Full Description
Originating as a proponent of U.S. exceptionalism during the Cold War, American Studies has now reinvented itself, vigorously critiquing various kinds of critical hegemony and launching innovative interdisciplinary endeavors. The Futures of American Studies considers the field today and provides important deliberations on what it might yet become. Essays by both prominent and emerging scholars provide theoretically engaging analyses of the postnational impulse of current scholarship, the field's historical relationship to social movements, the status of theory, the state of higher education in the United States, and the impact of ethnic and gender studies on area studies. They also investigate the influence of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies on U.S. nationalist—and antinationalist—discourses. No single overriding paradigm dominates the anthology. Instead, the articles enter into a lively and challenging dialogue with one another. A major assessment of the state of the field, The Futures of American Studies is necessary reading for American Studies scholars.Contributors. Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Günter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, José Estaban Muñoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Futures / Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman 1
Posthegemonic
What's in a Name? / Jan Radway 45
The International within the National: American Studies and Asian American Critique / Lisa Lowe 76
The Future in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia / Jose Esteban Munoz 93
Manifest Domesticity / Amy Kaplan 111
C. L. R. James, Moby-Dick, and the Emergence of Transnational American Studies / Donald E. Pease 135
Comparativist
Postnationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies / John Carlos Rowe 167
Salesman in Moscow / Dana Heller 183
The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism / Winfried Fluck 211
Autobiographies of Ex-White Men: Why Race is Not a Social Construction / Walter Benn Michaels 231
Color Blindness and Acting Out / Carl Gutierrez-Jones 248
Differential
Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity / Robyn Wiegman 269
Identities and Identity Studies: Reading Toni Cade Bambara's "The Hammer Man" / Lindon Barrett 305
Hemispheric Vertigo: Cuba, Quebec, and Other Provisional Reconfigurations of "Our" New America(s) / Ricardo L. Ortiz 327
Marriage as Treason: Polygamy, Nation, and the Novel / Nancy Bentley 341
Litigious Therapeutics: Recovering the Rights of Children / Gillian Brown 371
American Studies in the "Age of the World Picture": Thinking the Question of Language / William V. Spanos 387
Counterhegemonic
Work and Culture in American Studies / Michael Denning 419
"Sent for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today": American Studies Scholarship and the New Social Movements / George Lipsitz 441
Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies: Transnationality, Border, Discourses, and Public Culture(s) / Gunter H. Lenz 461
American Studies, American Politics, and the Reinvention of Class / Paul Lauter 486
The End of Academia: The Future of American Studies / Eric Cheyfitz 510
Nation dot com: American Studies and the Production of the Corporatist Citizen / Russ Castronovo 536
Afterword
ConsterNation / Dana D. Nelson 559
Bibliography 581
Contributors 609
Index 613
