patell dot org

Everyone's Favorite Oxymoron

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:03:45 -0500

Taken at the Round Swamp Farm stand in East Hampton, New York.

Moby-Dick and Calvinism

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:47:42 -0500

T. Walter Herbert, Jr. begins his marvelously insightful study Moby-Dick and Calvinism (1977) with an apologia for producing yet another book about Herman Melville:

It has been true for some time that by writing one reasonably intelligible book on Melville a man could secure a better living in America than Melville managed to win by writing the whole body of his work. It is possible that this period is now drawing to a close; but while it has lasted his writings have received such an immense volume of commentary that yet another article on Melville, to say nothing of a scholarly book, should be obliged to present reasons for its existence. (ix)

The raison d'être for Herbert's study is to make known "a major aspect of Melville's creative achievement" by providing "a biographical account of Melville's inner struggle with the theological ideas that were losing authority during his time" and investigating "his way of handling those ideas in Moby-Dick" (ix). Noting that "Melville's religious perplexities were shaped by the fact that he absorbed in childhood the opposing theories of Unitarianism and the most conservative orthodoxy," Herbert concedes that in the early nineteenth century, the debates between the proponents of these theories had come "to seem intractable and were denounced increasingly as a waste of motion" (5-6), and he suggests that Melville's "preoccupation with outdated religious questions was a source of dismay to his most intimate literary associates" (11).

And if these questions were outdated in Melville's time, how much more out-of-date would they seem to readers nearly a century-and-a-half-later? Somewhat defensively, Herbert writes that "Melville deals with historic theological issues that may seem quite remote to us, scarcely worth the energies of a great genius" and admits that "the need to review the historical context of his work" might be construed to be "antiquarian." Herbert argues, however, that such an interest is anything but antiquarian, because religion was part of "the structure of ideas that molded [Melville's] consciousness."

As Herbert presents it, the interest of Moby-Dick and Calvinism rests not on the particular religious ideas and theories with which Melville engaged (though Herbert does an excellent job of elucidating them for his reader) but rather on something more abstract: it is, finally, a study of the ways in which "masters of literary art" like Melville take "command of certain basic conventions of thought" that "dominate the meditations of [their] contemporaries" (5). Melville, Herbert argues, "lived in a world very different from our own, and thought in the idiom that his world provided," but he "addresses us directly" because he dramatizes "the historical finitude" of all the "basic conceptual frameworks in which men articulate their negotiations with experience" (5, 19).

Reading Herbert's study some thirty years after it was published, I am struck by the ways in which it seems simultaneously current and out-dated. In 1977, it was ahead of its time, an example of what Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen would refer to, nine years later, as "ideological literary criticism." Herbert doesn't use the term ideology, but like those critics in Bercovitch and Jehlen's influential anthology Ideology and Classic American Literature (1986), he draws on work from the social sciences to illuminate his account of literary creation: "Lines of research in sociology, anthropology, and psychology have converged upon the recognition that individual persons, as well as communities, render experience intelligible by employing conceptions of the world" (3). Although he feels duty-bound to invoke psychoanalytic theory in his discussion of "intellectual conflict" (12-15), Herbert's approach owes more to the work of Clifford Geertz and Thomas Kuhn, two of the most frequently invoked theorists among subsequent practitioners of ideological literary criticism. "Personality within a culture," Herbert writes, "coalesces about the scheme of basic attitudes which the culture mediates to every newborn in making him a member of his society. . . . Accepted conventions of thought and action reach into the individual and establish the terms on which he must achieve whatever individuality is to be distinctively his own" (3-4). Herbert's study is animated by a sense of the reciprocality of text and context that has now become de rigeur in the aftermath of the New Historicism.

And yet, one of the lessons of ideological literary criticism is that every act of reading or writing must be contextualized, and I am struck, reading Moby-Dick and Calvinisim in 2008 about the difference between its cultural context and my own. Indeed, I wonder whether the meaning of Herbert's suggestion that Melville "addresses us directly" hasn't changed in the thirty years since Herbert wrote those words: is it possible that the United States circa 2007 has more in common with Melville's time than it did in 1978?

In 1977, there was a Democratic president in office and social scientists fretted about what Christopher Lasch called the "culture of narcissism." Herbert writes with the implicit understanding that "the theocentric interpretation of moral experience has been superseded," but urges his reader not to underestimate the importance of religious thought.

