Given his reputation as the impeccably patrician high priest of Art, Henry James would have seemed a prime target for demolition in the regime of multiculturalism that began in the 1980s. It sought to redefine literary criticism as cultural studies and to create an intellectual climate generally skeptical of both aesthetic value and canonical white male elitists. As a novelist said to regard Art as a saving consolation amid the vulgarity of modernity, Henry James would seem doubly damned. Yet his critical fortunes have held steady in the 1990s. Moreover, by and large, he has avoided serving as a nostalgic refuge for those in flight from the multicultural dispensation of race, class, and gender. Instead, cultural studies has in many ways been a tonic, stimulating revisionary readings that set aside his image as genteel aesthete to reveal the depth and originality of James's response to the social and cultural upheavals that marked his fin de siecle transatlantic world. Various aspects of the Jamesian sensibility and a number of works in his oeuvre can be, and have been, enlisted to argue for his continued currency. Here I examine only one of these aspects and works - James the cultural analyst, author of The American Scene - and argue that it has something especially important to contribute to ongoing contemporary debates about ethnicity, pluralism, and what it means to be an American in our era of identity politics.