This document discusses the concept of American identity and culture through examining various texts and historical events. It analyzes how Christopher Columbus has become a foundational myth for American identity formation. It also summarizes The Great Gatsby and how it explores tensions between individualism and community in American identity. Finally, it discusses counter-cultural voices that sought to reclaim and redefine American ideals and identity in the 1960s.

1. NEW BEGINNING:
AMERICAN CULTURE AND
IDENTITY
E. Ngestirosa Endang Woro Kasih, M.A.
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2. INTRODUCTION
• Identity marks the conjuncture of our past with the social,
cultural and economic relations we live within. (Rutherford
1990: 19)
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3. INTRODUCTION
• USA is a place where different identities mix and collide, an assemblage, a multiplicity,
constantly producing and reproducing new selves and transforming old ones and,
therefore, cannot claim to possess a single, closed identity with a specific set of values.
• America has to be interpreted or ‘read’ as a complex, multifaceted text with a rich array of
different characters and events, within which exist many contesting voices telling various
and different stories
• Campbell, Neil; Kean, Alasdair. (2015). American Cultural Studies (p. 28). Taylor and Francis.
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4. INTRODUCTION
• E pluribus unum – out of many, one – is a more controversial
slogan for America today, for it suggests, on one level, the
integration, of melting the parts into a universal whole, when in
may prefer to remain distinct and unmelted or multiply attached
cultures, such as Mexican and American.
• Goal : This chapter charts the movements of dreaming and
the USA and the complex relations between them.
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5. READING COLUMBUS
• The story of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) and his arrival in the Americas holds a pivotal
place in an American foundational mythology that stages the ‘discovery’ and the subsequent
settlement and colonization of the ‘new world’ in prophetic ways.
• Paradox - Why Columbus, who never set foot on the land that would later become the United
States and who never knew in his lifetime that in 1492 he had not landed in Asia has been
considered one of the founding figures of the US-American nation.
• Paul, Heike. (2014). The Myths That Made America. (p. 43-44). Verlag: Bielefeld.
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6. READING COLUMBUS
• Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 in Genoa, Italy.
• He married Portuguese woman and died in 1506 from
an attack by natives.
• Columbus sailed for the country of Spain.
• Columbus went on four voyages in his lifetime.
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7. READING COLUMBUS
FIRST VOYAGE
• Columbus set sail on August 3, 1492.
• Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to pay for the first voyage in April of 1492.
• Columbus’s first expedition consisted of three ships and 89 men.
• The boats he took were the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
• The Santa Maria was about 100’ long. The Pinta and the Nina were about 50’ long.
• Columbus ended up in the islands below America, making him the first European
explorer to discover the “New World.”
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8. READING COLUMBUS
SECOND VOYAGE
• Columbus made his second voyage to Hispaniola in 1493.
• He took with him a large fleet of 17 ships with 1,500 colonists aboard.
• When he landed in Hispaniola, he discovered the old colony destroyed
by Natives. Because of this, Columbus founded a new colony.
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9. READING COLUMBUS
THIRD VOYAGE
• Columbus made his third voyage farther south to Trinidad and Venezuela in
1498.
• The purpose of this voyage was to transport convicts as colonists, because of
the bad reports on conditions in Hispaniola and because the novelty of the
New World was wearing off.
• After transporting the convicts, Columbus saw a new continent, but hurried
back to Hispaniola to check on his colony.
• Isabella and Ferdinand heard about the horrible conditions in the colony and
sent a ship to bring Columbus back to Spain in chains.
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10. READING COLUMBUS
FOURTH VOYAGE
• Columbus went to find a land entry to Asia and Japan in 1502.
• Halfway through his journey, Columbus stopped in Mexico
where he was attacked by Natives.
• During the attack, Columbus had to abandon two of his four
ships and return to Spain where he died.
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11. READING COLUMBUS
• Traditional mythology about Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the New World and the way in which it led to
the republican and democratic values embedded in the history of the United States may be traced
back to Joel Barlow’s epic Columbiad (1807) and Washington Irving’s A History of the Life and Voyages
of Christopher Columbus (1828).
• In the nineteenth century Columbus became widely adopted as the basis of many American place
names, and Columbus Day became part of the litany of national days of celebration.
• Columbus thus became integrated into Manifest Destiny, the belief that America’s progress was
divinely ordained.
.
