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Desiring Brotherhood
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Benning soldier from Alabama. In 1939, they moved to Fayetteville,
North Carolina, a small army town in which the writer created the
setting and plot of
Reflections in a Golden Eye.
According to Kaplan, the assumption that the American
struggle for independence from the British Empire makes the U.S.
essentially anti-imperialist has been an enduring paradigm of
studies of American culture. This ideology of “American
exceptionalism” has contributed to three notable omissions that
characterize the discourse of American studies: “the absence of
culture from the history of U. S. imperialism; the absence of
empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the
United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism” (Kaplan,
1993: 11). As a key figure of post-Americanist studies, Kaplan
critiques the ethnocentrism of the previous generation of
Americanists and aims at “relating those internal categories of
gender, race, and ethnicity to the global dynamics of
empire-building” (16). In her efforts to link the global to those
mundane fields of the everyday and the affective, Kaplan exposes
American national identity’s imperial unconscious, and explores
the infiltration of this unconscious into multiple facets of American
culture to become “a way of life” (14). Taking cues from Kaplan, I
argue that
Reflections in a Golden Eye
needs to be read as a
cultural text entangled with American imperialism. Although the
period between World Wars I and II is generally referred to as a
period of isolationism, this is not to say that the U.S. ceased her
project of expansion and aggrandizement in the 1920s and 1930s.
According to the anti-imperialist historian, Charles Austin Beard,
this period witnessed a “return to the more aggressive ways . . . to
protect and advance the claims of American business enterprise”
(Buzzanco, 2014). As Robert Buzzanco writes: “In addition to
reestablishing and augmenting economic ties to a rebuilding
Europe and pressing for a greater opening of Asian markets,
American officials and corporations continued to move into Latin
America in pursuit of expanded business opportunities” (Buzzanco,