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“America First”: Fear, Memory Activism, and Everyday Life in ’s The Plot Against America1

LIAO Pei-chen National Cheng Kung University

Memory disturbs and frightens people. —Li Youcheng, Jiyi [Memory]

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. —Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

Introduction Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an alternate-history novel, in which defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election and becomes the thirty-third American president. In Roth’s novel, the fictionalized Lindbergh echoes his historical counterpart, an aviation hero and a Nazi sympathizer, who was well-known for his speech, “Who Are the War Agitators?,” to the in September, 1941. In the novel’s alternative world, the Lindbergh administration strikes a deal with Germany to keep the U.S. out of WWII and starts the widespread persecution of Jews on various levels. In the name of greater assimilation, the Office of American

* This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology under Grant MOST 105- 2628-H-006-002-MY3. A Chinese article bearing a similar title has appeared in Xue yu tu er yin yu xin (Through Hearts and Minds) (ed. Wang Zhiming, Xiong Tinghui & Zhang Jinzhong [Taipei: Bookman, 2018]), but here I do more than simply translate that article into English. I restructure, substantially revise and expand it, add one new section, and sharpen the argument by incorporating and affect studies into this essay. This essay has benefitted a lot from the three anonymous reviewers’ comments and suggestions.

Received: June 25, 2018／Accepted: December 17, 2018 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, no.46 (Jan. 2019): 59-77 60_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

Absorption draws up programs to forcibly relocate selected Jewish families from their urban neighborhood to towns across the South and Midwest. In 1942, President Lindbergh disappears mysteriously. Radio broadcasts from start to circulate rumors which attribute Lindbergh’s disappearance to the Jews’ plot against America. Before long, angry mobs storm the streets, attack, kill, and humiliate Jews. In the end, Mrs. Lindbergh appeals to the public for peace and unity, and asks the police to end the search for President Lindbergh. In special elections held in November, former president Roosevelt is re-elected for a third presidential term. In December 1942, a year later than in actual history, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, the U.S. enters the war, and history is back on track in Roth’s novel. Despite its being a tale of alternate history, Roth’s novel endeavors to be as faithful to historical reality as possible. As Roth explains in “The Story behind The Plot Against America,” “My every imaginative effort was directed toward making the effect of that reality as strong as I could, and not so as to illuminate the present through the past but to illuminate the past through the past.” At the political level, Lindbergh is not a fictional character. His isolationism and anti-Semitism, as depicted in the novel, is also “reflected unambiguously in his speeches, diaries and letters” (Roth 2004a). Roth even provides the full text of Lindbergh’s 1941 speech, as an appendix at the end of the book, for his readers’ reference. All these show that, except for making Lindbergh the thirty- third American president, “everything else” in the novel has been made, as Roth himself claims, “as close to factual truth as I could” (2004a). At the personal level, the Roth family in the novel resembles the author’s family so closely that the story reads almost like a family memoir. The family’s second son, who is also the first-person narrator of the story, bears the same name as the author, Philip Roth,1 rendering the novel the famously last volume of the “Roth books.”2 Roth explains that writing the novel “gave me an opportunity to bring my parents back from the grave and restore them to what they were at the height of their powers in their late 30’s” (2004a). He continues, “I’ve tried to portray them here as faithfully as I could—as though I were, in fact, writing nonfiction” (2004a). The Plot Against America is evidently Roth’s another attempt, in addition to his autobiography The Facts, at preserving personal memories and telling ordinary people’s stories. So far, however, the interpretations of The Plot Against America as either an allegory of the Bush administration or a prophecy of the Trump presidency have formed a predominant part of the existing scholarship on the novel. Although Roth asserts that the novel is not meant as a “roman à clef” of the Bush administration (2004a), in Roth’s

1. To avoid confusion, I will use “Roth” hereafter when I refer to the author of the novel, and “Philip” for the novel’s protagonist. 2. According to Michael Wood in his 2004 review of The Plot Against America, “In recent years, Philip Roth (or his publisher) has taken to grouping most of his novels according to their visible narrator.” There are, for example, “Kepesh books,” “Zuckerman books,” “Roth books,” and “other books.” In the “Roth books,” Roth uses his own name as the name of the protagonist within a fictional as well as a non-fictional work. There are five Roth books, which are The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), : A Novel (1990), Patrimony: A True Story (1991), : A Confession (1993), and The Plot Against America (2004). LIAO Pei-chen_“America First”_61 fictional Lindbergh, many readers see Bush, who was then the American president when the novel was published.3 “A reader opening the novel in September 2004,” Steven G. Kellman argues, for instance, “might well have thought that its narrator, ‘Philip Roth,’ was evoking the traumatized post-9/11 world, rather than the period 1940-1942 in which the events of the story take place” (113). It was partly because the novel was published at a time when the Bush administration declared the War on Terror and announced the policy in tandem with a concentration on homeland security that brought drastic changes to Muslim Americans’ lives. Unlike President Bush, who was an interventionist, current American President is as much an isolationist as Lindbergh. Noting especially the slogan “America First” that President Trump used in his presidential campaign and inaugural address, another group of readers finds comparisons between Trump and Lindbergh and compliments Roth, as Scott Galupo does, for having “predicted the presidency of Donald Trump.” The reception of the novel manifests, in the words of Catherine Gallagher, that “at any single moment numerous unrealized pasts are still alive within us” (24). Inviting its readers to imagine how much worse things might have been in the past, Roth’s novel appears, in effect, to have spurred readers’ concurrent thinking of how possible it is to have a racist national leader in the present day and what consequences it may induce. In this essay, I take into serious account Roth’s insistence on “illuminat[ing] the past through the past” and the possibilities of the alternate-history novel for providing critical comments on the present and shaping the future. Taking cues from critics of alternate history, everyday life history, and affect studies, I argue that embedding his personal memories of anti-Semitism in the 1940s within a fictional framework in which Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt, Roth in The Plot Against America enacts a similar yet different type of memory activism than he does in his autobiography. 4 Memory activism, as Yu-cheng Lee [Li Youcheng] elaborates, “aims at righting wrongs, seeking justice, and bringing both hope for the slandered and comfort for the humiliated, so as to rebuild human dignity and to restore history as faithfully as possible” (16).5 Yifat Gutman likewise maintains that memory can “serve as a tool for social and political change” and “a counter-hegemonic force in society” (16). Based on his personal memories of the anti- Semitism in the 1940s, Roth’s The Facts, like other Jewish or ethnic minority writers’ life stories, contributes to “‘counter-history,’ that is, history from below or off to the side” (Gallagher 12). Similarly, as my discussion below seeks to substantiate, The Plot Against America can be read as a literary counterfactual in support of “the historical reparations efforts” that began in the 1970s and 1980s (Gallagher 18), as it, first of all, relies as heavily on Roth’s memories as it does on his imagination. Secondly, it explores “how a historical revision would be registered on the level of commonplace individuals, through habits of thought, modes of speech, routines of daily life” (Gallagher 19). In terms of restoring part

