ABSTRACT
The United States of America is arguably the most racially and religiously diverse nation in modern history. As such, the history of identity formation in the United States is instructive, given that ‘problems’ associated with racial and religious mixing have only intensified across the globe. ‘The United States is not so much a model for the world’, David Hollinger contends, ‘as an archive of experience on which the world can draw critically’ (Hollinger 2006: xxii). Although American identity was exclusive to white Protestantism for much of the nation’s history, racial and religious ‘others’ continually pushed at the boundaries of Americanism, expanding the circle of ‘we’ to include previously marginalized minorities. And yet, ironically, as American identity became more capacious – more cosmopolitan – solidarity became more problematic, to the degree that the last few decades are now referred to as an ‘age of fracture’ (Rodgers 2011). This chapter seeks to explain this paradoxical historical development by rooting the history of American identity formation in relation to three powerful historical forces that have also reshaped the United States: (1) the pressures of diasporic identity formation; (2) the powerful steadfastness of American conservatism; and (3) the splintering tendencies of postmodernism, or the cultural and intellectual representations of late-twentieth-century capitalism.
