ABSTRACT
In September 1988,1 was involved with a conference at my home institution on Liberal Arts Education in the Late Twentieth Century. The speakers at the three-day conference mostly represented an emerging mainstream-left consensus on issues such as pluralization of canons and curricula. I participated in the conference in two ways. On the second day, Skip Gates and I were on a panel about emerging canons, where I gave a talk about antihomophobic pedagogy and the difficult question of defining a gay canon. And on the last day, in the round-up discussion period that concluded the conference, I tried to articulate a serious unease that I had had with the whole proceeding. What was disturbing me then was the way the term “America” had come, unbidden and unremarked, to occupy a definitional center for almost every single one of the papers, and for the conference as a whole, in a way that no one could even seem to make visible enough to question. That the conference, whose title did not specify “America” and whose topic was by no means necessarily circum-
scribed by any boundaries of the national, had lined up so neatly in the current train of contestations about what exclusive or inclusive, white or non-white, gay or straight, homogeneous or heterogeneous visions are to constitute a national culture, a national identity, about where we are to look for the special American values-be they good or bad-of America and American education, seemed a striking datum to the very degree that it was taken for granted. It seemed to me that to the social archaeologist of the future, a conference like this one might figure not most saliently as an agonistic moment in the history of the liberal arts, nor as the nexus of a conflict between a political left and a political right, but as a moment of the heavy, incontestable re-engraving of nationalism-or more accurately, of what Benedict Anderson refers to as “nation-ness”1-as the invisible outline whose unquestioned boundaries could only be strengthened by the apparent fierceness of the battles fought in its name and on its ground. Why, I asked at that final session, when we talk about all the very disparate things we have been talking about, do we always seem to find-do we always seem to fail to notice or query-that we are also talking about, and ratifying-by appealing back to different versions of it to ratify usthe primary realness of, of all imaginary things in the world, “America”?
