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Surrogate Americans: Masculinity, Masquerade, and the Formation of a National Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
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Extract

This essay explores the layered, ideologically contradictory, and psychologically overdetermined ways national identities take form. The setting is the birth of the new American nation, the opening moments of George Washington's first administration. As European Americans from Benjamin Franklin to D. W. Griffith tell us, this is a white man's story about his “Black … and Tawney …” (br)others (Franklin, qtd. in Ferguson 169).

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 119 , Issue 5 , October 2004 , pp. 1325 - 1335
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2004

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