In the ghetto of identity

The supposedly “real life”. Scene from the feature film »Precious« (2009), based on the novel »Push«, which Percival Everett satirizes in »Erased«

The supposedly “real life”. Scene from the feature film »Precious« (2009), based on the novel »Push«, which Percival Everett satirizes in »Erased«

Since its founding, the American polity has been characterized by two contradictory promises. One is the promise of a new beginning, i.e. the promise of being able to be someone else and to break away from the past. Or to put it another way: to recreate on a small scale the revolution that the thirteen colonies undertook on a large scale in 1776. This is contradicted by the other promise: to be allowed and able to be who one was, as an equal among those equal in their diversity. The first promise has the individual as its agent, the second tends towards the collective. “Rugged individualism” - that ideal of individualism derived from the experience of western expansion and based on independence and self-sufficiency - was therefore accompanied from the outset by a no less powerful image of the group or "community", primarily in ethnic terms, together with its expectations, constraints and folkloristic practices, which were sometimes lived with more conviction in the New World than in the Old.

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