3. For more details on a post-9/11 reading of the novel, see Shostak (2011b), p. 112; Shiffman (2009), pp. 61-62; Lewis (2008), p. 247; Cooper (2005), p. 252; and Kellman (2008), p. 113. 4. I am deeply indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing this to my attention. 5. Lee’s Memory is written originally in Chinese. Unless otherwise indicated, all of the translations quoted in this essay are my own. 62_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities of the 1940s anti-Semitic history through personal memories of both fictionalized and real Philp Roth in order to serve justice, The Plot Against America is as engaged on realistic representation of everyday life as The Facts. Yet, as an alternate-history novel, The Plot Against America does more than simply impel its readers to know and to try to understand the often neglected anti- Semitic past of the U.S.. While accurately observing most historical facts, Roth’s novel has, after all, a significant point of divergence from actual history as it speculates on how the course of history might have been altered had pro-Nazi Lindbergh been elected. As a literary endeavor to “illuminate the past through the past,” The Plot Against America applies moral judgment to history and reveals how Roth’s memory is entangled with the emotion of fear, as exemplified in the novel’s speculative accounts of alternate history in the form as nightmare scenarios. Roth’s fear is a fear specifically of Nazism and anti-Semitism to arise and become rampant at any time, and a fear, in general, of a totalizing vision of American history that, in stressing the nation’s progress and perfectibility, disregards the heterogeneity of American experiences and identities. It is also a fear shared by several other American writers who have made similar conjectures as to the terrifying prospect of the triumph of Nazi Germany. In the vein of Gavriel Rosenfeld’s argument in The World Hitler Never Made, Roth’s alternate-history novel, as it expresses popular memory of the turbulent history of the U.S., is geared towards furnishing a cultural history of powerful fears haunting the American imagination since the end of WWII to the present. Especially at the present time when so many of the novel’s readers are discerning Lindbergh’s double in President Bush and Trump, The Plot Against America has become part of an evolving culture of fear from which it draws its force and to which it lends itself. Unraveling the relationship of fear with both memory and activism, I suggest that The Plot Against America does not merely manifest remembering as a tactic or an act of resistance, but, in a culture of fear, it also illuminates the influences of emotions on how one remembers and possible practices of resistance that ordinary individuals can be actively involved in on a small scale and on a daily basis.

Perpetual Fear Both epigraphs given at the beginning of this essay accentuate the interwoven relationship between memory and fear. Yet, according to affect studies, fear is often, if not always, related to the future. According to Sara Ahmed, fear “involves an anticipation of hurt or injury” (65, emphasis original). Lars Svendsen claims that “the core of fear is the assumption of a negative future situation” (39). Whereas it may seem unintelligible, if not contradictory, to say that fear “presides over . . . memories” (Roth 2004: 1) and “projects us from the present into a future” (Ahmed 65), The Plot Against America proves it is not. On the one hand, Roth’s allohistorical account of a pro-Nazi politician winning the American presidential election in 1940 is historically plausible as it is convincingly supported by detailed historical documentation and Roth’s personal memories of rampant anti-Semitism. On the other hand, alternate history is not real and can at best be seen as “what-if” or “almost-was” (Schneider-Mayerson 71, emphasis LIAO Pei-chen_“America First”_63 original). The structural possibility of the alternate history resonates, to some extent, with that of fear, whose object, “rather than arriving, might pass us by” (Ahmed 65). Just as “the possibility of the loss of the object makes what is fearsome all the more fearsome” (Ahmed 65), Roth’s alternate history that was not quite present makes it more fearsome than what the actual history of anti-Semitism was. It is such a perpetual fear of a past that could be worse than what it had been realized and of the worst yet to come that may haunt Roth’s readers when they read the novel. Although the Nazi-sympathizer Lindbergh never ruled the U.S., the fear of Roth and his fictionalized protagonist Philip, as reflected in The Plot Against America, is reasonable and should not be mistaken for anxiety that is nowhere, given the prevalence of anti-Semitism in American history. Right at the beginning of his autobiography, The Facts, Roth recounts the insecurity he felt growing up in late 1930s Newark, New Jersey. When he was nine years old, Roth recalls, he was aware of hostilities that broke out abroad and, more terrifyingly, blatant anti-Semitic acts which gentile Americans frequently lashed out at Jews, physically or verbally. On the one hand, as Roth writes, “[t]he greatest menace while I was growing up came from abroad, from the Germans and the Japanese, our enemies because we were Americans” (20). On the other hand, “[a]t home the biggest threat came from Americans who opposed or resisted us—or condescended to us or rigorously excluded us—because we were Jews” (20). In the late 1930s, for , faced with both internal trouble and outside aggression, nowhere was home. Roth’s authentic and detailed autobiographical account in The Facts reverberates throughout the novel’s adult narrator Philip’s flashbacks to his childhood experience. Under the circumstances, the threat of Lindbergh is as easily identifiable in the context of the novel as it was in actual history. The anti-Semitism that Roth portrays in The Plot Against America also reminds his readers of the Holocaust that persecuted the Jews in Nazi Germany and other European countries in the 1930s and 40s. Indeed, as Lee points out, the Holocaust is a historical trauma that is “both personal (including family and relatives) and collective (including the entire community and race)” (12). It has played “a very important part in trauma theories over the past decades” (Li 12-13). Precisely because the Holocaust “carries a universal meaning despite its being a uniquely Jewish tragedy” (Li 13), President Trump’s nostalgic evocation of “America First,” which was formerly proposed by Lindbergh as an initiative to condemn American Jews, becomes especially alarming. It shows that Trump is either ignorant of the history of anti-Semitism or, more dreadfully, deliberately provoking ethnic hatred, confrontation, and conflict. As Lee warns, “people with iniquitous intentions obviously do not mean to remember or to seek historical truth, but instead, they take advantage of memories to realize their ambition and fond illusion” (170-171). When the current American leader vows to put America first and chooses to forget the anti-Semitic past during WWII or even distorts historical reality, Roth’s The Plot Against America at once serves as a mnemonic to keep that past alive and a warning to some of his contemporary readers, fearful of what might become of the U.S. to be governed from Trump’s white supremacist viewpoint. Stressing both the historical truth of anti-Semitism and the historical possibility of having Lindbergh as president of the U.S., Roth’s The Plot Against America employs 64_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities the realistic style so characteristic of his later works while focusing on the everyday life of ordinary American Jews in the 1940s. As Debra Shostak has observed, Roth “provides a rich texture of real things, drawing on the sensual detail of his memory” and “shows the interpenetration of the material world with the self in time” (2011a: 12). In this way, his novel “reveals the common American history in the smallest of things” (2011a: 12). That is indeed what Roth has aimed for in The Plot Against America. As Roth grants in “The Story behind,” “my talent isn’t for imagining events on the grand scale.” Rather, he explains,

