I began A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature with a socioeconomic, political, historical, and theoretical overview of modern America, charting the formation of modern America from the last three decades of the nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth century, one that is continually becoming. By the 1920s, this modern America had become an economic superpower, producing a hegemonic business civilization, where mass production of consumer commodities and free market required everybody to become consumers, as it spread its imperial wings internationally. But this emergent, modern America was also culturally, racially, religiously, and economically diverse in lived experiences and perspectives.

Yet, modern America's Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses— the administration, Congress, the courts, the state legislatures, the police, the army, the family, the media, and the educational and political and cultural and literary institutions, which are relations of power, practices, and actions by which the ruling class maintains its economic dominance and enforces it rule— had a darker side. This modern America was an unequal and inequitable modern social formation. There were legal racial segregation and deadly economic exploitation of the working class, colonized indigenous nations, incorporated/ occupied territories, and protectorates. There was also secondclass citizenship for women and people of color. The Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses promoted centralization, professionalism, and an unmarked Anglo- Saxon, Hegelian (the rational alone is the real) definition of modern America. This ordering caused modern America to be represented singularly and monoculturally, with Eurocentric modernity breaking with the past/ nature/ the nonhuman— animals, plants, the water, the landscape, the nonrational, and/ or indifferent forces of nature.

In reconfiguring and re- representing modern American history and literature in the 1920s and 1930s, allowing conceptual spaces for race, gender, sex, nature, and class to be critiqued or to be displaced, I defined modern American history and literature not as linear and singular but as complex, diverse, heterogeneous, and rich. I viewed modern American history as a series of events— many of them happening sequentially and simultaneously and without being held together by societal norms and values— because I wanted to get at the rich diversity and a multilayered formation of modern America.