Three decades later, however, theocentrism seems to be enjoying a renaissance in the United States, with a Republican president in office who counts himself among the ranks of born-again Christians. By all accounts, George W. Bush was able to win re-election in 2004 because he managed to turn out a sufficient number of voters from the religious right to make the difference. In the aftermath of the election, the Economist, observing American politics from across the Atlantic, wrote that "the conservative rural red-neck Calvinist vote has captured America. A plurality of voters, emerging from poll booths, said that the most important issue in the campaign had been 'moral values'. It was not, it seemed, Iraq or the economy. And eight out of ten of these moralists voted for George Bush" ("The triumph of the religious right," 13 November 2004). Ten weeks later, U.S. News and World Report would call Bush's second inauguration "a day for the true believers -- the social conservatives, Christian activists, foreign-policy hawks, and, of course, George W. Bush himself" (20 January 2005).

Reading Herbert's monograph in this cultural context reinforces my sense that Moby-Dick was an emergent text in 1851 and is an emergent text today in 2008 -- in both cases because of its links to cosmopolitanism.

Moby-Dick and Me

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:25:43 -0500

When I was in graduate school, my advisor, Sacvan Bercovitch, used to say proudly that he counted among his students one from the oldest religion in the world (Zoroastrianism) and one from the newest (Mormonism) .

Full disclosure: my father is a Parsi, and I had a navjote ceremony when I was in the third grade, making me -- officially -- a Zoroastrian.

We had trouble finding someone from the priest class to perform the navjote ceremony, however, because my mother was a Filipino and a Christian -- a Protestant, oddly enough, my grandmother having converted to a Pentecostal sect before my mother's birth. My parents met at the International House at Columbia University, my father coming from Pakistan to study mathematical statistics, my mother from the Philippines to study literature and drama.

We weren't religious at home, though we did celebrate Christmas and made it a point to attend the Christmas eve services at Riverside Church in New York, a few blocks up the street from where we lived. My mother sometimes liked to attend Easter services there as well. It was always assumed that I would become a Zoroastrian, as my mother explained it, so that I could keep my options open. I could convert to Christianity but not to Zoroastrianism later, because Zoroastrianism didn't accept converts.

But, when the time came during third grade for the ceremony to be performed, we couldn't find a priest. We kept hearing excuses along the lines of "I would do it, but my mother-in-law is very old-fashioned." Finally, we managed to secure the services of a priest from Bombay who was traveling in the U.S. and spending some time in New York. Four years later, we had to go to London to have my sister's ceremony done.

It was an early lesson in the dynamics of culture, though it would take me years to recognize it: my parents' marriage was an emblem of cosmopolitan cultural mixing, while the priests' belief in the importance of cultural purity might serve as an emblem of all the forces that are arrayed against cosmopolitanism.

When I was growing up, strangers would ask me, "Where are you from?" and I'd say, "New York" or "the upper West Side." They'd look vaguely disappointed and then say, "No, I meant what's your background." I wasn't really being disingenuous, though I was well aware what the first question really meant. It's just that I never particularly identified with either of my parents' cultural traditions. We spoke English at home, and my parents had gradually lost their fluency in the mother tongues (Gujarati and Tagalog, respectively). What I identified with was being mixed and being able to slip from one cultural context to another. To my Parsi relatives, I looked Filipino; to my Filipino relatives, I looked "bumbai"; and to my classmates -- well, on the rare occasions when someone wanted to launch a racial slur, the result was usually a lame attempt to insult me as if I were Puerto Rican.

So I suppose it's somewhat predictable that in recent years I have chosen to work on what I call "emergent literatures" -- literatures that express marginalized cultural identities -- and found myself increasingly interested in theories of cosmopolitanism. And that I've been fascinated for the past fifteen years with a text that combines the Zoroastrian and Christian traditions -- Moby-Dick.

I'll be writing a lot about Moby-Dick here in the coming months, as I teach my Conversations of the West class again this fall and serve as an adviser for Ric Burns's new documentary, Into the Deep: America, Whaling, and the World.

[The image above is called The Voyage of the Pequod from the book Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1956) by Everett Henry (1893-1961). Courtesy of the Geography & Map Division of the Library of Congress. Click here to see their page about it.]

The Fate of Black Politics

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:50:49 -0500

In my post on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s critique of multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, I wondered what Schlesinger would have thought about the meaning of Barack's candidacy. Is it possible, I asked, that the election of Barack would have a similar effect on the self-esteem of Africans Americans that the election of Kennedy had on Catholics?