I imagined something small, really, small enough to be credible, I hoped, that could easily have happened in an American presidential election in 1940, when the country was angrily divided between the Republican isolationists . . . and the Democratic interventionists. . . . (2004a)

Here it can be seen that the principle guiding Roth’s writing of the novel appears to resonate with the agenda of the everyday-life historians whose scale or focus of writing, as John Brewer remarks, “is often small, personal and intimate” (90). Very much like an everyday-life historian whose shift in scale “offers the possibility not merely of greater complexity but of greater completeness” (Brewer 97), Roth attends to stories of common people who are usually elided completely in official history. In fact, not only do everyday-life historians and realistic fiction writers attend to ordinary individuals, their habits, and daily life, but the alternate historians do. Moreover, the rise of the counterfactual historical study since the 1980s onwards has remarkably coincided with that of the study of everyday life history, as well as American ethnic novels. According to Brewer’s research, the study of the history of the everyday emerged in 1960s West Germany, under the influence of capitalism, Marxism, and the Leftist critical tradition (91-92). The study reached its culmination in the 1980s with the publication of The History of Everyday Life, which, according to its editor Alf Lüdtke, revolves around “the life and survival of those who have remained largely anonymous in history—the ‘nameless’ multitudes in their workday trials and tribulations” (4). Just as European historians turned their attention to formerly invisible activities of the everyday life to narrate history from below, in the 1970s and 1980s, which are often thought of as “the reparations decades in the US” (Gallagher 18), American ethnic minority writers retold, for example, the stories of “the westward movement of European settlers, slavery and emancipation” (Gauthier 9), and alternate historians “began to demonstrate the historical possibility that, for example, the U.S. might have adopted more equitable policies toward native populations” (Gallagher 18). Emerging in the political climate of reparations and resulting largely from the desire for historical justice, all of the aforementioned interrelated studies precede the increase in alternate-history novels in the 1990s and might have arguably propelled Roth into writing The Plot Against America. In The Plot Against America, wherein alternate history, counterhistory, and everyday life history are intermingled, Roth portrays a dystopian alternative world LIAO Pei-chen_“America First”_65 through the changes in the everyday life of Philip, his family, and neighbors, to reveal the consequences of the grand narrative of “America First” on ordinary individuals. If, as Lüdtke highlights, the overt political aim of the history of everyday life is “to awaken a feeling of Betroffenheit, personal emotional concern” for the oppressed and marginalized (23), Roth’s novel does so by characterizing the emotion of fear as a habit cultivated and acquired over time by his protagonists after Lindbergh is nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. The “perpetual fear” that is underscored in the opening line of the novel might haunt its readers, as discussed previously, who become aware of the structural possibility of the novel’s alternate history and the futurity of fear. In the novel’s alternate timeline, however, the double meanings of the word “perpetual” is played out. “Perpetual,” understood in the sense of “happening all the time,” refers to the control of fear over Philip’s memories in childhood and its lingering into adulthood; yet, in the sense of “continuing forever or often repeated in the same way,” “perpetual” also suggests that Philip’s feeling of fear is based on repetition, like habits. To describe the emotion of fear as habits, as Svendsen contends, is to underscore that fear is “not simply something ‘given,’ but something that can be cultivated and changed” (45). Roth’s novel, like Svendsen’s hypothesis, draws attention to the “habitual nature” of “what could be described as low-intensity fear” that “surrounds us and forms a backdrop of our experiences and interpretations of the world” (46). The acquired habit of fear influences the way the novel’s Jewish protagonists view their homes and a series of daily activities closely related to them, to the extent that some of them surrender and become fearmongers, whereas others do everything possible, including small things in daily life, either to avoid or to face, reduce, and overcome fears.

Insecurity at Home The first four pages of Roth’s novel delineate Philip’s family’s flat, street, and neighborhood in Newark. A flat, street, or neighborhood is not simply a place. Rather, to everyday-life historians, each of these is a “location” of paramount importance “in determining the identity of the group, the will to collective action, and the responses of external forces” (Steege et al. 363). When fear changes the way Roth’s protagonists view these locations of home, it thereupon reflects their changing views of the self and the community. Before Lindbergh’s nomination, young Philip and his family appear to feel at home in the Weequahic neighborhood, where they build strong bonds with their Jewish friends and neighbors. As Philip recalls,

We were a happy family in 1940. My parents were outgoing, hospitable people, their friends culled from among my father’s associates at the office and from the women who along with my mother had helped to organize the Parent-Teacher Association at newly built Chancellor Avenue School, where my brother and I were pupils. All were Jews. (2)

