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Marcus E. Ravage's "An American in the Making", Americanization, and New Immigrant Representation
Ist Teil von
Melus, 2015-06, Vol.40 (2), p.5-29
Ort / Verlag
USA: Oxford University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2015
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Oxford Journals 2020 Humanities
Beschreibungen/Notizen
In this essay I discuss M. E. Ravage’s autobiography, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant (1917), a forgotten text in immigration literary history, and one of the most accomplished Romanian American Jewish autobiographies. I explore how the work of a first-generation immigrant writer and public intellectual contributes to contemporaneous debates about Americanization. I argue that, along with the cultural work of the immigrant press in the ideological context of the debates over what constitutes an American in the early twentieth century (the melting pot vs. cultural pluralism debate), Ravage’s text brings together consent to Americanization with simultaneous dissent. I show how Ravage rewrites not only the purported tragedy of the immigrant experience but also the genre of immigrant autobiography by challenging his readership to see instead “an American in the making,” a subject of literary production rather than an object of sociological inquiry and photojournalistic exposé. I suggest that the demands of the immigrant autobiography genre (established by the literary market) mirrored, in fact, the coercive demands of Americanization ideology at the beginning of the twentieth century.