Coda: Thinking ‘America’ in the Age of the Liminal

Abstract

The book is rounded up by a look at present-day debates on globalization and national identity. Synthesizing the study’s main findings, I maintain that ‘America’—to use Latour’s famous phrase—has never been ‘modern.’ Despite self-articulated claims of ‘exceptionalism’ and cultural homogeneity, the American history of ideas since the early republic seems rather marked by ‘liquid’ patterns of national self-fashioning, such as liminality, ambiguity, and transgression—in other words—‘pre-modern’ strategies for which the study proposes the term ‘moveable designs.’