“America,” Susanne Hamscha argues in The Fiction of America, has always been a figure (if not a figment) of the cultural imagination: the result of repeated performances that endorse normative visions of “Americanness” (male, white, heterosexual) but frequently carry subtexts that haunt these visions. Suggesting that “America” is ceaselessly produced “in the interplay of the cultural imaginary and performance” (15), Hamscha builds her argument on the theories of Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and Jacques Derrida, as well as on Americanist scholarship (Donald Pease, Robyn Wiegman, Lauren Berlant, Diana Taylor, Winfried Fluck, et al.). One of the most impressive achievements of this book is that it brings these theories and scholarship into critical dialogue with the cultural productions on which its many excellent close readings focus: the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; films like Finding Nemo, Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, and Jaws. Hamscha not only details the ways in which these productions perform specific versions of “America”; she also reshapes our understanding of American studies as a field of critical inquiry that has, to a substantial degree, constructed and indeed performed its own subject.

The Fiction of America is divided into major segments (“acts”) consisting of several chapters (“scenarios”); the acts are framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue, “The Fiction of America – America as Fiction,” introduces key concepts: simulacrum, performance, cultural imaginary, foundational scenarios, spectrality. The first act, “Setting the Stage – or, Performing ‘America’ on the Streets of Philadelphia,” investigates the moment in which the United States performed itself into being through the Declaration of Independence. Hamscha traces the cultural work of the Declaration of Independence as one of the republic's most revered foundational scenarios through analyses of films like Philadelphia and Rocky as well as Barack Obama's “A More Perfect Union” speech. Such scenarios and the performances of “America” they generate, she suggests, are always unstable and ambiguous. They have spawned narratives of white, male, and heterosexual normativity that are powerful precisely because they remain unmarked (and thus seemingly beyond reproach) but inevitably also include spectral narratives of dissent, resistance, and subversion. These spectral narratives, Hamscha proposes, are part of the national cultural imaginary, and they can be revealed through acts of critical unmasking that trouble dominant fictions of “America.”

The second and third acts follow key foundational scenarios from their nineteenth-century emergence to recent popular culture: the revision of the Emersonian scholar in Pixar's Finding Nemo, the reconstruction of the Thoreauvian hermit and Waldenesque nature in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, the poetic embodiment of democratic citizenry in Whitman's Leaves of Grass and its refraction in Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man movie, the ethnic ventriloquism in Melville's Moby Dick and its reappearance in Spielberg's Jaws, Hester Prynne's gendered dissent in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and its relation to Madonna's controversial performances of the 1990s. These juxtapositions of nineteenth-century texts with popular productions from the 1970s to today treat the “classics” not as fixed foils for contemporary performances of “America.” Instead, Hamscha rereads them as troubled performances that already reflect the many fissures that have shaped the “American” cultural imaginary. Readers willing to dig into this densely argued and theoretically ambitious book will be rewarded with fresh perspectives on American Renaissance writers as well as with a sophisticated understanding of postmodern popular culture's revising of gendered and raced fictions of “America.” The epilogue picks up Hamscha's initial remarks about the cowboy as a performative figure. Recalling her earlier discussion of Chris Richardson's “Space Cowboy” photograph (which graces the appealing cover of the book), it concludes with a compelling reading of Brokeback Mountain as a revision of previous cowboy fictions that makes explicit the homoerotic undertones that have always been present in the “American” cultural imaginary.

In closing, one critical remark about this otherwise stellar study, a remark that concerns the distinction between dominant narratives (white, male, heterosexual) and the subdued spectral narratives that are said to perform subversive work as counterscenarios. I am not entirely convinced that there ever was a “smooth surface of Americanness” (20). Rather, it seems to me that the very “version of America that goes against the grain” (30) which spectral narratives allegedly promote has always been part and parcel of the national cultural imaginary as well as one of the most central (or dominant) fictions in American thought. One of the great achievements of The Fiction of America, however, is that it triggers discussions of these kinds and urges us to continue investigating that elusive thing we call “America.” I, for one, look forward to future studies that might use Hamscha's many powerful insights to examine an even broader corpus of noncanonical, marginalized, and understudied performances in American cultural history.