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12. READING COLUMBUS
• Columbus is not only a foundational myth of the US – of course, he is at the center of much ‘old
world’ mythmaking about the ‘new’ – but also a European myth, perhaps even a global one;
and in the age of globalization he may take on new symbolic meanings.
• The Columbus myths enabled white Americans to find a beginning, to declare a courageous
opening to their ‘creation story’. It was part of the influential dream myth of origin so prevalent
in America. ‘America, said the founding documents, was the living incarnation of the search for a
common humanity … America declared itself as a dream … the microcosm, or prefiguration of
humanity’
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13. THE AMERICAN DREAM OF IDENTITY: THE
GREAT GATSBY (1925)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is aware both of the power of American dreams
and the problems of seeking them out in lived experience.
• The ideals of endless progress, self-creation, achievement and success – the mythicised dream
incorporated in the spirit of Columbus – are played out in the figure of Jay Gatsby as seen
through the eyes of Nick Carraway.
• The novel concerns itself with issues of identity and in particular with the temptation to believe
in a ‘dream’ which is manifested in Gatsby’s yearning for Daisy Buchanan, a woman he almost
married in the past, who encompasses ‘the endless desire to return to “lost origins”, to be one
again with the mother, to go back to the beginning’
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14. THE AMERICAN DREAM OF IDENTITY: THE
GREAT GATSBY (1925)
• The Great Gatsby’s fascination with the multiple identities of America, embodied in the figure of
Gatsby himself, are played out around the idea of the dream and the new beginning.
• The very ‘Americanness’ of Fitzgerald’s novel has much to do with its internal conflicts and
contradictions, as if within itself a whole drama of American uncertainty and division is played out.
• The Great Gatsby presents tension between stasis and the future is part of the web of contradictions
and conflicts that fill the novel and suggest an American identity wrestling with diversity and unity,
assimilation and separation, individualism and community, roots and routes, just as the self-made
man ‘Gatsby’ himself is simultaneously of the West and the East, Old World and New.
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15. • Fitzgerald clearly intends for Gatsby’s dream to be symbolic of the American Dream for
wealth and youth.
• Gatsby genuinely believes that if a person makes enough money and amasses a great
enough fortune, he can buy anything. He thinks his wealth can erase the last five years of
his and Daisy’s life and reunite them at the point at which he left her before he went
away to the war.
• In a similar fashion, all Americans have a tendency to believe that if they have enough
money, they can manipulate time, staying perpetually young, and buy their happiness
through materialistic spending.
THE AMERICAN DREAM OF IDENTITY: THE
GREAT GATSBY (1925)
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16. • Throughout the novel, there are many parties, a hallmark of the rich. But each festivity
ends in waste (the trash left behind by the guests) or violence (Myrtle’s broken nose and
subsequent accidental death.) Between the wealth of New York City and the fashionable
Egg Islands lies the Valley of Ashes, the symbol of the waste and corruption that
characterizes the wealthy.
• When Gatsby’s dream is crushed by Daisy’s refusal to forget the past or deny that she has
ever loved Tom, Fitzgerald is stating that the American Dream of wealth and beauty is just
as fragile. History has proven that view correct.
THE AMERICAN DREAM OF IDENTITY: THE
GREAT GATSBY (1925)
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17. • The sense of wonder of the first settlers in America quickly turned into an excessive
greed for more wealth. The ostentatious, wild lifestyle of the wealthy during the 1920s
was followed by the reality of the stock market crash and the Great Depression of the
1930s.
• Where there is great wealth, sadness and waste always seems to follow. The end
product is always a valley of ashes.
• In addition, Gatsby has always said that only by hard work and consistency, a man can be
wealthy and fullfiled. As we know, he turned to earn money from criminal activity.
THE AMERICAN DREAM OF IDENTITY: THE
GREAT GATSBY (1925)
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18. FIELDS OF DREAMS
• Phil Alden Robinson’s film Field of Dreams (1989) dwells on possibility, rekindling a sense of
wonder that the Reagan presidency had promised, but failed to deliver.
• In part, the film responds ambivalently to the so-called ‘culture wars’ debates of the 1980s and
1990s, in which issues of identity politics, multiculturalism and the representation of US history
came to the fore, often embedded in the looser exchanges and controversies over so-called
political correctness.
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19. THE SURFACE OF AN IDENTITY:
THE PAST AS PRESIDENTIAL DISCOURSE
• Presidential speech or the U.S. people is considered as the ideology.
• The Inaugural Address of President Bill Clinton in 1993 employed similar seasonal imagery to describe
his version of America’s new hope.
