| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The American Intellectual Tradition and Multiculturalism. By Hyungdae Lee. (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2004. xii, 228 pp. ISBN 89-951257-4-8.)
The American Studies Institute of Seoul, Korea, states as one of its purposes, "the task of studying and explaining American culture from an Asian perspective." All the authors in its monograph series are Koreans, and the publishing list includes subjects ranging from American foreign policy to literature to law and to race.	1
Hyungdae Lee has contributed to the series a polemical work. He is going after big game. Although the title of this book references multiculturalism, it constitutes for Lee only an epiphenomenon. Postmodernism furnishes the larger target, and Lee presses his quarry with abandon. Postmodernism constitutes for Lee a stark break from what he describes as "the American intellectual tradition." He believes it is a toxic import from Europe and an alien presence in American culture. Lee insists that in its recourse to identity politics—race, gender, ethnicity, religion—postmodernism fractures or dissolves nationhood or any sense of a collective American experience or a shared culture. In all notions of authority, postmodernists, Lee charges, see only discourses of power.	. . .

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