American Identity in the Age of Obama

Amílcar Antonio Barreto is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University. He is the author of Nationalism and Its Logical Foundations (2009), Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics (2002), The Politics of Language in Puerto Rico (2001), and Language, Elites and the State (1998).

Contributors expertly examine Obama's election and reelection as watershed phenomena that will be exploited by the president's supporters and detractors to engage in different forms of narrating the American national saga. Despite the potential for major changes in rhetorical mythmaking we question whether American society has changed substantively.

Introduction: The Age of Obama and American Identity; Amílcar Antonio Barreto and Richard L. O'Bryant. 1. Obama and Enduring Notions of American National Identity; Amílcar Antonio Barreto. 2. Racial Identification in a Post Obama Era: Multiracialism, Identity Choice and Candidate Evaluation; Natalie Masuoka. 3. The Son of a Black Man from Kenya and a White Woman from Kansas: Immigration and Racial Neoliberalism in the Age of Obama; Josue David Cisneros. 4. Immigrant Resentment and American Identity in the Twenty-First Century; Deborah J. Schildkraut. 5. Browning our way to Post-Race: Identity, Identification, and Securitization of Brown; Kumarini Silva. 6. White Masculinities in the Age of Obama: Rebuilding or Reloading?; Steven D. Farough. 7. "Exceptionally Distinctive: President Obama's Complicated Articulation of American Exceptionalism; Joseph M. Valenzano and Jason A. Edwards. 8. Barack Obama's Foreign Policy Leadership: Renewing America's Image; Mark A. Menaldo