The lead story by Matt Bai in today's New York Times Magazine offers some thoughts on precisely that question. Bai, a white reporter, interviewers a number of black politicians, both veterans of the Civil Rights movement like House majority whip James Clyburn and Representative Charles Rangel, and younger politicians like Cory Booker, the 39-year-old mayor of Newark, and Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter. The article registers the discomfort of being a white reporter asking black politicians why they did or did not feel drawn to Obama's candidacy.

Bai is particularly interested in why older politicians like Clyburn and Rangel supported Hillary Clinton. Bai writes:

For a lot of younger African-Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama's candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle -- to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream.

This is precisely what Schlesinger's analysis of ethnicity would suggest about the fate of African-American cultural identity, assuming that the dynamics of race in the United States are more similar to the dynamics of ethnicity than not. For Michael Nutter, who supported Clinton, "not supporting Obama's candidacy marked a kind of progress, too." According to Bai, "you could argue that it was Nutter -- and not those black politicians who embraced Obama because they so closely identified with his racial experience -- who represented the truest embodiment of Obama-ism" -- a post-racial politics.

Bai suggests that there is another way that Obama's election might spell the end of Black politics as we have known them. According to Bai, some black leaders worry that an Obama presidency might mean "the precipitous decline of black influence," because he would be "closely watched for signs of parochialism or racial resentment" and might therefore "have less maneuvering room to champion spending on the urban poor, say, or to challenge racial injustice."

Only time will tell, but I persist in thinking that the election of Obama would be the sign of a new era in American politics, the new beginning that I and so many others hoped would arrive with Bill Clinton's presidency but that failed to materialize.

The symbolism may be heavy handed, but I think it's grand that Obama will officially become the Democratic nominee on August 28, the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Mystery Solved

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:09:11 -0500

With the help of Bill over at the LivingDot helpdesk, I have managed to fix the problem with the feed from ahistoryofnewyork.com.

Bill reported that when he tried to access the feed, he received an error message: "An invalid character was found in text content."

At first, I didn't know how to reproduce the error, so I scanned the entries since August 8 for anything that might look like an invalid character. I made a few changes, but nothing helped. Then I tried to recreate the feed widget with Feeds.App Lite, and the process failed. I was sent over to feedvalidator.org, which identified the word in the entry "FringeNYC" that was causing the problem. It turned out to be the word "Tuesday," which must have contained some kind of hidden character that wasn't showing up on my screen. So I deleted "Tuesday," rewrote "Tuesday," saved the post and -- voila! -- everything is working again.

So if you're having trouble with illegal content in your feeds, use feedvalidator.org to isolate the problem. Thanks again, Bill!

Movable Type Mystery

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 08:50:23 -0500

For reasons that remain mysterious, the listing of recent posts from "Patell and Waterman's History of New York" (ahistoryofnewyork.com) disappeared from my sidebar after I republished some pages last night. The listing was created using the plugin Feeds.App Lite, which comes with installations of Movable Type 4. I'd been thinking of upgrading to a paid version of Feeds.App so that I can list the authors of each post, but I don't think I'll do that until I figure out what's wrong with the widget I created.

With luck or perhaps a flash of insight, I'll be able to get it working again soon. In the meantime, I'll just note that the last post concerned Herman Melville and his father's description of him as "n honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker."

Lego Computer DIY

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:54:13 -0500

Here is a project that brings together two of my hobbies: building computers and assembling Lego creations. Well, Lego assembly is really my sons' interest, but I seem to spend an awful lot of time doing it with my older son and for my younger son. I found the project via Engadget.com. It's a mini-ITX computer with a case built exclusively of Lego parts!

This Lego Computer is the brainchild of Luke Anderson, a computer science major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has thoughtfully provided both an account of the project and complete instructions under a Creative Commons license on his blog. He used the MLCAD program to design the case and order the parts from various sellers at Bricklink.com.

Here's a YouTube video of Luke assembling the case. It's fun to watch even if you have no interest in either building computers or building with Legos.

Verizon DSL and Actiontec Modem/Router

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:47:12 -0500

My father has Verizon DSL service and an Actiontec GT704-WGV DSL Wireless Gateway, a modem/router customized for Verizon. The setup recently gave him some trouble. Read on if you have a similar setup and want to know how the problems were solved.

