Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson's observation that “to write about race in American culture is to exclude virtually nothing” (1998: 11) aptly sums up the standing of race in the field. For if cultural history is essentially the history of stories that people tell, and the analysis of how those stories anticipate the creation and evolution of social identities, then race is ubiquitous within the cultural milieu of American history. Within the historiography of the United States, of course, race and ethnicity have remained ongoing preoccupations, but the key question for the purposes of this brief survey of the cultural history of race and ethnicity in the United States is: what can cultural historians say about the significance of race and ethnicity in the American past that other kinds of historians cannot? The body of scholarship that has been amassed on the subject, which had its formative years during the 1970s, constitutes an important and distinctive avenue by which to comprehend the predicaments and possibilities of being “of color” in American history.As the subject of historical inquiry, culture played a paradoxical role in the maintenance and subversion of racial and ethnic hierarchies in the United States. Even as it legitimized the ongoing subordination of racialized peoples, it also provided an important channel of resistance and assimilation by racial and ethnic minority ... log in or subscribe to read full text