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"This book offers a deeply relevant argument in the wake of 9/11 and counter-terror. Ali Behdad provides psychological depth to immigration discourse with a nuanced examination of 'forgetting' as a mode of negation that both denies and acknowledges a past built on the exclusion of otherness."--Russ Castronovo, author of "Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States"

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A Forgetful Nation

Duke University Press

Contents

Preface..................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Nation and Immigration.....................................................................11 Imagining America: Forgetful Fathers and the Founding Myths of the Nation..............................232 Historicizing America: Tocqueville and the Ideology of Exceptionalism..................................483 Immigrant America: Liberal Discourse of Immigration and the Ritual of Self-Renewal.....................764 Discourses of Exclusion: Nativism and the Imagining of a "White Nation"................................1115 Practices of Exclusion: National Borders and the Disciplining of Aliens................................143Conclusion: Remembering 9/11.............................................................................169Notes....................................................................................................177Bibliography.............................................................................................193Index....................................................................................................205

Chapter One

Forgetful Fathers and the Founding Myths of the Nation

In his seminal lecture "What Is a Nation?," delivered on 11 March 1882 at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan spoke of the importance of amnesia in the act of founding a nation. "Forgetting," he remarked, "is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality" (11). Renan argued that the political project of founding a nation often entails forgetting the originary violence, forgetting that the sense of national unity was achieved initially by means of brutality. To create a homogeneous community, dissidence and dissent must be eliminated, but such a violent eradication is never remembered: "every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century" (11). Though made in the context of France, Renan's argument offers powerful insight into how Americans have historically defined their national identity. The United States, I want to argue in this chapter, is an amnesiac nation that disremembers its violent beginnings to fashion itself as a unified imagined community. More particularly, my critical aim here is to consider the specific historical acts of forgetting that mark the ambivalent form of nation building in the United States. In the first part of my discussion, I will consider how the founding fathers' debate about immigration brings to the fore the nation's constitutive amnesia, while in the second part I will elaborate the theoretical and historical implications of forgetting by reading Crvecoeur's Letters From an American Farmer (1782) as a foundational account of the nation's ambivalent civic identity.

The Benevolent Father and the Forgetting of Violence

A historically revealing example of how amnesia is paramount to the founding of the nation is the debate over immigration between two of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, in the beginning of the nineteenth century. In his First Annual Message to Congress in 1801, Jefferson wrote, "I cannot omit recommending a revisal of the laws on the subject of naturalization. Considering the ordinary chances of human life, a denial of citizenship under a residence of fourteen years is a denial to a great proportion of those who ask it, and controls a policy pursued from their first settlement by many of these States, and still believed of consequence to their prosperity. And shall we refuse the unhappy fugitives from distress that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?"1 Jefferson's benevolent attitude toward new immigrants, as expressed in his rhetorical questions, is forgetful of many things. But before we recover these, let us first look at what his political rival, Alexander Hamilton, remembered by way of exposing the president's amnesia in his policy recommendation. The misrepresentation of the encounter between Native Americans and pilgrims as one of hospitality gave Hamilton ample ammunition to attack the president's deceptive benevolence toward immigrants. During the winter of 1801-2 he published a series of eighteen articles entitled "The Examination" in the New York Evening Post to refute Jefferson's annual message. In the seventh of these articles, he remembered Jefferson's own Notes on Virginia, in which he had claimed that populating the nation with immigrants would compromise the nation's homogeneity. There Jefferson had argued that immigrants would "bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw it off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass" (108).

In his presidential address Jefferson seems peculiarly forgetful of this earlier statement against lax immigration. In the Notes he had advocated a narrow, nationalist idea of homogeneity that rejected the naturalization of immigrant and indentured workers (that is, the Virginia model of immigration); in his speech, he calls for a humanist notion of a heterogeneous community that is accepting of all oppressed masses of humanity (the Pennsylvania model of immigration). To critique Jefferson's contradictory position toward immigration, Hamilton reminded him of the moment of the pilgrims' arrival. I quote at length from Hamilton's seventh article to reach the broader implications of Jefferson's amnesia:

It might be asked in return, does the right to asylum or hospitality carry with it the right to suffrage and sovereignty? And what indeed was the courteous reception which was given to our forefathers, by the savages of the wilderness? When did these humane and philanthropic savages exercise the policy of incorporating strangers among themselves, on their first arrival in the country? When did they admit them into their huts, to make them part of their families, and when did they distinguish them by making them their sachems? Our histories and traditions have been more than apocryphal, if any thing like this kind, and gentle treatment was really lavished by the much-belied savages upon our thankless forefathers. But the remark occurs, had it all been true, prudence inclines to trace the history farther, and ask what has become of the nations of savages who exercised this policy? And who now occupies the territory which they had inhabited? Perhaps a useful lesson might be drawn from...