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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Susan-Mary Grant
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Wiley-Blackwell, 2019.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
Since the inception of the United States, many of those who have spoken for and to the nation have struggled to define and defend a coherent American nationalism. This paper proposes that one of the reasons for this lies in the fault lines inherent in the invented traditions that underpin American, as many other nationalisms. Determined by warfare and by the desire for land, and frequently defined in racial terms, they have undermined more than they have stabilised the nationalist structures they seek to support through what they have excluded from the national imaginary. In common with other settler nations, arguably with most Western nations, in fact, America’s nationalist narratives struggle to serve as cohesive foundation myths. They represent the lasting legacies of national trauma derived from the nation’s violent colonial past and the severing of the imperial bond in the eighteenth century, chattel slavery and the civil war it caused, and Westward expansion and the imperative toward hemispheric control. Through the mapping of a topography of national trauma predicated on these national traditions and located within the tensions arising from warfare, land, and race, scholars can better comprehend the still frequently acrimonious debates over American nationalism that persist today.
Author(s): Grant S-M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Nations and Nationalism
Year: 2019
Volume: 26
Issue: 2
Pages: 366-387
Print publication date: 01/06/2020
Online publication date: 23/01/2019
Acceptance date: 19/11/2018
Date deposited: 10/12/2018
ISSN (print): 1354-5078
ISSN (electronic): 1469-8129
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12491
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12491
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