In 1973, when Richard Nixon accepted a custom-made LP titled Thank You, Mr. President—a gift from Country Music Association members under the leadership of Tex Ritter—it signaled the irrevocable fusion of country music with conservative politics. But this 15-track album did more than commemorate a presidency; it authenticated an ideological alliance, transforming a sociocultural flirtation into a permanent union, one whose reverberations would shape the genre’s memory landscape for decades to come.

This event, which I contend officiated the “arranged marriage” between the country music genre and conservative populism, symbolized far more than a gesture of political allegiance—it sounded a moment wherein the genre’s authenticity was officially co-opted and realigned to sing a conservative narrative. The presentation of this LP not only solidified country music’s future promoting right-wing jeremiads, but also strategically reimagined its past, anchoring the genre’s identity to a lyrically selective and exclusionary version of American cultural memory. The moment of exchange between the commander-in-chief and music city marked a definitive point in time in which public memory and authenticity were mobilized as rhetorical resources, carefully molding the contours of national identity politics.

To fully understand the implications of this deliberate conservative Nixonian alignment, I first turn to the broader rhetorical frameworks that shaped this cultural shift. By examining public memory as a lens, I will uncover how such moments rhetorically function as gateways for the reconstitution of collective identity.

Then, I will survey competing understandings of authenticity to argue it as a rhetorical construct rather than an inherent quality. In doing so, I argue that the Nixonian turn in country music redefined what it meant to be “authentically” American within the country genre. This authenticity was selectively framed, forgetting moments of departure and aligning it with conservative, traditionalist values—a process I term rhetorical amnesia. To further explore these dynamics, I employ my framework of rhetorical counter-mapping, which I use to chart how country music’s historical trajectories were redirected to serve the Nixonian agenda. This process of ideological remapping, grounded in selective memory, re-examines how dominant cultural narratives erase competing histories and construct singular remembrances and formations of the American experience. A brief historical overview will trace what led to, and enabled, the Nixonian turn. Thereafter, I will examine artists, songs, and rhetorics that challenge the construction of what an authentic American identity really means.

Modernismo is often considered the first authentic literary expression of the Americas as Juan Antonio Bueno Rodríquez underlines in the introduction to Azul (1888), the first important work of the movement penned by Rubén Darío (1867-1916). Darío’s fascination with the East is manifested in the prólogue he wrote in De Marsella a Tokio. Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón (1906) of his friend Enrique Gómez Carrillo's travel chronicle of the East.

Rubén Darío, considered the father of Modernismo movement, starts to dialogues with himself while writing about Japan, as if the truth he is writing about Japan are the genuine truths, even though he could not visit Japan or the East in his life-time. His poetic travels to the East, in particular to Japan, are as visual as Gomez Carillo’s physical travels. But how come someone travels to a far land, without having to visit physically? What are the roles of such untravelled travels in the formation of self-reflections in modernista poets and writers? The travel chronicles of Goméz Carillo and the poetic travels of Darío opens up a whole new avenue to explore, in particular between Latin America and the East. Given that, Latin America is often considered outside the West, the place of distorted oriental imagination as criticized by Edward Said (1935-2003) in his seminal work Orientalism (1978). In this paper I would like to examine these two notions of travel in Darío and Carillo, and to explore the image of the East that they provide

In the field of comparative literature studies, the French school and the American School, as the two main schools, have formed the relations of mutual competition and mutual influence based on their own unique theoretical frameworks and research methods. The French school emphasizes empirical research, which is widely recognized in the academic circle, while the American School is famous for its aesthetic research methods. Over time, this dualistic dichotomy between positivism and aesthetics, between French and American, has become a common understanding in comparative literature textbooks. However, with the development of comparative literature research, this simplified classification model has its limitations. In fact, empirical criticism and aesthetic criticism are not unique to one school, the French school also adopts aesthetic criticism, and the American school also pays attention to the empirical method, the two approaches in comparative literature research are integrated and shared. This shift reveals the complexity and pluralism of comparative literature research methodology and its transcendence over traditional classification models.

Against the backdrop of the Cold War,McCarthyism and the Cold War containment policy instigated a heightened sense of public sensitivity and panic regarding the underlying violations and deviant behaviors.As the cultural context trended towards popularization,it was inevitably and closely intertwined with regulatory discourses,which were disseminated through medical fields such as psychiatry.Richard Yates,an American writer,by focusing on the issue of mental illness in the cultural context from the 1950s to the 1960s,revealed the degradation of the middle class's subject power in the post-war American cultural narrative.In Yates's works,the mentally ill are depicted as malleable symbols,representing the public's anxiety and challenging and polysemous concepts.These characters,often referred to as "Foucaultian madmen,"diverge from the previous stagnant "simulacra" and are instead positioned as the other within Deleuze's "becoming" context.Through absolute freedom and acts of destruction,they subvert the implicit social regulations that govern them.While confronting the suspension of "bare life,"they compel readers to reevaluate the general medical premises represented by psychiatry.

On this basis,Yates' novel in different periods corresponded to the phased characteristics of the development of mental illness treatment in the United States,providing a clear perspective on the ever-changing mental health diagnosis methods in post-war America.In his early novels,Yates revealed the transformation process of the psychoanalytic discipline from experiencing a short-lived peak in the late 1950s to gradually declining in the early 1960s by depicting the disadvantaged position of women in the psychoanalysis and treatment system.This perspective is rooted in the practical needs of post-war medical care and cost-saving in medical expenses,as well as the continuous attention of the media and the film industry to "mental illness".He thus criticized the legitimacy and effectiveness of this discipline from the perspective of the private sphere.The exposure of the poor conditions in state-run mental hospitals by Life and CBS in the 1960s,and Kennedy's vigorous promotion of institutional reform for mental illness,prompted Yates to shift his focus to the public sphere in his later works.By capturing the psychological states and distinctive experiences of the protagonists,he made a thorough evaluation of institutionalized treatment services within the national public sphere from two aspects:the spatial power mechanism and the delayed-onset harm of custodial treatment.Yates' works rendered mental illness and its treatment as crucial components of body metaphor,revealing how individuals break free from coercion and bondage in the context of “impotentiality”.Consequently,a brand-new dialogue space was formed.While deconstructing the futile pursuit of regulation,the text also explores the human cost associated with the harmonious operation of a democratic society.