Philip’s memories of a blissful Jewish enclave support Ron Johnston et al.’s argument that ‘[s]patial separation among minority groups may also result from positive goals” (211). That is, members of minority groups, like the American Jews that Roth depicts 66_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities in the novel, “may wish to congregate in certain areas to facilitate intra-community interaction, to use community-focused facilities, such as churches, clubs and shops, and as the bases for community-based businesses” (Johnston et al. 211). “Such a desire to congregate,” Johnston et al. suggest, “reflects a wish to sustain their group cultures and identities, rather than to distance themselves from their hosts” (211). Roth’s novel likewise refutes the claim that the greater the minority groups’ segregation is, the less their assimilation by focusing on such details as the clothing and accent of the Weequahic residents, either outdoors or in their houses. For instance, even as a seven- year-old boy, Philip remembers, he could easily notice that “[n]obody in the neighborhood had a beard or addressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skull-cap” (3), and “hardly anyone in the vicinity spoke with an accent” (4). Living in a Jewish neighborhood, Philip considers himself “an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world” (7). Being both Jewish and American, Philip, his parents, and their neighbors feel no conflict of allegiances even if they congregate in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark. After Lindbergh is nominated as the Republican candidate and is elected president, however, Philip’s household and the Weequahic neighborhood change drastically as a result of the increasing tension between Jewishness and Americanness that gradually threatens the local residents’ self-perception. It starts, first of all, with Philip’s cousin Alvin’s leaving for “to join the Canadian armed forces, just as he said he would, and fight on the British side against Hitler” (44). Being a Jew, Alvin finds it impossible to side with the isolationist U.S. even before Lindbergh’s presidency. Then, the family’s friends, one after another, leave the neighborhood. Some of them choose to migrate to Canada for fear of anti-Semitic prejudice emanating from the Lindbergh administration. This is because Lindbergh has proven himself a bigot, following his nomination as a candidate, by denouncing “Jews over the airwaves to a national audience as ‘other peoples’” (16). Within weeks of the inauguration in the novel’s alternate timeline, Lindbergh meets personally with Hitler and signs “‘an understanding’ guaranteeing peaceful relations between Germany and the United States” (53-54). At a time of such political turmoil, Roth shows that a foreign country like neighboring Canada can be more homey to American Jews than their anti-Semitic homeland. Even Philip’s parents talk about moving to Canada, a response which recalls what Steege et al. have said about ordinary people’s “limitations” and “responsibility for making their own history” (362). Indeed, the American Jews in Roth’s novel have limited agency, considering they are nearly powerless in the face of the anti-Semitism that threatens their lives and homes. Yet, the decision to abandon their local community and to live and fight in another country “denotes a type of unruly behavior that is potentially liberating for the individual but simultaneously continues to interact with the structures of power” (Steege et al. 373). To put it simply, even if the American Jews in the novel are not powerful enough to control the situations and to feel no fear, many of them do not yield to the authorities that menace. However, just as in reality Trump has his supporters, in Roth’s novel, not all Jews hate Lindbergh. Some people, like Philip’s aunt, Evelyn, and her fiancée, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, are fearmongers who should be held responsible, at least partly, for LIAO Pei-chen_“America First”_67 heightening the tension between the local Jewish community and white American society. In full support of Lindbergh’s foreign policy of isolationism and the national policy of assimilation, they voluntarily help the newly created Office of American Absorption. Rabbi Bengelsdorf even serves as “the first director of the OAA office for the state of New Jersey” (85) and assists in running two programs, Just Folks and Homestead 42, to assimilate religious and ethnic minorities into the larger society. Despite the fictionality of the OAA office, its establishment truthfully reflects the predominant role that the concept of assimilation played in the 1940s and 1950s American society that “saw conflict as generated by ‘maladjustment’” (Zunz et al. 53). Under the circumstances, anyone who does not conform to the social norms of cohesion is at risk of becoming an unwelcomed outsider at one’s own home. To take the risk or not is a difficult question that all Jews in the novel have to confront. Roth portrays how Just Folks, “a volunteer work program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life” (84), causes conflicts between family members rather than unite them. For Philip’s father, for example, the program is “the first step in a Lindbergh plan to separate Jewish children from their parents, to erode the solidarity of the Jewish family” (86). Philip’s brother Sandy, however, sides with his aunt. “Under the auspices of Just Folks,” as the novel’s narrator ironically puts it, Sandy leaves home for the first time “for a summer ‘apprenticeship’ with a tobacco farmer” (84). There Sandy discovers Mr. Mawhinney, the farmer, to be a “paragon” (93), as opposed to his father, who is “only a Jew” (94). Obviously, after only a summer in Kentucky, Sandy is brainwashed into thinking that Jewishness is a defect. It is a given that Mr. Mawhinney is an almost perfect man, as the phrase “[i]t went without saying” indicates, for he is “a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness” (93). To Sandy, it pertains above all to whiteness and Christianity, from which every perfection is derived, despite the fact that the white Christian majority “subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro” (93). Through Sandy’s physical and emotional distance from the Jewish community in Newark and his growing yet blind admiration for white Christians, Roth construes white supremacy as a myth that the U.S. has lived by since the founding of the nation. Even though in the 2008 and 2012 elections an African American was elected president, the outcome of the 2016 election and the surge in white supremacy during the first year of Trump’s presidency reflect ongoing challenges that the American society is facing in dealing with race relations.6 In the novel, the Jews look at their homes habitually in fear, as a second program, Homestead 42, is subsequently established as the OAA’s new nationwide initiative. This particular habit of perceiving homes in fear appears to be carried, from Roth’s