• After the Republican presidencies of Bush Senior and Reagan, Clinton, a Democrat, called for ‘the
mystery of American renewal’, ‘a new season of renewal’ to once again alter the country and
replenish the nation/land through the fundamental core myths of American culture. First there is the
belief in the capacity ‘to reinvent America’; second, to ‘define what it means to be an American’; and
third, to ‘begin anew with energy and hope, with faith and discipline’
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20. THE SURFACE OF AN IDENTITY:
THE PAST AS PRESIDENTIAL DISCOURSE
• Clinton’s speech, his story of America, ‘thickens, becomes vitrified, freezes into an eternal
reference meant to establish American identity’ by repeating the past, or the language of
the past, and seeking to apply it to the present.
• ‘Myth is speech stolen [from the past] and restored [to the present]’ and the images it
restores transform historical processes into apparently natural occurrences so that we fail
to read them as a motive, only as a reason
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21. THE SURFACE OF AN IDENTITY:
THE PAST AS PRESIDENTIAL DISCOURSE
President George W. Bush stated:
• The story of America is the story of expanding liberty: an ever-widening circle,
constantly growing to reach further and include more… . In our world, and here
at home, we will extend the frontiers of freedom… . Like generations before us,
we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom. This is the
everlasting dream of America and tonight, in this place, that dream is renewed.
(Bush 2004)
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22. COUNTER-CULTURAL DREAMS
• The radical criticism of the mainstream by the counter-cultures of the 1950s and 1960s is an
interesting example of how the embodiment of possibility in America lived on as part of a counter-
hegemonic alternative voice.
• Counter-cultural critics felt that the dream imagery had been hijacked by the corporate ‘organisation
man’ and the values of the new beginning turned into the slogans of the consumer culture and
presidential politics.
• There are some works from American writers which emerged as rebellious figures willing to criticise
and attack mainstream society, there is a determined effort to reclaim the identity of America as a
statement of possibility rather than production
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23. COUNTER-CULTURAL DREAMS
• Some writers who expresses their voices underlined the new form of America.
• ‘America will be discovered’ (Allen 1960: 321)
• Ginsberg and other artists: a renewal of form, a challenge to the stasis that seemed only to
serve the status quo of hegemony.
• Michael McClure: ‘we wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it … we wanted
voice and we wanted vision’ (1982: 12–13).
• The language recalls the mythic notion of new beginnings and celebrates the idealism of
America, not as an imperial power, a conqueror of native lands or an oppressor of
minorities, but as a place capable of change – make it new.
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24. COUNTER-CULTURAL DREAMS
• The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti called for ‘a rebirth of wonder’ and ‘for
someone to really discover America, emphasizing both the loss of spirit and the
failure in American life to realise the true potential of the place.
• The Port Huron Statement (1962): ‘the most authentically American expression
of a new radicalism’ (Sayres et al. 1984: 250), the counter-culture, voiced
familiar calls for ‘American values’, which had been lost as a generation was
‘maturing in complacency’, and demanded change.
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25. COUNTER-CULTURAL DREAMS
• The 1960s opened a dialogue with the stale imagery of the American Dream and sought to reinvent it
with hope and to enlarge it through inclusiveness, by ‘stressing the utopian aspects … as
distinguished from its economic aspects’ (Sayres et al. 1984: 249).
• Fredric Jameson argues that the 1960s in America were part of a wider global reaction to colonialism
involving those inner colonized of the first world – minorities, marginals, and women – who became
integral to a coming to self-consciousness of subject peoples.
• Groups excluded from early visions of the dream, and silenced by the processes of history, sought to
play some role in the rethinking of ideas of identity and nation.
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26. MULTIPLICITY, DIFFERENCE AND RE-VISION
• The French critic Gilles Deleuze argues that America is concerned with
deterritorialisation or the movement across lines and boundaries, unafraid to
flee to new lands or leave old ones behind.
• He writes of the American passion for departure, becoming, passage in its
creation of a New Earth.
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27. MULTIPLICITY, DIFFERENCE AND RE-VISION
• American identity is characterised by re-vision as a process of renewal: ‘Re-
vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text
from a new critical direction’ (Rich 1993: 167).
• The voices of people of colour, feminists and radicals coming from the margins
of American culture and beyond the USA altogether have caused the
‘assumptions’ to be examined and reviewed, but this is a process inherent in a
radical interpretation of the myth of new beginnings.
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