earticle

영어

This paper aims to address the underexamined origin of modernity in the immigrant subject. There has been an untested, yet persistent assumption that immigrants have migrated from premodern countries to America, to be renewed and modernized, and that the metropolitan ghetto is a rare site of exoticism where modern Americans can travel to witness the premodern they lost and left behind long ago. But Abraham Cahan’s Yekl clearly shows, I claim, that the immigrant subject is a proactive agent who helps shape American modernity, while America is an incomplete social formation still struggling to be modernized. My second claim is that this modernizing immigrant paradoxically misrecognizes America as having already achieved modernity. American modernity is a cultural fiction simultaneously invented and imitated by the immigrant subject.