchings, with trophies from the shooting displayed on the director’s desk. Just as lynching established particular social practices in the South, Hoover’s publicly performed law-enforcement practices normalized the role of the FBI agency.
The Second World War brought a new role of locating the foreign agent on American soil, but the most significant modern developments for the growing FBI occurred in response to the emergent civil-rights movement. The movement arose in part out of a new relationship between the federal government and segregationist southern states, and this relationship required increased federal police intervention. The FBI was very slow to fulfill this new role, notwithstanding movie portrayals as in Mississippi Burning (1988), which erroneously depicted the Bureau as a key force for change. Only when freedom riders refused to halt their journeys through the South, and when other civil-rights activists refused to stop their work registering rural blacks, forcing the Kennedy administration to protect them, did FBI agents act. Civil-rights activists themselves often believed that the FBI remained on the sidelines until after their beatings.
But the FBI once again used events to bolster its public image. The murders of three activists (two of them white) in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964, led to a very public investigation undertaken by the FBI, which eventually unearthed the bodies of the young men who had been killed with the collusion of local police authorities. This performance, reassuring as it was for many northern liberals, and played for all its worth to television audiences in the Hoover-endorsed FBI series (ABC, 1965–74), masked Hoover’s other more sinister work during this period.
This work involved the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s home and office on the assumption that he was working with known communists. Endorsed by the Attorney-General Robert Kennedy (who worried about his brother’s identification with civil-rights leaders), this wiretapping revealed no “reds” under beds, but did produce salacious material that Hoover could add to his files (which most likely also covered John Kennedy’s philandering).
Hoover also turned to his counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) to infiltrate black militant organizations, the new left and the antiwar movement. The growing number of race riots in the mid-1960s led to the establishment of a “Ghetto Informant Program” in 1968, in which 3,250 agent provocateurs were employed to infiltrate organizations like the Black Panthers. Just as Hoover had helped create a “red scare” in the 1920s by sometimes creating organizations where there were none, so the FBI contributed to the exacerbation of racial tensions in black ghettos.
This work is now generally acknowledged as part of Hoover’s excesses. What is less clearly recognized is the manner in which such actions contributed to the understanding of the direction in which the movement towards racial equality was moving, and the extent to which their legacy has scarred American society. Hoover’s vision that the riots were the result of the work of Black Power advocates was in direct contrast to the arguments of the Kerner Commission, which recognized the social roots of discontent.
While Hoover has been vilified for his work during this period, his understanding of the period has survived, contributing to the backlash that occurred against the Civil Rights movement.
During the Watergate years, many of the FBI and CIA’s illegal activities came to light. Reforms occurred to such an extent that many conservatives began to feel that the federal policing agencies had been eviscerated, leaving the nation vulnerable. Now the Bureau benignly advertises itself as an enforcement agency complementing other local and state police forces, providing a sophisticated laboratory (to which Homicide, (NBC, 1993–9) detectives could turn when necessary) for studying fingerprint, DNA and other forensic evidence. It also undertakes investigation of telemarketing fraud, security fraud, bombings and major art thefts—not to mention the paranormal, as seen on the X-Files (FOX, 1993–). Yet the feeling that there may have been some legitimacy to Hoover’s methods has been rekindled among many Americans by events like the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and fears associated with “foreign” (usually cast as Muslim, sometimes also immigrant) threats associated, once again, with increased involvement of American forces overseas. However, as in the case of the FBI’s handling of the Waco confrontation with the Branch Davidians and the apparent cover-up of its agents’ use of incendiary tear gas, such sentiments of legitimacy are quickly turned to excess.
Industry:Culture
For nearly fifty years, the time slot between the 23:00 local news and station sign-off has been dominated by one format—the live talk show—and one show—NBC’s Tonight Show—under a succession of hosts. Other local stations generally fought back with movies and syndicated programming. CBS’ Tonight Show offshoot, Late Night with David Letterman, ABC’s Nïghtline and the syndicated Arsenio Hall Show, among others, have created viable alternatives, yet still within a conversational format.
Noting other experiments in late-night programming, NBC developed the Tonight Show from a local program hosted by Steve Allen, a witty urbane New York comedian and pianist. Between 1954 and 1957, Allen created the formula for the ninety-minute show—a living-room ambience, complete with family (announcer and band) and varied celebrity guests, from sex symbols to poet Carl Sandburg. Comic features, music and excursions into the live audience and onto the street framed and paced the talk, incorporating a democracy of celebrity into late-night relaxation. This era also established union scale as guest payment (while growing commercial revenues poured into NBC coffers for generations). Celebrities, nonetheless, have used this teleforum to sell their movies, songs and television shows, careers, athletic achievements and humanity (including political candidates).