August Augury?

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:13:29 -0500

Let's hope not, Mets fans. But the past three days bode ill for the future of the season.

On the field, the Mets had a fabulous month of July. They went 18-8, including a 10-game winning streak from July 5th to July 17th that vaulted them back into contention and put them, briefly, into first place. The streak was their longest in 17 years, the longest this year in the NL, and tied with Minnesota for the longest this year in the majors. Jose Reyes tied for the major-league lead in hits for the month with 39 and was tied for the most triples with 4. Fernando Tatis, given the chance to play regularly with the injuries to Moises Alou and Ryan Church, led the majors with a .397 batting average for the month. Carlos Delgado went on a tear at the plate and returned to the clean-up spot. Oliver Perez led the majors with a 1.38 ERA for the month. More details about the Mets' performance for the month are available in the the MLB "Gameday Press Pass" for August 1.

Off the field, however, things didn't go so well. Ryan Church continued to suffer from the effects of post-concussion syndrome. Moises Alou tore a hamstring and was lost for the season, with retirement a stron possibility. Pedro Martinez's father passed away. And Omar Minaya failed to make any deals by the non-waiver trading deadline of July 31 to bolster some of the team's weakenesses.

The first three days of August have borne out the seriousness of those weaknesses. Minaya was in the market for a corner outfielder but failed to land ex-Met Xavier Nady, who went to the Yankees from the Pirates. Now the mets are platooning two rookies, Nick Evans and Daniel Murphy, in left field, with Endy Chavez returning to his role as the fourth outfielder and lead bench player.

Probably more significantly, Minaya was interested in upgrading his bullpen, after closer Billy Wagner had an MRI and had to miss a day and Duaner Sanchez failed miserably as his understudy, in what turned out to be a waste of eight superb innings from Johan Santana and a come-from-behind Phillies win in the ninth inning (July 22). But July 31 came and went with no help for the bullpen.

And so what happens? The bullpen blows the first two games in August, both of the losses charged to Aaron Heilman, the second occurring after Wagner fails to hold a two-run lead in the ninth. And then, on August 3, the offense hints that it might have been playing over its head during the previous month and fails to score any runs. All this to the Houston Astros, who -- even with the sweep of the Mets -- are four games under .500 and 13 games behind the Cubs. Meanwhile, John Maine has been put on the disabled list, and Wagner may follow him, pending the results of another MRI.

Just when when we were ready to think that the team had finally put last year's choke behind them . . .

All the Way from Shanghai

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:52:22 -0500

There's a new laptop waiting for me in my mailroom, and this one is a tablet. Even though I'm still quite fond of the Inspiron 700m that I've used for the past three years, I've decided to make the move to Windows Vista: my desktop PC dual-boots Vista and XP, but I've recently made Vista the primary operating system. The 700m isn't quite up to the task of running Vista. It has a single-core Centrino processor, and its graphics are comparatively weak:
they lag behind even my wife's old Latitude D610 and won't play my son's Lego Star Wars game. I suspect that the machine won't be up to the video editing that I want to be able to do on a notebook in the coming months.

I've had my eye on tablet pcs for the past couple of years, and two of my colleagues have used them: one swears by them, the other threw up her hands in disgust and bought something more conventional after a year. My handwriting is terrible, so I hate taking notes on pads of paper, but I also don't like clicking on a keyboard when I'm attending meetings or listening to lectures. Plus I'm trying to decrease the amount of paper in my life: I've been scanning documents like crazy overt the past few months, and I'm subscribing to an increasing number of digital publications. I'm hoping that the tablet's portrait orientation will make it more fun to read digital magazines and perhaps also lead me to print out drafts of manuscripts less frequently.

I was disappointed that Dell hasn't seen fit to release a consumer-oriented tablet yet: at two grand, their Latitude tablet is priced for corporations and is more than I want to spend on a machine that I'll be dragging around. Then I read a piece on my favorite tech blog, Engadget, about the Hewlett-Packard tx2500z Tablet, which the company bills as an "entertainment notebook." The tx2500z tablet runs on an AMD dual-core processor with ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics, and it feature both passive and active touchscreen capabilities, meaning that you can use a finger to navigate your way around but also use a pen for notetaking and handwriting recognition. I took a look at preconfigured model being offered by Circuit City. As some online reviews have suggested, the screen appears a little washed-out compared to a standard laptop as a result of the passive digitizer. It's certainly not as vivid as my current laptop, but it seemed quite usable.

