Assimilation and the Nation: How Examining Ideas about Newcomers Illuminates Narratives of the American Nation

• In Event: 452 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. Immigration and Assimilation

Abstract

This paper argues for using elite discourse about assimilation to better understand national identity. Examining elite ideas about the incorporation of newcomers reveals normative assumptions about what the nation is as well as what it should be. This approach also shows that nations are flexible, processual, and multiple, not static and monolithic. By mapping out sociological theory on assimilation, we can see the way these assimilation and the nation were once linked, but have largely been separated for the past several decades. Nations and nationalism has remained a fairly small field in the US, while the literature on assimilation has grown and finds its importance in the subfields of race and ethnicity and migration studies. The two fields rarely come together in American sociology, but clearly find a place—though differently rendered—in American politics. It is time to reconnect these important areas. Exploring a century’s worth of academic work—essays, books, papers—on immigration and assimilation illuminates three stories of the meaning of America, all which describe the American nation. This theoretical paper is part of a larger project which employs this method in examing meanings of America over the course of the twentieth century. Examples from this work are used as illustrations throughout.

Author

• Shannon Latkin Anderson, Roanoke College