American Magnitude: Hemispheric Vision and Public Feeling in the United States
Autor Christa J. Olsonen Limba Engleză Paperback – 9 dec 2021
Winner, 2023 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award Winner, 2022 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award from the National Communication Association At a moment in US politics when racially motivated nationalism, shifting relations with Latin America, and anxiety over national futures intertwine, understanding the long history of American preoccupation with magnitude and how it underpins national identity is vitally important. In American Magnitude, Christa J. Olson tracks the visual history of US appeals to grandeur, import, and consequence (megethos), focusing on images that use the wider Americas to establish US character. Her sources—including lithographs from the US-Mexican War, pre–Civil War paintings of the Andes, photo essays of Machu Picchu, and WWII-era films promoting hemispheric unity—span from 1845 to 1950 but resonate into the present.
Olson demonstrates how those crafting the appeals that feed the US national imaginary—artists, scientists, journalists, diplomats, and others—have invited US audiences to view Latin America as a foil for the greatness of their own nation and encouraged white US publics in particular to see themselves as especially American among Americans. She reveals how each instance of visual rhetoric relies upon the eyes of others to instantiate its magnitude—and falters as some viewers look askance instead. The result is the possibility of a post-magnitude United States: neither great nor failed, but modest, partial, and imperfect.
Olson demonstrates how those crafting the appeals that feed the US national imaginary—artists, scientists, journalists, diplomats, and others—have invited US audiences to view Latin America as a foil for the greatness of their own nation and encouraged white US publics in particular to see themselves as especially American among Americans. She reveals how each instance of visual rhetoric relies upon the eyes of others to instantiate its magnitude—and falters as some viewers look askance instead. The result is the possibility of a post-magnitude United States: neither great nor failed, but modest, partial, and imperfect.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258118
ISBN-10: 0814258115
Pagini: 240
Ilustrații: 19 b&w illustrations
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.34 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814258115
Pagini: 240
Ilustrații: 19 b&w illustrations
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.34 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Olson’s skillful dissection of how visual images inspire feelings of Americanness is a powerful insight into how national identity is grounded in assumptions of racial and cultural superiority, and speaks in important ways to this cultural moment.” —Lois Agnew, author of Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics
“Olson offers a powerful rhetorical analysis of American claims to greatness. In a context where such greatness is often taken as self-evident or manifest, this study of American magnitude as a matter of persuasion and hemispheric public feeling is vital and extremely welcome. —Naomi Greyser, author of On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America
“Olson offers a powerful rhetorical analysis of American claims to greatness. In a context where such greatness is often taken as self-evident or manifest, this study of American magnitude as a matter of persuasion and hemispheric public feeling is vital and extremely welcome. —Naomi Greyser, author of On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America
Notă biografică
Christa J. Olson is Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador.
Extras
There are thirty-some nation-states on the American continent, but more often than not rhetors in the United States habitually, glancingly, claim “America,” unmarked, for ourselves.Tracking American magnitude—in stories and glances—illuminates how, across major moments and quotidian activities, the uniquely American Americanness of the United States has come to be common sense. The story of American magnitude is the story of how US Americans—particularly, but not exclusively, white settler US Americans—have come to feel themselves as the Americans within a broader American context.
To begin that pursuit of American magnitude’s stories, I open this book with glances at three maps: the one you’ve already seen and two others. The second map is famous, monumental, and historic: It’s the map that names “America.” The third map is none of those. It’s a simple illustration in a child’s book. Our glances at these maps will not show you the inevitable shape of the United States. Instead, they hint at the course and consequence of American magnitude. In them, you just might glimpse the cartographic outlines of the United States gradually becoming the consequential site of America.
When America was invented, the United States did not yet exist. I do not mean this merely as a matter of chronology, though it is true that the thirteen British colonies hadn’t yet been founded, let alone achieved independence. Instead, I mean that the mapmaker whose famous map so confidently named a continent after one of his colleagues did not yet know that there was a substantial landmass north of the Tropic of Cancer. He drew the Caribbean islands larger than life, placed a long and narrow mass where we would now find South America, and then sketched a petite stretch of “Terra Ulteri Incognita” to the north and west of it. The flag of Castile hovered in between. For Martin Waldseemüller, “America” was what English speakers today call South America. What would eventually become the unmarked center of America began its existence as an appendage.
...
One of this book’s central assumptions is that, by seeing American scenes, audiences in the United States learned the contours and responsibilities of being American. Scholars in rhetoric and beyond have established the groundwork for that assumption, showing how landscape painting, photography, and tourism, for example, revealed the United States to itself and helped viewers experience themselves as part of the nation. This book extends that view. I argue that becoming American, in its most consequential sense, required looking not only within but also beyond US borders. It required that US viewers—consistently imagined as white—feel themselves to be particularly American among Americans.
Audiences in the United States learned important elements of their Americanness by encountering American scenes that were not part of the United States of America. They, like Koerner, glanced at what was not the United States and saw their own future. Especially following the US-Mexican war, their glances were turned southward, to the “other American republics” in Latin America. What Gruesz calls a “small question of geographical semantics,” in which “America” becomes a “a synonym for the United States of America,” is ultimately quite consequential, and it isn’t just a question of semantics. The trophic geographies of “America”—simultaneously symbolic and material—chart the shape and nature of the United States as America. And, repeatedly, over centuries, that shape and nature have been felt in terms of magnitude.
When America was invented, the United States did not yet exist. I do not mean this merely as a matter of chronology, though it is true that the thirteen British colonies hadn’t yet been founded, let alone achieved independence. Instead, I mean that the mapmaker whose famous map so confidently named a continent after one of his colleagues did not yet know that there was a substantial landmass north of the Tropic of Cancer. He drew the Caribbean islands larger than life, placed a long and narrow mass where we would now find South America, and then sketched a petite stretch of “Terra Ulteri Incognita” to the north and west of it. The flag of Castile hovered in between. For Martin Waldseemüller, “America” was what English speakers today call South America. What would eventually become the unmarked center of America began its existence as an appendage.
...
One of this book’s central assumptions is that, by seeing American scenes, audiences in the United States learned the contours and responsibilities of being American. Scholars in rhetoric and beyond have established the groundwork for that assumption, showing how landscape painting, photography, and tourism, for example, revealed the United States to itself and helped viewers experience themselves as part of the nation. This book extends that view. I argue that becoming American, in its most consequential sense, required looking not only within but also beyond US borders. It required that US viewers—consistently imagined as white—feel themselves to be particularly American among Americans.
Audiences in the United States learned important elements of their Americanness by encountering American scenes that were not part of the United States of America. They, like Koerner, glanced at what was not the United States and saw their own future. Especially following the US-Mexican war, their glances were turned southward, to the “other American republics” in Latin America. What Gruesz calls a “small question of geographical semantics,” in which “America” becomes a “a synonym for the United States of America,” is ultimately quite consequential, and it isn’t just a question of semantics. The trophic geographies of “America”—simultaneously symbolic and material—chart the shape and nature of the United States as America. And, repeatedly, over centuries, that shape and nature have been felt in terms of magnitude.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction A Glance at the Map Chapter 1 Acquiescing to Accumulation Chapter 2 The Andes on Display Chapter 3 Of Cities on Hills Chapter 4 Animating Interests Chapter 5 Size Matters Bibliography Index
Descriere
Analyzes how imagery and rhetoric of pan-American grandeur from 1845 to 1950 used Latin America as a foil for creating US national identity and a particular American way of feeling.