NBC revived the Tonight Show under Jack Paar (1957–62), who hosted John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as well as show business celebrities. Paar also began taping shows in advance, although still with a live audience. Edgy, personal and combative, Paar walked off the show—on air -in 1960 after a fight with censors.
In 1962 Johnny Carson took over for three decades. Carson did not change his predecessors’ formats, but overlaid them with a casual style that suited the Manhattan show’s move to California in 1972. He made the monologue more topical, while his approval legitimated newcomers in standup comedy, music and film for decades. Both star guests and the sheer repetition of formulaic jokes, sketches and banter with announcer Ed MacMahon, made Carson a constant fixture in American life and language.
Carson’s 1992 retirement created a battle between a frequent replacement host, standup comedian Jay Leno, and David Letterman. Letterman already had developed his sometimes surreal humor, more Allen than Carson, on NBC’s Late Nïght (1982–92).
Here, he took over a new 00:30–01:30 slot pioneered by Tom Snyder’s intimate, discursive Tomorrow (1973–82). The “wars” ended with Letterman getting millions from CBS, creating competition in style, features and location (Letterman’s Times Square versus Leno’s California), although guests migrate between these shows and the youngeroriented talk shows that follow.
Meanwhile, in 1979, ABC began nightly broadcasts on the Iran hostage crisis. A few months later, this became the half-hour Nightline., hosted by Ted Koppel. Nïghtline provides analysis, contentious interviews and debates on hot news, and longer investigative, town meeting and location reports confronting American dilemmas of riots, prison, racism, presidential scandal and challenges abroad. With its sobriety and immediacy Nightline has, at times, eclipsed variety-show rivals.
While various other syndicated talk shows and hosts have failed in the 1980s and 1990s, the Arsenio Hall Show (1989–94) was both a racial break-through for its African American host and a generational one, in contrast to the aging Carson. Hall, however, mixed super-hip with seriousness, including frank discussions of AIDS with Magic Johnson and poignant coverage/appeals for calm during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. A 1990s newcomer, Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect (ABC), throws together celebrities, politicians and “average” citizens in pointed discussions of politics and culture, especially during Clinton’s unfolding scandals, while PBS’ Charlie Rose promotes erudite one-onone exchanges.
Morning television provides information and family chatter to begin the day. Latenight has permitted adult talk to chronicle, comment on and sometimes create fifty years of American life, media, politics and change, whether packaged as humor and gossip or serious debate. These shows have emerged as significant sources of political information and opinion for viewers. In the 1990s, viewers also can escape to multiple cable options—movies, reruns, cooking and sports—or simply go to bed.
Industry:Culture
For nearly half its distance, the 1,947 kilometer US/Mexico border follows the Rio Grande river from Brownsville/Matamoros to El Paso/Ciudad Juárez, where it becomes a geometric line cutting across the Sonora and Mojave desert until it reaches San Diego/Tijuana. The region was sparsely populated until after the Second World War when development programs fostered the expansion of agriculture and agribusiness, trade, tourism and maquiladoras (assembly plants). Between 1930 and 1990, the population of El Paso increased from 102,421 residents to 515,342, while its “sister city” Ciudad Juárez grew from 19,669 to 789,522. During the same period San Diego went from 147,87 to 1,110,549 inhabitants, and Tijuana 8,384 to 698,752 inhabitants.
Because of this rapid growth, immigration, environmental and cultural issues have become a source of bi-national tension and concern. On a cultural level, the meaning of the border speaks directly to perceptions of US identity since many see it as a dividing line while others, including many Chicanos/as, emphasize the possibilities for cultural exchange and dialogue.
From 1521 to 1810, the settling of Northern Mexico—now the US Southwest—by Spanish soldiers, farmers and missionaries was sporadic because of violent confrontations with Native Americans and the region’s arid climate. Attempts to settle the region, which included devising policies aimed at attracting Anglo settlers, continued after Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1810. US expansion led to the US/ Mexico War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ceded Northern Mexico to the US. As Anglo settlers moved into the region, they dispossessed—through force, legal maneuvers and purchase—Mexicans of their land. In the US, racial segregation was the rule as Mexican Americans were seen and treated as a cheap labor force.
The introduction of new irrigation techniques and railroad lines in the 1900s led to the expansion of agribusiness and the wider use of Mexicans as farm labor. The “bracero” program, which was started in 1942 to provide US agribusiness with temporary Mexican field-hands, brought thousands of Mexican workers to the Southwest. When the program was ended in 1964, many workers settled in the border region and continued migrating to the US.
