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"An Introduction to Neonativist Collectives: Place, Not Race, in Cather's The Professor's House and Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent This paper offers a critical introduction to neonativism, a term I use to describe authorial refusals of the racially essentialist and "retrogressive" tendencies of political nativism in early-twentieth-century American literature.1 Texts that evince "neonativism," rather than nativism, offer alternatives to race-based identity constructions, alternatives that highlight the role of place in the construction of American national identity. As it defines neonativism, "place" means more than space or land.2 Aleida Assmann has distinguished between the three this way: spaces are geographical and political domains, land is invested with myth, and places are marked by names and qualified by histories (58). Assmann asserts that place is "invested with experience and history" and resonates with "human aspirations, values, traditions, and memories" (59). Ed Casey also helps us to see the difference between spaciality and platiality. A platial experience would be one that is constituted "by means of positions, that is, a series of points arranged on [a] line and grasped together, as the line" (9). Casey employs Bergson to clarify further: "We could not introduce order among terms without distinguishing them and comparing the places which they occupy; thus we must perceive them as multiple, simultaneous, and distinct" (qtd. in Casey, 9). Taken together, Assman's, Casey's, and Bergson's conceptions of place identify the difference between place-based identity constructions and race-based ones (or neonativist and nativist constructions): place is multiple; a singular place can simultaneously mean numerous things to numerous people. As J. J. Gibson remarks in the epigraph to Casey's Getting Back Into Place, "we live in places" not spaces, or, I would add, races. Thus, many authors have reacted against the nativism of their time by refusing to adopt the race-centric and binaristic constructions that seek to define national identity on the basis of race. Instead, as Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925) and D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent (1926) show, the place a subject occupies matters greatly and contributes to the simultaneous negotiations between hybridity and purity, history and future, and nation and individual. People who aspire to feel included among a national people, be they immigrant or ethnic "Others" (or both), often feel a sense of "displacement" owing to the fact that they do not feel "at home" in the country in which they live. Nativism, as an exclusive ideology, surely engenders feelings of displacement in those who cannot participate in it. By focusing on the existence of "place" networks in two particular novels written (in large part) in the American southwest in the 1920s, Willa Cather's The Professor's House and D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, we can see that these authors do not, in contrast to Walter Benn Michaels's argument in Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995), reify (Cather) or rehearse (Lawrence) the race-based nativist attitudes dominant in America at the time. This is not to say that race does not play a critical role is these novels, as Michaels correctly affirms, because the interplay between people of difference ethnic heritages is very much central to the plots of these texts. Yet, these novels are about more than keeping races ultimately separate and "pure." These novels, in fact, consider the ways in which relationships to place in America make new racial families, connections, and hybrid futures possible. These texts are neonativist texts because in them the hegemony of race as constitutive of national identity is significantly called into question. Once we recognize these texts' simultaneous attention to race and place, our understanding of them as nativist or quasi-nativist texts becomes less absolute. The benefit we receive from reading The Professor's House and The Plumed Serpent as neonativist is that we can more accurately appreciate the authors' struggles - as well as our own - with the role of racial purity, hybridity, history, and future within the matrix of national ideology and in specific platial contexts.1 "Nativism" is most commonly used to describe America's political xenophobia, responsible for the creation of political parties, such as the mid-eighteenth-century Know-Nothing Party, as well as for discriminatory anti-immigration acts, such as the Immigration Act of 1924. Throughout America's history as a nation, and as evidenced by the nation's literary and political products, authors living and writing within the confines of the nation have been dramatically influenced and affected by dominant nativist attitudes that nostalgically prefer an (imaginarily homogenous) "previous America" to the polyglot, heterogeneous America in which these people actually lived and wrote. Thus, nativism is marked by retrogression, as I term it, an active and ideological nostalgia for the (however mythic) American past. Nativists, as nativism's foremost critic John Higham has noted, are fearful that America will become a messy amalgam of indistinct peoples. Nativists are hostile to change, particularly concerning the complexion of the national people. These two attributes, fear and hostility, make basic dislike of a group into the particular national phenomenon that is nativism. "Neonativism" has been used by other scholars, including Hal Rothman. For Rothman, a "neonativist" is someone who is "attracted to the places that have become tourist towns because of the traits of these transformed places" (11). Rothman reserves the identifier "neonative" for people who are not native (either born in a place or aboriginal) and present themselves as natives who simply were not born in a certain place (in his example, New Mexico) (88). Rothman's neonatives create a simulacral past. The difference between neonative as I use it and as Rothman does is that "neonativity" in my use does not apply to a specific group but rather describes a philosophical program, one that unites place and race to enable the individual to create a space of belonging, of nativity, because the subject has been otherwise excluded as result of laws or dominant American attitudes. 2 By "nature," Perry Miller, in Nature's Nation, means not only the natural and pristine landscapes of America but also "nature" as natural instinct. Americans uniquely have this instinct: "America has not time to make people good for anything; they have to be good for something to start with" (6). On the basis of this notion, Miller famously discusses a history of American literary connections between the natural wild and beautiful landscapes of America, "human nature," and divine dictate. In my discussion of "place," I do not refer to the "cult of Nature" that Miller discusses but rather to "place" as in "a sense of place," akin to the idea of networks addressed in Deep Ecology (see Sue Ellen Campbell), or as in "the spirit of place," as D. H. Lawrence discussed at length in Studies in Classic American Literature.
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