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speculative rewriting of the past, can be read not only as a critique
of the present but also as a proposal for a turning away from and a
suspension of a teleological and preemptive understanding of history.
This rigid view of a nation’s trajectory can lead to justifying taking
drastic means to govern contingency and prevent alternative
historical paths from being articulated.
Three years later in 2007, another Jewish American writer,
Michael Chabon published
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
, in which
he imagines an interim Jewish settlement in Alaska rather than a
Jewish state in Palestine. It is no coincidence that two of the most
prominent Jewish American writers of their time have both taken up
the Holocaust as their subject, while cloaking their inquiry into this
subject behind the hypothetical question of a “what if” in plotting
understanding, self-definition, and self-representation. Historically, there have
been different claims about what constitutes the exceptionality of America: America
is exceptional in the sense that it is exemplary, different, unique, and/or missionary.
The idea that America is exceptional is a familiar, and very old theme in American
literature. The famous “city on the hill” sermon, delivered by John Winthrop to his
puritan followers, registers the early colonists’ fervent belief that the new “city on
the hill” that they were destined to build in the New World would be an exemplary
community for the whole world to behold. At the heart of Winthrop’s inspirational
rhetoric lies a messianic streak, the belief that the young country could not only set
itself up as an exemplary model to be emulated, but it is also its mission to further
the moral and political emancipation of the world. In the nineteenth-century,
American exceptionalism underwent a decisive shift when the “city on the hill”
idiom is fused with the rhetoric that it is the young nation’s “manifest destiny” to
expand westward. However, the desire to expand did not end with the “closing”
of the western frontier; it continues even today. The fusion of these two notions of
American exceptionalism
—
as an example or as its mission
—
has launched the US
into a series of wars, resulting, rather ironically, in its colonization of the native
peoples, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine–American War, the two World-
Wars, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the First Gulf War, and the War on Terror.
Wherever there is a national crisis, the language of American exceptionalism is
recycled both to assert America’s hegemonic position in the global geopolitics and
to justify America’s domestic and international policies. For a critical survey of the
historical development of American exceptionalism, including its cultural and
theological meanings and the implications for reshaping the field of American
Studies, please refer to Donald Pease’s “Exceptionalism” in
Keywords for American
Cultural Studies
(2007).