By the 1960s the border region was the site of a number of industries, including agriculture, defense, technology, petroleum, real estate and tourism. The economies of border cities have become tightly linked as goods, labor (both legal and illegal), tourists, shoppers and plant managers cross the border on a daily basis. On the Mexican side, the government promoted maquila (assemblyplant) manufacturing in cities such Tijuana, Piedras Negras, Ciudad Juárez and Nuevo Laredo. The Mexican Border Industrialization Program, which was started in 1965, sought to take advantage of the low-wages paid to and the high productivity of the Mexican workforce. The program allowed for the dutyfree importation of machinery equipment and materials under the condition that everything produced was exported. By 1975, 67,214 were employed in maquilas, by 1990, 460,293. The majority of these plants engaged in electronic and furniture assembly and textile production. Maquilas have generated controversy because of their low-wages, reliance on young women as employees, ecological impact and inability to provide jobs for the large number of migrants to the border region.
In order to control the entry of illegal immigrants the US has begun to militarize the border, including deploying marines for patrol duty. Militarization and violence on the border have led to concerns over the protection of human rights. Groups such as America’s Watch have written reports critical of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s ability to guarantee the rights of legal and illegal immigrants. Attempts to limit illegal immigration—such as the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act which included employer sanctions for hiring undocumented workers—have had little impact on the migrant flow. Many of these issues of crossing and employment are depicted in the movie El Norte (1989). Most analysts agree that as long as there exists such a large disparity in Mexican and US wage rates—and a demand in the US for Mexican labor— illegal immigration will continue.
As a result of border industrialization, environmental problems have generated new legal issues and highlighted the need for greater bi-national cooperation. Problems such as cross-border flooding, sewage spills, the disposal of hazardous waste and air pollution have drawn the attention of environmental groups and policy-makers. Untreated waste from Tijuana has polluted beaches near San Diego and over half of the maquilas, most of which are owned by US and Japanese companies, have toxic-discharge problems. After 1990, with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, both the US and Mexican governments began to voice concern over borderland environmental conditions.
In 1992 US and Mexican environmental agencies devised the Integrated Border Environmental Plan, which focused mainly on educational programs and information sharing while paying little attention to enforcement. A number of US and Mexican nongovernmental organizations have formed to pressure for improving environmental conditions.
For many who view US culture as being homogenous and bounded, the complexities and permeability of the border represent a diluting of US culture and ideals. Many Chicanos/as have challenged this view by emphasizing the porous and creative nature of identity and culture; cultural borderlands are not threatening exceptions, but rather regions of cultural exchange and dialogue. Indeed, this rethinking of US identity is needed for transforming perceptions of the US/Mexico border from a closed dividing line to a region where new forms of bi-national cooperation and cultural expression should be fostered and encouraged.
Industry:Culture
For that nineteenth-century Anglo-American practitioner, Henry James, the novel was a loose and baggy monster. This genre, literally the new inheritor of the romance tradition and the cultural consequence of, among other things, the rise of a middle class, has such an extraordinary breadth of forms and formats that definition necessarily gives way to description. Customary designations of the novel may involve length, linguistic tradition, regional or national identification, established historical epoch or period, experimental correlation with developments in other disciplines or spheres, or close association with cultural movements—often those considered radical, in the mathematical sense of that word. Many of these categories of description have particular application to the American novel as one constituent element of a national literary tradition that Marius Bewley labeled “The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel” (1959, italics added).
One of the earliest written prototypes of the American novel was a New Republic-era experiment by the nation’s pioneering professional novelist, Charles Brockden Brown. In Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), Brown introduced themes which have resonated for two centuries: a reading of the then “untamed,” unfamiliar American landscape as Gothic wilderness; the preoccupation with madness, guilt and the nightmarish; a fascination with murder and suffering as acts of divine retribution; and an inexplicable alliance with the preternatural. From that 1798 narrative, one can easily trace a trajectory from Edgar Allen Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1851) to Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952).
Much of American literature has been a Bildungsroman, or novel of education, both in the literal journeys of individual characters and the nation’s own symbolic coming of age. A very significant component of that journey from innocence to experience has been the encounter with multiple landscapes of ever-changing national borders. In his five novels known as the LeatherStocking Tales (1823–41), James Fenimore Cooper narrated the exploits of Natty Bumpo and the Native chief, Chingachgook, in the confines of the allegedly “civilized” world and the philosophical textbook of the frontier. Such concerns would return a generation later in the works of American transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, while the journey to experience underpins Mark Twain’s picaresque Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), considered by many the pre-eminent American novel. For some, the frontier/wilderness was a mythic space in which one’s mettle was tested and one’s character honed by the struggle for survival. For Herman Melville, that frontier was an ocean expanse where Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (1851) battled for dominion against Job’s Leviathan. For Tomas Rivera, however, the natural world was the concrete terrain in which the migrant workers of…y no se lo trago la tierra/And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971) interwove their achronological and elusive impressions with the recurrent cycles of the farmworker’s growing seasons. For John Steinbeck, writing about the forced emigrations of Midwestern farmers in the Depression era (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939), nature was an equal partner in an archetypal story about survival against the odds.
