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- Hyphens and Accents: The Hidden Violence of Assimilation
Hyphens and Accents: The Hidden Violence of Assimilation
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This paper uses Mary Antin's memoir, Promised Land, to examine the issues of a
hyphenated identity as a strategy of becoming an American.
| creator | Omer, Farah M. |
| Title | Hyphens and Accents: The Hidden Violence of Assimilation |
| supporting host | Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity Symposium, 2017 |
| advisor | Andrews, Stephen, 1956- |
| supporting host | Grinnell College. English Department. |
| Index Date | 2017 |
| Publisher | Grinnell College |
| Type of Resource | text |
| Genre | research paper |
| Digital Origin | reformated digital |
| Digital Extent | 7 pages |
| Media Type | application/pdf |
| description | In the early 1900s, there was an influx of immigrants to the United States with numbers surpassing twenty million. All of a sudden pockets of immigrants of Eastern European and Mediterranean descent emerged across the United States. This influx of immigration was contextualized as a challenge to the state’s efforts in building a nation-state. So how does the state adopt to the rapid demographic changes to secure its survival and forge the loyalty of the newcomers? The scope of this paper will discuss Mary Antin’s memoir, The Promised Land, to investigate why the state allows for a hyphenated identity as a strategy of securing its survival. It addresses the cultural, political, and the societal implications of the project of Americanization and the construction of an American identity. Antin goes through the process of Americanization and successfully becomes an American—a Jewish-American. Although she does not have to give up her Jewishness to become an American, the terms of what constitutes “Jewishness” get redefined by the state. The state has an interest in destroying the otherness and melting the pot. Therefore, it allows but renegotiates the hyphenated identity, treating the hyphen as a transitional space in which the work of cultural ideology is done. So, to become an American, Antin feels that first she has to change her name, get rid of her accent, leave Judaism. Thus, the hyphen becomes a metonym for the project of Americanization. It acknowledges the existence of difference while aggressively undermining and eradicating the saliency of that difference. |
| Language | English |
| Topic | Assimilation (Sociology) |
| Topic | Antin, Mary, 1881-1949. |
| Topic | Promised Land (1912) |
| Topic | Jewish authors. |
| Geographic | United States. |
| Temporal | Nineteen tens. |
| Classification | PS |
| Related Item | Digital Grinnell |
| Related Item | Student Scholarship |
| Related Item | Undergraduate Student Symposium |
| Identifier (local) | grinnell:19508 |
| Access Condition | Copyright to this work is held by the author(s), in accordance with United States copyright law (USC 17). Readers of this work have certain rights as defined by the law, including but not limited to fair use (17 USC 107 et seq.). |
| Identifier (hdl) | http://hdl.handle.net/11084/19508 |