6 . For more detailed discussions on the surge in white supremacy in the Trump era, see Shugerman (2018) and Beckett (2017). Both Shugerman and Beckett cite the May torch rally in Charlottesville, Virginia as an example of increasingly violent white supremacist provocations. Shugerman furthermore comments on Trump’s inauguration speech and controversial promises to stop Muslims and undocumented immigrants from entering the U.S. 68_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities alternate-history novel, into the present day. To more than a few of Roth’s readers, Homestead 42 is reminiscent of post-9/11 Homeland Security.7 In reality, there were also several precedents before. Roth bases the fictional Homestead 42 on precedents that were implemented in accordance with the Homestead Act, which was passed in 1862 and remained in effect until 1988 in actual history. In a tone as ironic as when he is talking about Just Folks, the adult Philip remembers the “auspices” of Homestead 42 (218). The Lindbergh administration promises the Jewish families that are “fortunate enough to have been chosen” (218) that they will receive “exciting new opportunities to expand their horizons and to strengthen their country” (204). The fact is that “[t]wo hundred and twenty-five Jewish families have already been told to vacate the cities of America’s northeast in order to be shipped thousands of miles from family and friends” (229). The true intention of launching Homestead 42 is to scatter “frightened, paranoid ghetto Jews,” as Sandy learns from Aunt Evelyn (227). Unlike Philip’s family and Jewish neighbors, who consider Weequahic a hospitable ethnic enclave, Aunt Evelyn constantly refers to it as a ghetto. When talking with young Philip, she associates residential segregation negatively with self-isolation and ignores the positive goals of the Jewish neighborhoods (216). Instead of benefiting the chosen Jews as it claims, Homestead 42 merely tears them from their families and homes, relocating them where they have no friends or support community. For example, because Philip’s father is selected by the OAA office in a partnership with Metropolitan Life to be “transferred from Metropolitan’s Newark district to a district office opening in Danville, Kentucky” (205), the whole family must accompany him. Seeing how his parents are put in a state of agitation and not wanting to leave the neighborhood himself, Philip decides to secretly ask Aunt Evelyn for help. He betrays his playmate and downstairs neighbor, Seldon Wishnow, whose mother also works for Metropolitan Life, by causing Mrs. Wishnow to be transferred to Kentucky. When Philip’s father decides to quit his job rather than be transferred to Kentucky, it results in Philip’s imagining Seldon, “off living with his mother, the only Jewish kid in Danville, Kentucky” (239). For fear of losing the local community they are deeply attached to, Philip and his father do everything they could to secure their home, while the most unfortunate Wishnow family can do nothing but to rebuild their home elsewhere and nowhere. Fear is repeatedly and endlessly felt in the novel because when one finally feels safe from the threats of Just Folks and Homestead 42, a third program is introduced. After more and more of Philip’s neighbors leave the neighborhood, both voluntarily and involuntarily, members of other ethnic groups are moved in. Philip’s new neighbors are an Italian family arranged through “a previously unpublicized section of the homesteading plan called the Good Neighbor Project” (280). On the pretext of “‘enrich[ing]’ the ‘Americanness’ of everyone involved,” the Good Neighbor Project “introduce[s] a steadily increasing number of non-Jewish residents into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods” (280). The real reason is, however, to disperse and separate Jews and to prevent them from unifying against the government. Clearly, to the Lindbergh administration, Jewishness is the very antithesis of Americanness. Such a

7. See, for example, Basu (2015), p. 144 and Kaplan (2015), p. 152. LIAO Pei-chen_“America First”_69 prejudice, presuming Jews are hostile to American principles, renders a Jewish enclave undesirable. Through the displacement of Jewish families, their replacement by gentile families in local communities, and, above all, their everyday fear, Roth demonstrates how national policies wreck ordinary people’s lives, leaving them torn from their communities and prime targets for alienation and loneliness.

Stamp Collecting and Stump Care

At the same time as the habit of fear is gradually acquired through frequent and repeated anticipation of the home under threat by expected and unexpected national policies, Roth’s novel also draws its readers’ attention to other habits that form the texture of everyday life. In particular, Philip’s waxing and waning enthusiasm for stamp collecting and his daily care for Alvin’s stump shed light on what Veena Das calls “ordinary ethics.” By “ordinary ethics,” Das means “thinking of the ethical as a dimension of everyday life in which we are not aspiring to escape the ordinary but rather to descend into it as a way of becoming moral subjects” (134). Das emphasizes “the importance of habit as the site on which the working of ordinary ethics can be traced” (142). As if to echo Das, Roth does not reduce Philip’s habitual actions of collecting stamps and caring for stumps to simple behavior. Rather, Roth foregrounds the context in which Philip’s habits are formed and broken, in order to illuminate “what it takes to allow life to be renewed, to achieve the everyday, under conditions of . . . catastrophic violence that erode the very possibility of the ordinary” (Das 134). The novel also emphasizes Philip’s agency and intentionality as well as his moral responsibility for others. Not many critics have noticed the importance of stamp collecting in The Plot Against America. Joshua Kotzin is a rare exception. In his article, Kotzin refers to two stamps that are issued in 1932 and 1927 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Arbor Day and Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, respectively. He analyzes these two stamps at great length because “both are explicitly described as commemorative stamps and thus reside at the nexus of history and national identity” (49). The Arbor Day stamp shows “two children planting a tree,” and therefore, “represents a beginning, a birth” (47). In the novel, the stamp commemorating Lindbergh’s famous 1927 solo transatlantic flight has a symbolic meaning of birth as well. It is partly because the stamp is a ten-cent airmail, “leading inexorably to national declarations of power, to the viability of the national airmail system” (Kotzin 50) and partly because Lindbergh’s completion of the solo flight coincides with “the day in the spring of 1927 that my mother discovered herself to be pregnant with my older brother,” as Philip recalls (Roth 2004: 5). Considering the symbolism of birth associated with Lindbergh’s solo flight, Kotzin argues that “this introduction of the figure of Lindbergh in the novel suggests his interest to Roth for more reasons than simply his anti-Semitism” (49). Kotzin has a valid point here, but his attention is paid simply to the symbolic meanings associated with the Lindbergh commemorative stamp. If Philip’s collecting stamps is understood as a habit that is practiced in everyday life, the formation and collapse of the habit appears to be a response to the American society’s anti-Semitism and isolationism in the 1940s. Plainly, some may argue that a 70_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities habit or a ritual is “an unthinking, reflexive action” (Steege et al. 368). French sociologist Henri Lefebvre, for example, famously conceptualizes and formulates the critique of everyday life under capitalism. According to Shuli Chang [Zhang Shuli], Lefebvre’s critique is targeted specifically at “the vulgarity, commercialism, and regularity of post-war life in ,” aiming to “catch a glimpse of ‘extraordinary’ creativity in daily routines, the variation and dissonance out of common boredom” (23).8 Instead of seeking extraordinary moments in everyday life so as to break the cultivated habit of fear, Roth’s The Plot Against America paradoxically proposes the activism of the everyday by giving prominence to “the positive and proactive meaning of daily life practice which has long been considered stereotypically reflexive and taken for granted” (Zhang 23-24). First of all, Philip’s habit of collecting stamps is not a result of boredom. Rather, it is inspired by his admiration for President Roosevelt, who supports the American entry into WWII and strives to end the Holocaust in Europe. On the first page of the novel the narrator introduces himself, at the age of seven, as “an embryonic stamp collector inspired like millions of kids by the country’s foremost philatelist, President Roosevelt” (1). When Philip’s stamp collecting becomes a habit, it may at first seem dull and tedious, but it in fact bespeaks the stability of American society under the leadership of President Roosevelt, who provides the American people with a safe and peaceful environment wherein they can cultivate daily habits. His regular life that supports a simple hobby like collecting stamps comes to an end “on that terrible Saturday” when Lindbergh officially announces his candidacy (22). Philip recalls his fear of not being able to collect stamps any more: “[A]ll I could think of . . . were the old stamped envelopes and the embossed stamps on the prepaid newspaper wrappers . . . and how I would now have no chance “to obtain” them because I was a Jew” (22). Philip’s memory of Lindbergh’s presidency is accompanied by a rise in anti- Semitism, leading to the conflict between his Jewish identity and stamp collecting. Philip’s stamp collection also indirectly symbolizes his nostalgia for the past and his vision of the future. In addition to the two aforementioned commemorative stamps, in Philip’s collection are two other notable stamps, on one of which “was Booker T. Washington, the first Negro to appear on an American stamp” (23). The other is “the brown 1938 one-and-a-half-cent stamp that pictured the first president’s wife in profile” (74). Even though Philip does not have the 1902 stamp that a tour guide in Washington D.C. tells him about, he knows that it is “the first stamp ever to show an American woman” (74). The two stamps that show Booker T. Washington and Martha Washington represent young Philip’s ideal of Americanness: democracy, liberty, and equality. Immersing himself in the ideal, Philip suddenly feels like American again, as if “all the complications of our being a Jewish family in Lindbergh’s Washington simply vanished” (74). In the past before Lindbergh’s presidency, Philip remembers, “at the start of an assembly program, you rose to your feet and sang the national anthem, giving it everything you had. (74). The action of singing “the national anthem” signifies Philip’s loyalty to and identification with the U.S., but the nation he trusted exists only in his

