American studies

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American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that examines American literature, history, society, and culture.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> It traditionally incorporates American historiography, literary criticism, and critical theory.

Scholarship in American studies focuses on the United States. In the past decades, however, it has also broadened to include Atlantic history and interactions with countries across the globe.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Subjects studied within the field are varied, but often examine the literary themes, histories of American communities, ideologies, or cultural productions. Examples might include topics in American social movements, literature, media, tourism, folklore, and intellectual history.

Fields studying specific American ethnic or racial groups are considered to be both independent of and included within the broader American studies discipline. This includes African American studies, Asian American studies, Latino studies, Native American studies, and others.

Founding notions

Vernon Louis Parrington is often cited as the founder of American studies for his three-volume Main Currents in American Thought, which combines the methodologies of literary criticism and historical research; it won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize. In the introduction to Main Currents in American Thought, Parrington described his field: Template:Blockquote

The "broad path" that Parrington describes formed a scholastic course of study for Henry Nash Smith, who received a PhD from Harvard's interdisciplinary program in history and American civilization in 1940, setting an academic precedent for present-day American studies programs.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>Template:Citation needed

The first signature methodology of American studies was the "myth and symbol" approach, developed in such foundational texts as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land in 1950, John William Ward's Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age in 1955 and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden in 1964.Template:Citation needed Myth and symbol scholars claimed to find certain recurring themes throughout American texts that served to illuminate a unique American culture. Later scholars such as Annette Kolodny and Alan Trachtenberg re-imagined the myth and symbol approach in light of multicultural studies.

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, these earlier approaches were criticized for continuing to promote the idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the US has had a special mission and virtue that makes it unique among nations. Several generations of American studies scholars moved away from purely ethnocentric views, emphasizing transnational issues surrounding race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, among other topics. But recent studies critique the exceptionalist nature of the transnational turn.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> "The transnational turn has positioned American Studies in a nationalist rut", observes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, in After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism: Template:Blockquote

Institutionally, in the last decade the American Studies Association has reflected the interdisciplinary nature of the field, creating strong connections to ethnic studies, gender studies, cultural studies and post- or de-colonial studies. Environmental perspectives, in ascendance in related fields, such as literature and history, have not penetrated the mainstream of American studies scholarship.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> A major theme of the field in recent years has been internationalizationTemplate:Citation needed—the recognition that much vital scholarship about the US and its relations to the wider global community has been and is being produced outside the United States.

Debate on use of the term American

Until the mid-2000s, the use of American for this multidisciplinary field was widely defended. In 1998, Janice Radway argued, "Does the perpetuation of the particular name, American, in the title of the fieldTemplate:Nbsp... support the notion that such a whole exists even in the face of powerful work that tends to question its presumed coherence? Does the field need to be reconfigured conceptually?" She concluded, "the name American studies will have to be retained."<ref>Template:Cite speech</ref> In 2001, Wai Chee Dimmock argued that the field "is largely founded on this fateful adjective. [American] governs the domain of inquiry we construct, the range of questions we entertain, the kind of evidence we take as significant. The very professionalism of the field rests on the integrity and the legitimacy of this founding concept."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In 2002, Heinz Ickstadt argued that American studies "should accept its name as its limitation and its boundary."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In 2006, Dimmock affirmed that the field "does stand to be classified apart, as a nameable and adducible unit."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

More recently, scholars have questioned American as a categorizing term. "In consideration of the limitations of conventional terms," Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera argued in 2018, instead of American, terms like "spaces claimed by the political body" and "residents of spaces claimed by the political body" would offer a "more sensitive and attuned descriptionTemplate:Nbsp... of the regions, critical artifacts, communities, and individuals in question, one that is less charged with the ambiguities and colonial ties that weigh down the traditional disciplinary nomenclatures."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In "the interests of justice and along the lines most suitable to our emergent age," argued Markha Valenta in 2017, scholars should consider "abandoning America as the field identifier."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Imperial American studies

"One of the central themes of American historiography", argued William Appleman Williams, "is that there is no American Empire". Another central theme is that America is a World Power continuously and steadily expanding since 1890 and extending varying degrees of American sovereignty throughout the world. Whatever euphemisms are used to describe the American Empire, it exists.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