When I discovered an online coupon from HP that offered $500 off a customized tx2500z priced above $1399, I decided to go for it. I placed an order on July 19 for a system with the following specs: AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor ZM-80 (2.1 GHz); 12.1" diagonal WXGA High-Definition HP BrightView Widescreen (1280 x 800) with Integrated Touch-screen; 3GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm); 320 Gb SATA hard drive; ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics; HP "Echo" Imprint Finish; Microphone; Webcam; Fingerprint Reader; Wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g/n; Bluetooth; LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-RW with Double Layer Support; 8-Cell Lithium Ion Battery; Vista Home Premium SP1 with System Recovery DVD; and Microsoft(R) Works 9.0.

According to my confirmation e-mail, the order was sent to the factory and was expected to ship by July 31. Then, lo and behold, I received an e-mail on July 25, just as my famiy and I were leaving for a week of vacation, that my order had shipped. When I clicked on Fed Ex's tracking link, I discovered that it was shipping from "Shanghai, CN." It was fun tracking its progress. The tablet was in Anchorage, Alaska, the next day and Memphis, Tennessee, at noon on July 27. It arrived in Newark that evening and was in my mailroom before 9:00 a.m. on July 28.

I'm looking forward to testing it out on my return to the city this weekend and will post some first impressions then.

[Image source: tabletpcreview.com]

Marvin the Martian

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:30:53 -0500

Sixty years ago today, Marvin the Martin made his debut on the Looney Tunes episode "Haredevil Hare." As a child, Marvin was my second-favorite among Bugs Bunny's nemeses, after (of course) the Tasmanian Devil.

Mel Blanc would change his vocal characterization of Marvin over time. In my mind's ear, he will always sound the way he does in "Mad as a Mars Hare" (1963), the episode in which he utters his classic remark (after getting hit by a rocket from Earth), "I'm not angry. Just terribly, terribly hurt."

As "Mars Hare" opens, we find Marvin looking through a telescope: "Hmm, yes. Very curious. Very interesting. I do so enjoy observing the flora and fauna of that tiny planet. I think Man is the most interesting insect on earth, don't you?" He adjusts the telescope and then says: "There is a growing tendency to think of man as a rational thinking being, which is absurd. There is simply no evidence of any intelligence on the earth."

I find myself thinking something similar every morning when I open The New York Times. This morning, for example, we find an article on the front page of the business section entitled "Oil Survey Says Artic Has Riches." Here we learn that, with the melting of the ice caps brought about by global warming, areas that "were once considered too harsh to explore" are now accessible, and "a race has begun among Arctic nations, including the United States, Russia, and Canada, for control of these resources." The survey suggests that "the Arctic may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil reserves, and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This would amount to 13 percent of the world's total undiscovered oil and about 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas."

Hmmm: burning oil produces carbon and leads to global warming; global warming makes Arctic oil more available, which will lead to more burning of oil -- and more global warming. Oh well, let's hope the energy companies will be more interested in the natural gas than in the oil. (Well, one can hope, right?)

You can find "Haredevil Hare" on disc 3 of The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One. Unfortunately, "Mad as a Mars Hare" doesn't seem to be available on DVD at the moment, though it was released as part of a VHS collection entitled "Marvin the Martian: 50 Years on Earth." You can also find it on YouTube:

A transcript of "Mad as a March Hare" is available at http://www.theclassictoons.com.

New Sidebar Feature

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:40:44 -0500

I've written a number of posts during the past week at my other blog, Patell and Waterman's History of New York (ahistoryofnewyork.com), a collaborative project with my colleague Bryan Waterman.

So I've added a feature that I'm calling "The Past Week at ahistoryofnewyork.com" at the top of the left-hand column of the sidebar. It'll display the titles of the last seven posts on the blog in the form of clickable links. We've resolved to put up a new post each day, so showing the last seven posts should approximate the previous seven days' work.

Click the continuation if you're a Movable Type 4 blogger and want to know how to include a similar feature on your blog.

Stick Bug R.I.P.

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:43:32 -0500

Another of our original stick bugs went toes up today. It had, however, fulfilled its biological imperative: we now have more baby stick insects than we can count easily. We're still not sure what to do with them once they start outgrowing their cage!