8 . Chang’s article is written originally in Chinese. Unless otherwise indicated, all of the translations are my own. LIAO Pei-chen_“America First”_71 memories. When he first obtained the Booker T. Washington, it gave him hope he would see the first Jew on an American stamp in the near future. American society has, however, made progress at such a slow pace that it took twenty-six years for the first Jew, Einstein, to appear on an American stamp (23). If, as Roth’s novel makes clear, it has not been easy for Jewish Americans to be accepted by American society, it remains arguable whether members of other ethnic groups will share in the bright future President Trump has promised as a strong advocate of “America first.” In The Plot Against America, stamps are everyday objects through which memories of the good old days are evoked. They also vividly embody Philip’s fear of and struggle against anti-Semitism. In the novel, Philip’s fear is materialized in different nightmares he has about losing his stamps. In one of the nightmares, when he picks up the stamp album dropped on the way to Earl’s, he is “stunned” to find, in his twelve 1932 Washington Bicentennials, the portraits of Washington are all replaced by Hitler, and “on the ribbon beneath each portrait . . . the name lettered across the ribbon was “Hitler” (43). Falling “out of the bed,” Philip at first feels relieved to be awakened from the nightmare, but when he “look[s] next at the album’s facing page to see what, if anything, had happened to my 1934 National Parks set of ten,” he is shocked by what he sees: “[A]cross everything in America that was the bluest and the greenest and the whitest and to be preserved forever in these pristine reservations, was printed a black swastika” (43). This nightmare within a nightmare that the narrator describes in detail very early on in the novel foreshadows the nightmarish reality in which Philip and all the other Jews are trapped. Just as, in his dream, Hitler’s name and portrait replace Washington’s, the U.S. ruled by Lindbergh turns out to be nothing but a derivative of Hitler’s Europe. Shostak thus views “Philip’s prized stamp collection” as a symbol of his “innocent dream of America” and the nightmare as the “vanish[ing]” dream (2011b: 112). Not only does the stamp collection function as an “ideal” (Shostak 2011b: 112) that Philip pursues, but the habit of collecting stamps is also an individualized practice of everyday life. Through the practice of collecting stamps, Philip realizes his admiration for President Roosevelt, deepens his friendship with Earl, and becomes acquainted with American history. The series of nightmares presented at the beginning of the novel show how Philip’s life begins its descent into the chaos that ensues after the presidential election. In 1942, a year after Lindbergh’s ascendancy to the presidency in Roth’s novel, young Philip runs away from home, hoping to live in an orphanage and thereby escape the troubles resulting from his being a Jew. The only thing he cannot leave behind is his stamp album because, for Philip, stamps are as precious as life. He cannot bear the thought of his “album ever being broken up or thrown out or, worst of all, given away wholly intact to another,” so he takes it with him (233). On his way toward the orphanage grounds, he is accidentally kicked in the head by a horse, and lies “bleeding and unconscious” until he is discovered by Seldon (233). When he wakes up in a hospital, he is devastated “because my stamp album, my greatest treasure, that which I could not live without, was gone” (235). To some extent, both Philip’s running away from home and the loss of his stamp album are the consequences of anti-Semitism. As discussed previously, during Lindbergh’s presidency, anti-Semitic government policies 72_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities uproot hundreds of Jewish boys. Although Philip is not forced to leave home, as Seldon and his mother are, he determines “to resist a disaster our family and our friends could no longer elude and might not survive” by erasing his Jewish identity and becoming nobody (232). As the adult narrator recalls, “I wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible. I wanted to be an orphan” (233). Having lost his self-identity echoes the loss of the stamp album, which is “[g]one and irreplaceable. Like—and utterly unlike—losing a leg” (235). Philip’s comparison of the loss of the stamp album to the loss of a leg exemplifies how one’s life and identity can both be disrupted when one’s habitual routine is broken. “Losing a leg” may be a metaphor that the novel’s narrator utilizes to describe young Philip’s utter devastation after losing his stamp album. Losing a leg is, however, a cruel reality that Philip’s orphaned cousin, Alvin, has to live with. It is a painful sacrifice Alvin has made after leaving home to fight in Canada against Nazi Germany. Philip clearly remembers the first day Alvin returns home from Canada. He has “never before seen anyone so skeletal or so dejected” as Alvin, whose “left trouser leg dropped straight down from the knee” (127) because his “[s]tump broke down” (129). Having lost his parents in his youth, Alvin returns from Canada to live with Philip’s family in Newark and shares Philip’s room. Not until the fourth night does Philip see Alvin’s stump and prosthetic leg because “[o]n the first three nights Alvin had been careful to change into his pajamas in the bathroom and then to hop back to hang his clothes in the closet” (136). These daily details stored in the adult narrator’s memory exhibit Alvin’s strong sense of shame after losing his left leg. His broken sense of self is reflected in his “stump,” which, as the narrator describes, is “the blunt remnant of something whole that belonged there and once had been there” (136). Comparing young Philip’s stamps with Alvin’s stump, Shostak contends, “If his stamps are the ideal, Philip’s cousin Alvin’s amputated stump, the result of his defiant entry into World War II, is the real” (2011b: 112). Shostak persuasively argues that “[t]he stump connotes inevitable suffering, mortality, and Alvin’s participation within the public sphere—it is the wound of history” (2011b: 112). Indeed, unlike Philip’s father, who passively resists by verbally attacking Lindbergh with his friends at home, Alvin has chosen to join the war. However, his loss of a leg cannot change the reality of Lindbergh’s ruling the U.S. and the atrocities perpetrated against innocent Jews. Alvin resents his own powerlessness, as evidenced by his shouting at Philip’s father: “The Jews? I wrecked my life for the Jews! . . . And look, look, Uncle Fucking Disaster—I have no fucking leg!” (297, emphasis original). In The Plot Against America, both Philip’s stamps and Alvin’s stump mark ordinary people’s struggle and impotence when facing changes over which they have no control. No matter how their life is changed by external forces, Philip and other Jews in the novel manage to keep their life in order. This can be seen in Philip’s learning to care for Alvin’s stump and prosthetic leg. Even though Philip has never lived with disabled people before, and Alvin’s moving into his room could be seen as an imposition, he is empathetic and becomes Alvin’s primary caretaker until Alvin can live independently. After repeated practice, in less than a week Philip learns to bandage Alvin’s stump, “without again throwing up,” and Alvin “hadn’t once to complain of the bandaging LIAO Pei-chen_“America First”_73 being too loose or too tight” (142). Doing it “nightly” as an everyday routine, Philip receives from Alvin “the Canadian medal that he’d been awarded ‘for performance under exceptional circumstances’” (145). Indeed, losing his treasured stamp album and caring for an amputated stump are exceptional circumstances not commonly seen in a child’s everyday life, but they become changes that young Philip has to get used to during Lindbergh’s presidency. Forced to adjust to these exceptional changes, Philip chooses not to succumb to the status quo. If losing the stamp album connotes Philp’s powerlessness in the face of rampant anti-Semitism, caring for Alvin’s leg attests his sense of moral responsibility for others. After Alvin leaves home for work, Philip’s playmate Seldon moves back from Kentucky to live with Philip’s family in Newark because his mother has been killed in an anti-Semitic riot, leaving him a homeless orphan. Looking at Seldon, who shares a room with him, Philip thinks to himself, “There was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, and until he was taken to live with his mother’s married sister in Brooklyn ten months later, I was the prosthesis” (362). If “stumps” are the emblem of broken families and limited and disordered life under the impact of the grand narrative of “America first,” the symbolic “prosthesis” that Philip talks about here represents Jewish people’s endeavor to help each other, in order to complete their lives, rebuild homes, and bring order and peace to their everyday life.

