“[E]thnicity” has continued to be used widely as a description of and prescription for social life. Indeed, the acceptance and eventual celebration of ethnic difference was one of the most significant transitions of the twentieth century. Coincident with the increasing awareness of migration at the beginning of the century, a cosmopolitan appreciation of exotic difference arose. Writing in the days before World War I, a number of New York intellectuals embraced the rich diversity of the city, forecasting that the eclectic mix of global migrants was the future of U.S. society. Randolph Bourne’s vision of a “transnational America” (1916) and Horace Kallen’s description of “cultural pluralism” (1915) argued against the xenophobia that fueled the immigration exclusion acts of the same period, replacing it with an embrace of the different. The consumption by elite whites of the music and art of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, along with periodic fads for Oriental art and so-called primitive tribal objects, reflected an embrace of the exotic as valuable. The celebration of exoticism in theories about the cosmopolitan self laid the groundwork for two major developments concerning ethnicity. The first was the theoretical foundation for the commercialization of ethnic difference; the second was the creation of a new definition of elite, enlightened whiteness.

This is an excerpt from Henry Yu’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 106).