It's About AMERICA!!!!!!!

[Michael Joseph]

On Fri, 9 May 2003, Dave Monroe wrote:

> Hadn't thought of that.  Perhaps explains why I've thought the gov't's
> deployment of it so clumsy. Pynchon as exile in his own land ...

suggesting merely as an additional resonance that homeland retains this
officially abandoned meaning, that America was not called homeland before
because homeland implied 'primordial unity' ("corporate feeling of oneness
that infuses a particular, concrete, unquestioned set of inherited
relationships.") With its notions of inheritance, homeland was at variance
with American ideology, and with the reality of the immigrant experience.
Asserting group solidarity meant resisting the churning required by
ethnicization. So there is a worrying agency in the new post 9/11, post
Clinton, post Lewinsky use of homeland, where many of us are exiles, at
least potentially.


Michael

> http://www.vheissu.be/art/art_eng_49_hollander.htm
>
> Michael Joseph <mjoseph at rci.rutgers.edu> wrote:I wonder if it's useful
> at this stage of the discussion to recall that within recent memory
> homeland had a slightly different meaning, and one which Pynchon would
> certainly remember. People used it talk about the place one had _left,_
> the old country, the lost land of one's birth, a lost primal community.
>
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