Conclusion

Roth’s The Plot Against America records in detail the everyday life of Philip’s family in terms, especially, of their cultivating the habit of fear as a way of looking at homes and neighborhood, and their learning to acquire other habits to reduce the fear that is to emerge at any time with the Lindbergh administration’s anti-Semitic policy. The novel’s alternate history concurrently reconstructs the American history of the 1940s from below, and offers perspective into the historical truth of anti-Semitism that has often been left out of official history. As Lee contends, “even if memories are broken, complicated and malleable, critically summoning, cleaning up, and reconstructing memoires is itself a form of activism as well as an inevitable act of ethical responsibility” (171). Although Roth’s novel presents an alternate history that contains fictional elements, it truthfully depicts anti-Semitism based on Roth’s personal memories of childhood. Its ultimate aim is humane consideration of the plight of American Jews, and, through a realistic portrayal of ordinary people’s daily lives, it articulates the complexity of history. Roth’s novel shows that any history from below is always counterhistory that resists the grand narrative of “America first” because, as opposed to the homogenous and single- truth discourse of national history, the histories of the everyday foreground humanism and multiculturalism. Roth succeeds in combing memory activism with the activism of the everyday by featuring the American Jewish people’s limitations and agency, as seen, respectively, in their everyday fear and acts of resistance on a small scale. Preserving memories of anti-Semitism and evoking perpetual fear through alternate history, Roth’s novel urges its readers to think about the problem of white supremacy that continues, almost persistently, to dominate American society. In 74_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities fictional Lindbergh, many readers see not only current American President Trump but also Bush. Readers’ response manifests the effectiveness of the novel as a tool of memory activism. Although Roth’s novel is primarily concerned with how individualized memoires of the past function as tools to mediate history, it also provides a frame, as a form of literary representation and imagination, to transmit personal memories culturally and to supply critical literacy with which to rethink collective memory and identity in terms of active citizenship. Featuring the American Jewish people’s limited agency in the face of the white supremacist policies often linked to an “America First” attitude, Roth specifically invites his readers to ponder the role that they play in creating their own history, either by becoming Trump’s supporters, like Philip’s pro-Lindbergh aunt and Rabbi Bengelsdorf, or by making every effort to help themselves and others, like Philip’s father’s quitting his job, Alvin’s leaving Newark to fight in Canada, and Philip’s caring for Alvin’s crippled leg and keeping orphaned Seldon company. Roth’s activism of the everyday exemplifies the possibility of ordinary ethics as a starting point from which to critically rethink and challenge the grand narrative of “America First,” then and now.