According to American Studies Association president Janice Radway, one of the main problems has been that American Studies consistently tilted towards "Imperial American Studies." The field consistently becomes politicized, and its representatives find themselves responsible for US foreign policy and for globalization suspected to benefit US citizens disproportionally.<ref>Radway, Janice (20 November 1998). "What Is in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association," American Quarterly, vol 51 (1/1999), p 23, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30041632</ref> The imperial tilt increased following the "unipolar moment" in 1991. The field reacted with a "Transnational Turn" initiated by Amy Kaplan in 1993.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Paul Giles joined the campaign with a proposal to elevate the field from the aged patriotic empire-building to the increasingly transnational networks of the 1990s.<ref>Giles, Paul (1994). "Reconstructing American Studies: Transnational Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives," Journal of American Studies, vol 28: p 337.</ref> The volume of scholarship edited by Kaplan inspired a 1998 conference on the theme "American Studies and the Question of Empire." Opening the conference, Radway magnified the anti-imperial push and suggested erasing the adjective "American" from "American Studies" because of the association between "American" and "imperial."<ref>Radway, Janice (20 November 1998). "What Is in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association," American Quarterly, vol 51 (1/1999), p 8, 18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30041632</ref>

The Transnational Turn was criticized as an antipode to US state power. Speaking transnationally became identified with speaking in a counter-hegemonic way. US imperialism, it was claimed, is an integral part of American Studies, as are manifestations of non-US imperialisms in their respective fields. Other integral parts of the field are outlining the differences between the US and non-US imperial practices, and how the US version in the long run has proven more successful and powerful than most pre-American forms of dominance. According to Frank Kelleter, the Transnational Turn is based on wishful thinking caused by US hegemony: Template:Blockquote More recently, scholars have examined how cultural imperialism occurs within the US borders. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera described the phenomenon as an attempt to transition the "cultural symbols of the invading communities from 'foreign' to 'natural,' 'domestic,'" through three discrete and sequential phases:

People in new space Objective
(1) Merchants

Also termed "explorers" e.g., Lewis and Clark

Encounter resources

E.g., minerals, trade routes, spices, furs, communities

to tax or conscript, fertile agricultural zones, strategic

geography, etc.

(2) Military

An invasion force

Control resources

Implement martial law so that the metropolitan may

exploit resources; establish "Fort" cities, e.g., Fort

Lauderdale, Fort Worth etc. that facilitate metropolitan

settlement.

(3) Politicians

Socialize the space into a new province of the metropolitan

Social engineering

Acculturize the space into a region of the metropolitan

through saturation of symbol, legend, and myth.

Establish laws and norms that promote the metropolitan

(invading system) as dominant culture and prohibit or

criminalize other systems; offer citizenship to conquered

peoples in exchange for submission to metropolitan

cultural norms and abandonment of original or other (in

the case of immigrants) social tendencies.

(Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. 2018. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. Routledge. p. 24)

While the third phase continues "in perpetuity", the imperial appropriation tends to be "gradual, contested (and continues to be contested), and is by nature incomplete."<ref name="Herlihy-Mera 2018 24">Template:Cite journal</ref> The Americanization of the continent has been described as a cultural engineering project that strives to "isolate residents within constructed spheres of symbols" such that they (eventually, in some cases after several generations) abandon other cultures and identify with the new symbols. "The broader intended outcome of these interventions might be described as a common recognition of possession of the land itself."<ref name="Herlihy-Mera 2018 24"/>

Outside the United States

European centers for American studies include the British Association for American Studies, the Center for American Studies in Brussels, Belgium, and most notably the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies in Berlin, Germany. Other centers for American studies in Germany include the Bavarian America-Academy, the University of Munich, the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) and the Center for North American Studies (Zentrum für Nordamerikaforschung or ZENAF) at Goethe University Frankfurt. Graduate studies in the field of North American studies can also be undertaken at the University of Cologne, which works together in joint partnership with the North American studies program at the University of Bonn.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> American Studies Leipzig at the University of Leipzig is a center for American studies on the territory of former East Germany. Founded in 1992, the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark now offers a graduate program in American studies. In the Netherlands the University of Groningen and the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen offer a complete undergraduate and graduate program in American studies. The University of Amsterdam, the University of Leiden and the University of Utrecht only offer a graduate program in American studies. Both the University of Sussex and the University of Nottingham in England offer both a number of postgraduate and undergraduate programs. In Sweden, the Swedish Institute for North American Studies at Uppsala University offers a minor in American studies.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In Slovakia, the University of Presov and Pavol Jozef Safarik University offer a complete undergraduate and graduate program in American studies combined with British studies. The Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library also offers a range of events and fellowships, as well as promoting the American collections held at the British Library.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Russia's main center for American studies is the Institute for US and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In the Middle East, the oldest American Studies program is the American Studies Center<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> at the University of Bahrain in Sakhir, which was founded in 1998.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> An American studies program is offered at the University of Tehran within the Faculty of World Studies.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In Oceania, the University of Canterbury in Christchurch New Zealand operated a full undergraduate and graduate American studies<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> program until 2012, and in Australia, an undergraduate major in American Studies and a postgraduate specialisation in American Foreign Policy is run by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

