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 ... Read morethat this self-forgetful representation necessitated.
Donald E. Pease
Nations and Nationalism
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 By way of valuable new readings of Jefferson, Hamilton, Tocqueville, Crevecoeur, 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 Show Less