The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of the social, the imaginary is ideally suited to chart the consequences of the transnational turn in American studies. Leading scholars in the field from the United States and Europe address the literary, social, and political dimensions of the imaginary, providing a methodological and theoretical groundwork for American studies scholarship in the transnational era and opening new arenas for conceptualizing formations of imaginary belonging and subjectivity. This important state-of-the-field collection will appeal to a broad constituency of humanists working to overcome methodological nationalism. The Imaginary and Its Worlds: An Introduction • LITERARY IMAGINARIES • Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America - Ramón Saldívar • The Necessary Fragmentation of the (U.S.) Literary-Cultural Imaginary - Lawrence Buell • Imaginaries of American Modernism - Heinz Ickstadt • SOCIAL IMAGINARIES • William James versus Charles Taylor: Philosophy of Religion and the Confines of the Social and Cultural Imaginaries - Herwig Friedl • The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community: A Perspective of Figurational Sociology on the Cultural Imaginary - Christa Buschendorf • Russia’s Californio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman’s Pacific - Lene Johannessen • Form Games: Staging Life in the Systems Epoch - Mark Seltzer • POLITICAL IMAGINARIES • Real Toads - Walter Benn Michaels • Obama Unwound: The Romanticism of Victory and the Defeat of Compromise - Christopher Newfield • Barack Obama’s Orphic Mysteries - Donald E. Pease • Coda. The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer - Winfried Fluck • Contributors • Index

In a groundbreaking work of “New Americanist” studies, John R. Eperjesi explores the cultural and economic formation of the Unites States relationship to China and the Pacific Rim in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eperjesi examines a variety of texts to explore the emergence of what Rob Wilson has termed the “American Pacific.” Eperjesi shows how works ranging from Frank Norris’ The Octopus to the Journal of the American Asiatic Association, from the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason to the travel writings of Jack and Charmain London, and from Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—and the cultural dynamics that produced them—helped construct the myth of the American Pacific. By construing the Pacific Rim as a unified region binding together the territorial United States with the areas of Asia and the Pacific, he also demonstrates that the logic of the imperialist imaginary suggested it was not only proper but even incumbent upon the United States to exercise both political and economic influence in the region. As Donald E. Pease notes in his foreword, “by reading foreign policy and economic policy as literature, and by reconceptualizing works of American literature as extenuations of foreign policy and economic theory,” Eperjesi makes a significant contribution to studies of American imperialism.

In the Name of the Mother examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. Samuele Pardini links African American literature to the Mediterranean tradition of the Italian immigrants and examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. This volume emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities.

Dartmouth College began life as an Indian school, a pretense that has since been abandoned. Still, the institution has a unique, if complicated, relationship with Native Americans and their history. Beginning with Samson Occom’s role as the first “development officer” of the college, Colin G. Calloway tells the entire, complex story of Dartmouth’s historical and ongoing relationship with Native Americans. Calloway recounts the struggles and achievements of Indian attendees and the history of Dartmouth alumni’s involvements with American Indian affairs. He also covers more recent developments, such as the mascot controversies, the emergence of an active Native American student organization, and the partial fulfillment of a promise deferred. This is a fascinating picture of an elite American institution and its troubled relationship— at times compassionate, at times conflicted—with Indians and Native American culture.

This book was designed as a collaborative effort to satisfy a long-felt need to pull together many important but separate inquiries into the nature and impact of inequality in colonial and revolutionary America. It also honors the scholarship of Gary Nash, who has contributed much of the leading work in this field. The 15 contributors, who constitute a Who's Who of those who have made important discoveries and reinterpretations of this issue, include Mary Beth Norton on women's legal inequality in early America; Neal Salisbury on Puritan missionaries and Native Americans; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on elite and poor women's work in early Boston; Peter Wood and Philip Morgan on early American slavery; as well as Gary Nash himself writing on Indian/white history. This book is a vital contribution to American self-understanding and to historical analysis.

For years, opponents of outsourcing have argued that offshoring American jobs destroys our local industries, lays waste to American job creation, and gives foreigners the good jobs and income that would otherwise remain on our shores. Yet few Americans realize that a parallel dynamic is occurring in the healthcare sector—previously one of the most consistent sources of stable, dependable living-wage jobs in the entire nation. Instead of outsourcing high-paying jobs overseas—as the manufacturing and service sectors do—hospitals and other healthcare companies insource healthcare labor from developing countries, giving the jobs to people who are willing to accept lower pay and worse working conditions than U.S. healthcare workers. As Dr. Tulenko shows, insourcing has caused tens of thousands of high-paying local jobs in the healthcare sector to effectively vanish from the reach of U.S. citizens, weakened the healthcare systems of developing nations, and constricted the U.S. health professional education system. She warns Americans about what she’s seeing—a stunning story they’re scarcely aware of, which impacts all of us directly and measurably—and describes how to create better American health professional education, more high-paying healthcare jobs, and improved health for the poor in the developing world.

Invisible Masters rewrites the familiar narrative of the relation between Puritan religious culture and New England’s economic culture as a history of the primary discourse that connected them: service. The understanding early Puritans had of themselves as God’s servants and earthly masters was shaped by their immersion in an Atlantic culture of service and the worldly pressures and opportunities generated by New England’s particular place in it. Concepts of spiritual service and mastery determined Puritan views of the men, women, and children who were servants and slaves in that world. So, too, did these concepts shape the experience of family, labor, law, and economy for those men, women, and children—the very bedrock of their lives. This strikingly original look at Puritan culture will appeal to a wide range of Americanists and historians.