SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

Leslie Francis. But much like the aforementioned works, this book’s focus and its source
material limit its use for this project. Such existing scholarship on alienation tends to cover either
very general theoretical questions or very specific real-life situations, none of which seems as
applicable to my particular project as works like Romine’s and Womack’s, which explore
specific aspects of community and separatism through the lens of fictional textuality.
10 One such issue might be the motivation for separating in the first place; but, as Bertrand M.
Roehner and Leonard J. Rahilly point out in their book Separatism and Integration: A Study in
Analytical History, “Separatist forms of action can be described more objectively than
motivations” (23). I should note, though, that this work discusses actual separatism, rather than
fictional representations, and defines “separatist action” much more narrowly than I do: “By
definition, a separatist action is directed against the central government and its local
representatives: police, army, tax officials, judges” (Roehner and Rahilly 161). In a strictly
sociopolitical sense, this definition might be accurate; however, I find it too limiting. It seems to
conflate “radical nationalists” with “separatists.”
11 In her article “Female Suffering and Religious Devotion in American Pentecostalism,” R.
Marie Griffith defines Pentecostal home spaces and families in a larger sense than actual blood
relations: “‘Home’ also suggested relationships beyond the immediate family—whole
communities bound by ties of affection, compassion, and common belief” (191). This definition
supports the idea of the imagined community.
12 Other critics have noticed similar tendencies, occurring both in actual, historical veterans’
lives and in artistic representations of veterans’ experiences. In his book American Literature
and the Experience of Vietnam, for instance, Philip Beidler writes, “[Readjusting to life in The
World] was a problem of ‘vision’ in its largest sense—of having undergone an experience so
peculiar unto itself and its own insane dynamic as to make nothing in life ever look altogether
sane again—and subsequently (and here would be their real point of difference from other
veterans of other American wars), of being sentenced, by unspoken national consent, to solitary
confinement with the memory of it, urged to tell no tales, please, on the grounds that even were
the experience of Vietnam to prove susceptible eventually to certain methods of explanation,
there would be virtually no one in the entire country who would care to hear about it” (9). I read
“unspoken national consent” as an act of segregation, and I suggest that veterans often thought of
as separatist have indeed only been segregated.
25