WORKS CITED

Ahmed, Sara (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge). Basu, Ann (2015). States of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America (New York: Bloomsbury). Beckett, Lois (2017). “The Year in Nazi Propaganda: Images of White Supremacy in Trump’s America.” , 27 Dec. (www.theguardian.com/media/2017/ dec/27/the-year-in-nazi-propaganda-images-of-white-supremacy-in-trumps- america). Brewer, John (2010). “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life.” Cultural and Social History 7.1: 87-109. Cooper, Alan (2005). “It Can Happen Here, or All in the Family Values: Surviving The Plot Against America.” Derek Parker Royal (ed.): Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Westport: Praeger), 241-254. Das, Veena (2012). “Ordinary Ethics.” Didier Fassin (ed.): A Companion to Moral Anthropology (Malden: John Wiley & Sons), 133-149. Gallagher, Catherine (2010). “Telling It like It Wasn’t.” Pacific Coast Philosophy, vol. 45: 12-25. Galupo, Scott (2017). “Donald Trump and The Plot Against America.” The Week, 1 Jan. (theweek.com/articles/670634/donald-trump-plot-against-america). Gauthier, Marni (2011). Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American History: Counterhistory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

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Gutman, Yifat (2016). Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel- Palestine (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press). Johnston, Ron, James Forrest & Michael Poulsen (2002). “The Ethnic Geography of EthniCities: The ‘American Model’ and Residential Concentration in London.” Ethnicities 2.2: 209-35. Kaplan, Brett Ashley (2015). Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth (New York: Bloomsbury). Kellman, Steven G (2008). “It Is Happening Here: The Plot Against America and the Political Moment.” Philip Roth Studies 4.2: 113-123. Kotzin, Joshua (2013). “The Pilot against America: Stamps, Airmail and History in The Plot Against America.” Philip Roth Studies 9.2: 45-55. Lefebvre, Henri (1991). Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso). Lewis, Charles (2008). “Real Planes and Imaginary Towers: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America as 9/11 Prosthetic Screen.” Ann Keniston & Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (eds.): Literature After 9/11 (New York: Routledge), 246-260. Li Youcheng [Lee Yu-cheng] (2016). Jiyi [Memory] (Taipei: Asianculture). Lüdtke, Alf (1995). “Introduction: What Is the History of Everyday Life and Who Are Its Practitioners?” Alf Lüdtke (ed.): The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life. Trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 3-40. Rosenfeld, Gavriel (2005). The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Roth, Philip (1989). The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography [1988] (New York: Penguin Books). Roth, Philip (2004). The Plot Against America (Boston: Houghton). Roth, Philip (2004a). “The Story behind The Plot Against America.” , 19 Sept. (www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/books/review/the-story-behind- the-plot-against-america.html). Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew (2009). “What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel.” American Studies 50.3/4: 63-83. Shiffman, Dan (2009). “The Plot Against America and History Post-9/11.” Philip Roth Studies 5.1: 61-73. Shostak, Debra (ed.) (2011). Philip Roth: , , The Plot Against America (New York: Contunuum). Shostak, Debra (2011a). “Introduction: Roth’s America.” Shostak (ed.):1-14. Shostak, Debra (2011b). “The Plot Against America: Introduction.” Shostak (ed.): 111- 114. Shugerman, Emily (2018). “White Supremacy Still Casts a Shadow over the Trump Presidency after a Year of Controversy.” The Independent, 20 Jan. (goo.gl/ KL3ZCP). Steege, Paul, et al (2008). “The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter.” The Journal of Modern History 80.2: 358-378. Svendsen, Lars (2008). A Philosophy of Fear (Frykt) [2007]. Trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion Books). Wood, Michael (2004). “Just Folks.” London Review of Books, 4 Nov.: 3-6. 76_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

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ABSTRACT

Taking cues from critics of alternate history, everyday life history, and affect studies, I argue that embedding his personal memories of anti-Semitism in the 1940s within a fictional framework in which Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America does more than simply impel its readers to know and to try to understand the often neglected anti-Semitic past of the U.S. As a literary counterfactual to “illuminate the past through the past,” it applies moral judgment to the grand narrative of “America First” and reveals how fear of white supremacy could become perpetual, like habits, to both the novel’s Jewish protagonists and contemporary readers. Unraveling the relationship of fear with both memory and activism, I suggest that The Plot Against America does not merely manifest remembering as a tactic or an act of resistance. Moreover, in a culture of fear, it illuminates the influences of emotions on how one remembers and possible practices of resistance that ordinary individuals can be actively involved in on a small scale and on a daily basis.

Keywords: The Plot Against America, America First, fear, memory activism, everyday life, anti-Semitism

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「美國優先」：《反美陰謀》之恐懼、 記憶行動主義與日常生活9

廖培真 國立成功大學

摘 要

本文援引架空歷史、日常生活史學和情動研究來檢視菲利普．羅斯的小說《反 美陰謀》。羅斯以林白在一九四○年總統大選打敗羅斯福為前提來改寫美國歷史， 卻又在這樣的虛擬框架中嵌入其童年對反猶太主義的記憶，《反美陰謀》因而所 訴求的不僅是讀者對這段經常被遺忘的美國反猶歷史的認識與理解。因為羅斯創 作的目的是要「重返過去以闡明過去」，本文主張此架空歷史小說同時也對「美 國優先」的巨型敘事提出道德批判，並且表露了小說的猶太主角和當代讀者對白 人優先主義如習慣般永無休止的恐懼。本文藉由檢視《反美陰謀》中恐懼與記憶 和行動主義之間的關係，探討小說如何彰顯記憶作為抵抗的策略與行動展現。更 重要的是，羅斯的小說在恐懼文化中闡明情感對記憶方式的影響，提出其他尋常 百姓在日常生活的基礎與有限活動中可積極參與和實踐的抵抗之道。

關鍵詞：《反美陰謀》、美國優先、恐懼、記憶行動主義、日常生活、反猶太主義

* LIAO Pei-chen is an associate professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Cheng Kung University. Her research interests include contemporary British fiction, South Asian diasporic fiction, post-9/11 fiction, postcolonial and globalization studies. Her book “Post”-9/11 South Asian Diasporic Fiction: Uncanny Terror was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. Her articles have appeared in Life Writing, NTU Studies in Language and Literature, Review of English and American Literature, and EurAmerica. She is currently working on a project about American after 9/11.