How did early Americans define themselves? The American exceptionalist
perspective tells us that the young republic rejected Europeans, Native Americans, and African
Americans in order to isolate a national culture and a white national identity. Imitativeness at this time was often seen as antithetical to self and national creation, but Jason Richards
argues that imitation was in fact central to such creation. Imitation Nation
shows how whites simultaneously imitated and therefore absorbed the cultures they so readily
disavowed, as well as how Indians and blacks emulated the power and privilege of whiteness while
they mocked and resisted white authority.
By examining the republic’s
foundational literature--including works by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Martin Delany--Richards argues that the national desire for cultural uniqueness and racial purity was in constant conflict with the national need to imitate
the racial and cultural other for self-definition. The book offers a new model for understanding
the ways in which the nation’s identity and literature took shape during the early phases
of the American republic.
