Just Like Us
The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
Americans have long considered themselves a people set apart, but American exceptionalism is built on a set of tacit beliefs about other cultures. From the founding exclusion of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans to the uneasy welcome of waves of immigrants, from republican disavowals of colonialism to Cold War proclamations of freedom, Americans’ ideas of their differences from others have shaped the modern world—and how Americans have viewed foreigners is deeply revealing of their assumptions about themselves.
Just Like Us is a pathbreaking exploration of what foreignness has meant across American history. Thomas Borstelmann traces American ambivalence about non-Americans, identifying a paradoxical perception of foreigners as suspiciously different yet fundamentally sharing American values beneath the layers of culture. Considering race and religion, notions of the American way of life, attitudes toward immigrants, competition with communism, Americans abroad, and the subversive power of American culture, he offers a surprisingly optimistic account of the acceptance of difference. Borstelmann contends that increasing contact with peoples around the globe during the Cold War encouraged mainstream society to grow steadily more inclusive. In a time of resurgent nativism and xenophobia, Just Like Us provides a reflective, urgent examination of how Americans have conceived of foreignness and their own exceptionalism throughout the nation’s history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Borstelmann (The 1970s), a professor of modern world history at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, explores "how Americans thought and think about non-Americans" in this incisive, pointillist account. Casting a critical eye on U.S. exceptionalism and the prioritization of individual rights over communal responsibilities, Borstelmann argues that the "absorptive, acquisitive individualism of American culture" has had "at least as subversive an effect" on the rest of the world (by undermining other countries' values and depleting their talent pools), as immigration, communism, and other foreign influences have had on the U.S. Focusing on the post-WWII era, Borstelmann contends that the mainstream American viewpoint is simultaneously suspicious of foreigners and convinced that, deep-down, they're no different than the average American: in essence, the natural state of humanity is to be American. He has a tendency to overgeneralize the American perspective, failing to break out the distinctive views of the religious right, for instance, and the chapter on the 2016 election ("the dramatic reappearance of an open, at least rhetorical hostility to people of color, particularly those born elsewhere") is more muddled than the rest of the book. Nevertheless, this accessible and informative survey delivers a rich, discerning analysis of an essential aspect of American culture and politics.
