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Chapter 2 - Imagining Purity

The Corrosive Stranger and the Construction of a Genealogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2022

Dean Hammer
Affiliation:
Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania
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Summary

The chapter explores efforts to answer how a community premised on a dislocation from the past, but comprised of people who bring with them their own pasts, locates itself in time. How does a community constituted by other pasts not simply blur into those pasts? I argue that in both Rome and the United States a particular type of Stranger, the corrosive Stranger, is constructed in response to this question. The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity, but is used to construct an imagined purity that gives a community a genealogy that distinguishes it from other communities and also posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership. I look at the different efforts by Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans and then by Noah Webster for the United States to craft a genealogy of national identity that is defined against the threats of the corrosive Stranger. I then look at attempts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to confront the burden of memory reflected in the Stranger marked by race who carries America’s own memory.

Type
Chapter
Information
Rome and America
Communities of Strangers, Spectacles of Belonging
, pp. 58 - 95
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Imagining Purity
  • Dean Hammer, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Rome and America
  • Online publication: 22 December 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009249621.004
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  • Imagining Purity
  • Dean Hammer, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Rome and America
  • Online publication: 22 December 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009249621.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Imagining Purity
  • Dean Hammer, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Rome and America
  • Online publication: 22 December 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009249621.004
Available formats
×