Douglas Dowland's Weak Nationalisms: Affect and Nonfiction in Postwar America suggests that understanding nationalism ought to be a more central task for literary criticism. What Dowland has in mind is not the “hot or strong variety of nationalism” (5), treated as “ultimately a fiction or, worse, a coercive reality” when studied (11–12). To approach all instances of national attachment with “aloofness, againstness, suspicion, and superiority” is to misunderstand nationalism's multiformity and affective range, at a moment in American politics when these matters deserve renewed attention (223). Dowland's belief that nationalism's “ordinariness” has been especially overlooked leads to his theorization of the “weak nationalism” of the book's title (13), elaborated at length in readings of nonfiction texts from the early Cold War to the Trump administration.

Weak Nationalisms’ four chapters read its chosen nonfiction texts according to the rhetorical figure of synecdoche, highlighting how texts and readers affectively position themselves in relation to an imagined national whole. Several times the book quotes Benedict Anderson's thesis that “communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined,” taking Anderson's somewhat nebulous category of “style” to mean affect. “Moodiness: The Everyday America of Beauvoir's America Day by Day” understands Simone de Beauvoir's often maligned 1948 travelogue as an outsider's provisional observations of the United States, where bowling alleys, drugstores, college cafeterias, and consumer objects come to stand in for the varied sensory experiences available in the American nation at large. “Curiosity and Its Discontents: Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and America and Americans” examines John Steinbeck's reliance on national synecdoche in his 1960s nonfiction, in his search for what he hoped would be the generalizable “larger truth” of his cross-country road journeys, and his insistence that the decade's national upheavals were, in his words, “manifestations of one single cause” (99).

Dowland's readings are most convincing when individual texts are put into contact with other synecdochical discourses, such that national representation of all kinds comes to appear as the product of any number of affective investments and part-for-whole substitutions operating in a culture at a given time. Steinbeck's nonfiction is suggestively likened to the best-selling psychology and sociology texts of the era, with Dowland pointing out that such “universalizing narratives” became increasingly untenable as the Cold War consensus broke down, much as Steinbeck's own national diagnostics had already fallen out of critical favour by the time of his death in 1968 (82). “Hopefulness: On the Road with Charles Kuralt” explains how Kuralt's long-running CBS segment invited American television viewers to imagine themselves as members of an emotionally legible national community, in a way the more detached rhetoric of the evening news broadcast did not. In the book's final chapter, “Incredulity: Reading Sarah Vowell,” Vowell's contrarian political writing and idiosyncratic media persona are shown to have been constructed in opposition to the climate of Reagan-era triumphalism in which she and other members of Generation X came of age, to the extent that “her perception of the nation, and herself, reflect attempts to construct an identity from eighties discourse” well into the post-9/11 period (168).

Weak Nationalisms makes valuable reading for literary critics of all stripes looking to broaden the types of questions asked of texts in the present theoretical and political context; the book's two biggest influences may be Rita Felski and Donald Trump. Dowland is sensitive to synecdoche's limitations, the tendency for its substitutions to become naturalized in a way that downplays the more historically contingent processes involved in taking parts for the whole. Defining synecdoche chiefly as a “feeling toward the nation” allows the book's chapters to keep in view the contested aspects of both literary and political representation, demonstrating why understanding the United States through its parts has appealed to such a heterogeneous group of texts in the first place (6). Nonfiction is the most fungible of the book's categories, chosen because it has been undertheorized and can accommodate diverse affects in genres like the television documentary and essay collection, insofar as what the book says about national synecdoche could be applied to more or less any text or genre.

Is there really an “entire archive” of texts “invisible” to literary criticism owing to affective misunderstandings (18)? Some may query Dowland bending over backwards to accommodate de Beauvoir's America Day by Day while regarding Diana Trilling's review of the text as “an eruption of a developing Cold War hot nationalism as much as it is literary criticism” (42), or his suggestion that “ideological analyses like Jameson's ‘waning of affect’ seem a melodramatic byproduct of the hermeneutics of suspicion” (25).

“Hopeful” best describes the affect of Weak Nationalisms, since the book is premised on literary critics’ potential to “reclaim their space in a discussion in which they have mostly been absent” (9). Given that Weak Nationalisms explores the affective dimensions of national attachment, it seems strange that Dowland has nothing substantial to say about globalization, a word appearing in the book precisely once. Investigating the variety of affects associated with the United States’ complicated embeddedness in the global economic and political system, along the lines, say, of Arjun Appadurai's still-current Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006), would add further reason for literary critics to rethink how they study nationalism.