The Non-national Subject in The Language of Baklava and An American Brat

Abstract

In the different notions of Americanness that circulated at the turn of the twentieth century, there were tensions between maintaining ethnic identifications, valorizing individualism and liberty as eminent elements of an American national consciousness, as well as a third definition of America as a transnationality. James Bryce holds, in The American Commonwealth (1888), that “individu-alism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions” (419–420). Individualism and freedom are not only fundamental in definitions of Americanism but also the core principles of national identification that unite Americans, as opposed to unity based on shared ethnic/religious roots.¹ However, Randolph Bourne, in “Trans-national America” (1916), argues against narrowing the conception of Americanness to the Anglo-Saxon traditions. Bourne holds that, “America is coming to be, not a nationality but a transnationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors” (121). The escalation of different waves of immigrants to the United States from the late nineteenth century heightened the feeling of urgency to find an ideal that could function as the ground for American national identification; individualism served that goal.