Taking Stock at the All-Star Break

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:43:06 -0500

In a previous post, I compared the fortunes of the Mets and the Yankees as the month of June began. The Mets were 27-27 and the Yankees were 28-27.

A lot has happened since then. At the time, I was looking forward to Joba Chamberlain's finally starting for the Yankees and to Pedro Martinez's finally returning to the Mets after nearly two months on the disabled list. As June began, the Yankees seemed to stumble: after Joba's first start, which last only 2.1 innings, the team's record was 28-30. Meanwhile, Pedro looked good in his first outing. Joba would eventually find his way, pitching better with each outing. Pedro, on the other hand, would lose his way, looking simply awful in his fourth game back, a 9-0 loss to the Yankees. He found his form again last Saturday against the Rockies, but left after 4+ innings with a slight groin strain. Ominous.

The Yankees started June in 4th place, one game above .500 and 5.5 games out of first in their division. At the All-Star break, they've improved to 5 games above .500 at 50-45, but they're 6 games out of first.

The Mets started June at .500 and 4 games out of first. Their sloppy play led to the firing of manager Willie Randolph and coaches Rick Peterson and Tom Nieto in the middle of the night after the first game of a Western swing. They continued their .500-calibre play for the beginning of Jerry Manuel's tenure as coach.

And then something happened to the Mets: the players loosened up off the field and tightened their play on the field, and the team reeled off nine wins in a row before the All-Star game. Carlos Delgado found his stroke, Mike Pelfrey found his control, and the reserves and part-time players (subbing for injured starters Ryan Church and Moises Alou) started providing timely hits and big defensive plays. At the break, the Mets are 51-44, 7 games above .500 and only half a game behind the Phillies. General Manager Omar Minaya's looking like a genius these days.

Despite the ugly 9-0 loss in the fifth game, the Mets ended up winning this year's Subway Series 4-2.

Meanwhile, Boston has finally overtaken Tampa Bay in the A.L. East., while the two Chicago teams remain atop their respective divisions.

What will the second half hold? Here's hoping that the baseball races remain close and scintillating -- and that the presidential race turns out to be anti-climactic, with Obama opening up a big lead.

What's that you say? McCain has closed the gap to a statistical dead heat according to the latest Newsweek poll? Nate Silver -- please explain!

Schlesinger and Obama

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:40:59 -0500

As I complete the revisions to my manuscript on emergent literatures for NYU Press, I've been rereading Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s critique of multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, originally published in 1992 and now in a second, revised edition (1998). Schlesinger criticizes what he refers to as the "cult of ethnicity," the idea that "America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups, that ethnicity is the defining experience for Americans, that ethnic ties are permanent and indelible, and that division into ethnic communities establishes the basic structure of American society and the basic meaning of American history" (20-21)

There's a lot to like in Schlesinger's book -- and a lot to critique as well -- and I'll be including a brief discussion of it in my emergent literatures book. One of the things that feels dated about the book is its preoccupation with Afrocentrism, a movement that has receded in importance in the ten years since the last edition of Schlesinger's book. His remark that twelve percent of American are black, and the felt pressure to correct injustices of past scholarship comes mostly on their behalf" becomes the subject of Nathan Glazer's We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1998), which argues that multiculturalism as an educational movement owes its power to the interest that African American intellectuals and educators have taken in it as a way of addressing the social and educational problems that blacks in America still face.

Schlesinger is no apologist for white resentment: although he believes firmly in the importance of "America" as an ideal, he also believes that the diversity of the United States is one of its chief characteristics and greatest strengths. He just doesn't want diversity to become fetishized in a way that prevents Americans from thinking of themselves as Americans first and representatives of some other group -- racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, or whatever -- second.

One remark in particular caught my eye: Schlesinger described the election of an "Irish Catholic" -- John F. Kennedy -- to the presidency of the United States in 1960 as "a signal of ultimate acceptance that relieved Irish-Americans of the need for ethnic cheerleading" (62).

Unfortunately, Schlesinger passed away in February of last year: he didn't live to see Barack Obama become the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency. I wonder what he would have thought about the meaning of Barack's candidacy. Is it possible that the election of Barack would have a similar effect on the self-esteem of Africans Americans that the election of Kennedy had on Catholics? Or is the matter of race too important and divisive to make the cases similar? The "Catholics" that Schlesinger seems to have on his mind in the book are white Catholics.

Only time will tell, but it's worth pondering.