In an entirely different landscape—the sophisticated world of the European salon— Henry James described the search for an American identity and a home. James, himself an American expatriate, painstakingly chronicled that same quest in such novels as The American (1877) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Incisive critiques of American manners also found elegantly nuanced expression in the novels of Edith Wharton, particularly in The Age of Innocence (1920).
Whether sketching out sumptuously appointed drawing rooms or virgin prairies, American writers often discovered a wilderness of interior exile. The oeuvres of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald contributed significant portraits to such a gallery Nella Larsen and James Weldon Johnson captured the loneliness of racial identity confusion in Passing (1929) and Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). In The Surrounded (1936) and House Made of Dawn (1968), D’Arcy McNickle and N. Scott Momaday described painful attempts to reconcile twinned Native and American cultures which often seemed and functioned as antagonistic or foreign to each other. Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991) used humor to talk about the problematic cost of Asian American forms of apparently successful identity negotiation, while Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction asked uncompromising questions about becoming American. The complex choreography of sexual identity also offered a “queered” reading of the American consciousness in such works as Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956).
Narratives by voluntary as well as involuntary immigrants simultaneously explored the border crossings from birth to physical as well as legal and social adulthood in a new order. Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925) pursued the psychological clash between a father’s old vistas and a daughter’s new world ideals in a narrative about Yiddish cultural transplantation. A consistent and sardonic critique of the nation’s repressive infantilization of boys demanding recognition of their full adult status appeared in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952).
Intermingling both the pain and the beauty of life in the American crucible, the sighted legatees of Ellison pierced the veil intended to disregard the humanity of the other in such lyrical prose poems as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984). Sometimes this demythologizing project involved a compelling, incisive and genderforegrounded interrogation of the constraints on women’s imaginative, fiscal, intellectual and psychosexual independence that surfaced in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Novelists such as Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Gloria Naylor and Maxine Hong Kingston created new dynastic trinities of grandmothers, mothers and daughters in Sula (1974) and Song of Solomon (1977), The Joy Luck Club (1989), Mama Day (1988) and The Woman Warrior (1976).
American narrative experimentalists—Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, William S. Burroughs, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Donald Barthelme, Toni Cade Bambara, Kurt Vonnegut, Ismael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison and others—often made use of the conflation of genres or the construction of fabulation to confront simultaneously the future, the inherited and the invented past. Hence, Louise Erdrich’s trilogy traces almost a century of recollections about family stories; for those whose histories have been erased, distorted or discounted, fiction-as-historiography has become a compelling genre all of its own.
Rememory and the haunting of buried secrets permeate such texts which make whitewater of streams-of-consciousness. Other writers like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Upton Sinclair used fiction as a site of testimony where one could make a public and prophetic record of that which demanded documentation.
From the preoccupation with the sighting of whales to the haunting power of wraiths and the remembered, American novels have served as a moveable feast.
Industry:Culture
For the US, China has been a distant land that may be mysterious, enchanting or threatening. While the US, unlike Europe, occupied no protectorate in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century China provided markets for both business people and missionaries. On the other hand, the Chinese have harbored strong suspicions about Americans, balancing admiration of some aspects of techno-modernity by concerns about social and cultural limits. Despite Chinese immigration to the US and growing American knowledge of China, suspicions as well as competitions often divide the nations.
The Second World War was a watershed in US-China relations. Fighting the Japanese as allies, the US recognized Chinese citizenship at home and, in Frank Capra’s Battle of China, touted the nation’s commitment to democracy and peace. Yet, seeds of difference were already present that became climactic in the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. This change reverberated in the Cold War US around claims about “who lost China” and opposition to Chinese communist intervention, played out in Korea (and, later, Vietnam). American commitments to nationalist forces who had fled to Taiwan nearly led to war in 1955 and 1958, and remain a source of conflict today Moreover, American—Chinese relations have been triangulated by both states in terms of other ties and conflicts with the Soviet Union, Japan and India.
