The Mexican-American war and Whitman's "Song of myself": A foundational borderline fantasy

Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 385-401

  Pease, Donald ^a  

^a DARTMOUTH COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 79958985609     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (27)

1. Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).
2. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Journalism, Vol. 1: 1834-1846, ed. Herbert Bergman, Douglas A. Noverr, and Edward J. Recchia (New York: Peter Lang, 1998).
3. "Surrender and Massacre at Goliad," in Thom Hatch, Encylopedia of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999), 99-106.
4. Judith Butler discusses U.S. norms of dominance withan account of the ways in which those norms are experienced most profoundly at the instant of their loss: "What kind of loss is this? It is the loss of the prerogative, only and always to be the one who transgresses the sovereign boundaries of other states, but never in the position of having one's own boundaries transgressed" (Precarious Life [New York: Verso, 2004], 39).
5. Throughout these notes, I have associated Butler's reflections on the relationship between matters of U.S. sovereignty at the time of the U.S. war in Iraq withWhitman's editorials at the time of the U.S.-Mexican War so as to follow Walter Benjamin's dictum that the task of the critic is "to blast a specifi c era out of the homogeneous course of history" and to "grasp ... the constellation which his own era has formed witha earlier one" ("Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt [New York:Schocken, 1968], 263).
6. Butler discusses this condition of primary vulnerability within the context of prisoner of war camps in the chapter "Violence, Mourning, Politics" of Precarious Life, 19-49.
7. Discussion and quotations in this paragraph from "Atrocities Committed during the Texas Revolution," in Hatch, Encylopedia of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, 41-42.
8. For a splendid account of Tejanos's perspectives on the United States' violation of Mexico's sovereignty, see Arnoldo DeLeon, "Tejanos and the Texas War for Independence: Historiography's Judgment," New Mexico Historical Review 61 (April 1986), 137-46.
9. Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Journalism, 1:349.
10. "Whose lives count as grievable lives? What makes for a grievable life?" Judith Butler correlates these questions withreflections on Foucault's association of the state's biopolitical power withthe decision over who will it let live and let die (Precarious Life, 20-21).
11. "If a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worThnotice. It is already the unburied, if not the unburiable" (Butler, Precarious Life, 34).
12. Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Journalism, 1:354.
13. "When the United States acts, it establishes a conception of what it means to act as an American, establishes a norm by which that subject might be known. In recent months a subject has been instated at the national level, a sovereign and extra-legal subject, a violent and self-centered subject; its violence constitutes the building of a subject that seeks to restore and maintain its mastery through the systematic destruction of its multilateral relations, its ties to the international community" (Butler, Precarious Life, 34).
14. Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Journalism, 1:366-67.
15. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8, 11.
16. Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Journalism, 1:359.
17. On a discussion of the ways in which Whitman's various accounts of these events served his performing the role of cultural diplomat, see Kirsten Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Trans-American Origins of Latino Culture (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2002), 121-35.
18. Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 226-27.
19. "Surrender and Massacre at Goliad," in Hatch, Encylopedia of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, 99-106.
20. For discussions of these distinctions, see Fernando Alegria, Walt Whitman en HispanoAmerica (Mexico City: Ediciones Studium, 1954).
21. Mauricio Gonzalez Garza's notorious 1970s exposé of Whitman (Walt Whitman: Racista, Imperialista, Antimexicano [Mexico City: Malaga Collection, 1971]).
22. For a discussion of the signifi cance of this deactivated memory to the historical transmission of the events that took place there, see DeLeon, "Tejanos and the Texas War for Independence.".
23. Gonzalez Garza describes Whitman's predatory imperial memory in Walt Whitman: Racista, Imperialista, Antimexicano.
24. Philip Fisher discusses the signifi cance of these passages in the chapter "Democratic Social Space" in Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 82-86.
25. Butler evokes a sense of the inequities in what she calls the normative conditions of vulnerability withthe following unaswered question: "Could the experience of a dislocation of fi rst World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that vulnerability is distributed globally?" (Precarious Life, 30).
26. Enrique Dussel writes movingly about the inherently nondemocratic dimension of communicative acts that are otherwise construed as rational and noncoercive: "There is no liberation without rationality, but there is no critical rationality without accepting the interpellation of the excluded, or this would inadvertently be only the rationality of domination" (The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Eduardo Mendieta [Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1996], 36).
27. For a discussion of the ways in which this exclusion guarantees the rationality of the narrative community, see Dussel, Underside of Modernity, 28-29.