A Forgetful Nation

“A Forgetful Nation is a comprehensive work that combines breadth and depth to produce an authoritative diachronic account of the nexus of national culture and identity politics in the United States.” - Adriana Neagu, Journal of American Studies

“A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States is an extraordinary work of cultural memory and an important contribution to critical historiography. In writing it, Ali Behdad has established a heretofore unrecognized connection between the culture’s mythical representation of itself as an ‘Immigrant Nation’ and the negation of the history of the violence inflicted against immigrants that this self-forgetful representation necessitated.” - Donald E. Pease, Nations and Nationalism

“[T]he genealogy Behdad offers us in A Forgetful Nation opens up directions to think about the discursive strategies of the current mobilization of migrants in the US and elsewhere—movements that bear the political possibility of re-constitution of citizenship.”

- Ayse Deniz Temiz, Borderlands

“Behdad’s analysis reminds us that memories that obliterate the difference that difference makes could very easily be a kind of historical amnesia that resists the accountability of the past and traditionally grounds all hegemonic narratives of national identity in the United States.” - Ioanna Laliotou, Journal of American Ethnic History

“This impressive work persuasively argues that the cultural identity of the United States historically excludes immigrants…. Overall, this is a highly recommended study.” - Kristin Whitehair, Multicultural Review

“This lucid book, written with quiet passion, is provocative and insightful in its analysis of contemporary policy….” - James Dawes, American Literature

“By way of valuable new readings of Jefferson, Hamilton, Tocqueville, Crèvecoeur, and others, Ali Behdad has found a new way into established terrain. Neither pro- nor anti-immigration per se, this book traces the cultural workings and productions of immigration politics, an angle explored by few contributors to the immigration literature. A Forgetful Nation should be required reading for all those interested in the long and often hidden history of nation-building in the United States.” - Bonnie Honig, author of Democracy and the Foreigner

“This book offers a deeply relevant argument in the wake of 9/11 and counter-terror. Ali Behdad provides psychological depth to immigration discourse with a nuanced examination of ‘forgetting’ as a mode of negation that both denies and acknowledges a past built on the exclusion of otherness.” - Russ Castronovo, author of Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States