Nonetheless, an important shift in US policy came under Richard Nixon, who had baited the People’s Republic of China for much of his career. Building on sporadic ongoing diplomatic talks and “ping-pong diplomacy” he sent Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Beijing in 1971 for secret talks, followed by Nixon’s dramatic state visit in 1972. Recognition of “the mainland,” as many Americans refer to it, had repercussions for Taiwan/the People’s Republic of China (then a totalitarian regime with strong lobbyists in Washington). Loss of its UN seat and wariness over American commitments and PRC intentions have complicated Taiwan, where America now practices a policy of “strategic ambiguity.” Sino-American contact grew in the 1970s and 1980s not only between people (journalists, scholars, tourists) and ideologies, but also between markets. Yet, in 1989, the US and China again reached point of decision when television broadcasted the brutal repression of students in Tiananmen Square, whose Goddess of Liberty recalled the American Statue of Liberty Ambivalence on the part of both the US and mainland China has marked subsequent relations. Commercial ties have driven American corporate and political campaigns for “permanent normal trade relations” and entry into the World Tade Organization. Yet, human rights activists (including many concerned by religion), labor organizers and right-wing isolationists decry this rapprochement or demand concessions the Chinese are unwilling to give. This led to bitter confrontations (including those within the Democratic Party) before Congress approved PNTR status in May 2000. Others asked why China should be given this status and Cuba embargoed. At the same time, Chinese courting of American support betrays a wariness of American morals as well as policies.
Both misunderstanding and necessity will undoubtedly continue into the twenty-first century despite increasing exchange and communication among their citizens.
Industry:Culture
Foreign policy, domestic discourse and mass media have often coincided in the identification of “acceptable” external American enemies, both vilified and stereotyped, with potentially painful consequences for those who might be associated with these groups within the US. The culture of the select reviled enemy as global metaphor for American identity pervaded wartime propaganda of the twentieth century which vilified the Spanish, Turks, Germans and Japanese. In the last case, racial features were cruelly caricatured even as the rights of resident Japanese Americans were trampled on by their confinement in concentration camps. In the Cold War, this sense of a powerful foe focused on communism—the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, the nearby threat of Cuba and continuous concerns with Asian enemies—Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean.
With the collapse of many communist regimes, the question of “suitable” foreign enemies has become more ambiguous for politicians and media. Lethal Weapon II (1989), for example, turned to white South Africans; Russian mobsters have become frequent villains for movies and television (The Saint, 1997; NBC’s Law and Order, 1990–). Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega have also been cast as arch-enemies, as were Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbs amidst ongoing Balkan conflicts (a sense of “enemyship” was parodied in the 1997 film Wag the Dog, which created a fictional engagement and heroic actions in Albania). The need for and manipulation of enemies remains fundamental to American politics, whether justifying military expenditures or actions abroad, or in defining the American dream against those denied some aspect of it.
Yet these images continue to cause deep conflicts within a multicultural society. For example, 1999 congressional and FBI concerns about Chinese espionage in American nuclear research evoked a specter of an inscrutable Asian enemy and divided loyalties that deeply worried Americans of Asian descent, among others.
Industry:Culture
Formed by conjunctions of railroads, cattle, oil, finance and technology the glassy spires of Dallas rise from the Central Texas plains, surrounded by highways and suburban sprawl. This wealthy city of 1,075,894 (1998 estimate) is also a center for art, education (Baylor, Southern Methodist and Dallas Universities), medicine and religion, especially massive evangelical churches. NeimanMarcus department store, famed for its fabulous Christmas catalog, and computer maker Texas Instruments are also based there. Sports teams include the world champion Cowboys (football) and the Mavericks (basketball); baseball’s Texas Rangers play in adjacent Arlington. The city shares an airport with nearby Fort Worth in a metropolitan area of over 4 million, including fast-growing suburbs like Plano.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 and the televised events that followed inscribed Dallas on world consciousness: the sixth-floor museum in the Texas Book Depository commemorates this tragedy. In the 1980s, the city’s image was reshaped by the prime-time soap opera Dallas. The grittier realism of Errol Morris’ documentary Thin Blue Line (1986) and other works recognize the class and racial diversity of the area and its problems.
Industry:Culture
Formed in 1961 from municipal institutions and serving almost 220,000 students, CUNY includes eleven urban colleges, six community colleges, law, medical and graduate programs. Descended from the Free Academy of 1847, CUNY remained free of tuition fees until 1973. Long the immigrants’ springboard out of poverty its student body has evolved from an earlier dominance of mostly Jewish, leftist intellectuals to its current diverse range of African American, Arab American, Latino and Asian American populations. As state and city funding have been slashed, however, CUNY faces increasing pressure to balance generally open admissions with “efficient results,” a controversy polarizing university and city.
Industry:Culture