In Canada, the University of Alberta has the Alberta Institute for American Studies.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The University of Western Ontario has a Centre for American Studies<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> that has both an undergraduate and master's program in American studies, with specializations at the graduate level in American Cultural Studies, and Canadian-American Relations.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> York University offers an undergraduate program in United States Studies.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

American studies centers in China include the American Studies Center<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (Beijing Foreign Studies University) in 1979, the Institute of American Studies<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (Chinese Academy of Social Science) in 1981, Center for American Studies<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (Fudan University) in 1985, American Studies Center<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (Peking University) in 1980, Center for American Studies<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (Tongji University), American Studies Center<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (Sichuan University) in 1985, Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in 1986, American Social and Cultural Studies Center (China Foreign Affairs University) and Center for American Studies<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (East China Normal University) in 2004. These centers do not have undergraduate programs. Based on the requirement of the curriculum setup of the China Department of Education, these centers only have graduate programs. In addition, there are also scholarly journals, such as American Studies Quarterly<ref>http://qk.cass.cn /mgyj/setTemplate:Dead link</ref> and Fudan American Review.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In the Republic of Korea, Sogang University<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (Seoul, Korea) is the sole institution that offers regular degree program both in bachelor (BA) and master (MA) degree in American studies, named American culture. The American culture division is run by the Department of English along with English literature and linguistics. Keimyung University (Daegu, Korea), Hansung University (Seoul, Korea), Pyeongtaek University (Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi-do, Korea), Kyunghee University (Yongin, Gyonggi-do, Korea) also provide a major in American studies. Seoul National University (Seoul, Korea) and Yonsei University (Seoul, Korea) offers undergraduate interdisciplinary courses in American studies. The American Studies Association of Korea (ASAK) is one of the country's foremost research associations devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and society within the Korean context.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

International American Studies Association

Founded at Bellagio, Italy, in 2000, the International American Studies Association<ref name=IASA>Template:Cite web</ref> has held World Congresses at Leyden (2003), Ottawa (2005), Lisbon (2007), Beijing (2009), Rio de Janeiro (2011), The Sixth World Congress of IASA<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> at Szczecin, Poland, August 3–6, 2013, and Alcalá de Henares, Madrid (2019).<ref name="IASA Events">Template:Cite web</ref> The IASA is the only worldwide, independent, non-governmental association for Americanists. Furthering the international exchange of ideas and information among scholars from all nations and various disciplines who study and teach America regionally, hemispherically, nationally, and transnationally, IASA is registered in the Netherlands as a non-profit, international, educational organization with members in more than forty countries around the world.

Associations and scholarly journals

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The American Studies Association was founded in 1950. It publishes American Quarterly, which has been the primary outlet of American studies scholarship since 1949. The second-largest American studies journal, American Studies, is sponsored by the Mid-America American Studies Association, University of Kansas, and University of Minnesota. Today there are 55 American studies journals in 25 countries.<ref>American Studies Journals: A Directory of Worldwide Resources (updated 2015). TheASA.net. Retrieved January 22, 2015.</ref>

See also

References

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Further reading

  • Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism (Routledge; 2018)
  • Bieger, Laura, Ramon Saldivar, and Johannes Voelz, eds. The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies After the Transnational Turn (Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England; 2013) 312 pp
  • Kurian, George T. ed. Encyclopedia of American Studies (4 Vol. Groiler: 2001)
  • Maddox, Lucy, ed. Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline (Johns Hopkins University Press 1998), Template:ISBN
  • Pease, Donald E. and Robyn Wiegman, eds. The Futures of American Studies (Duke University Press 2002), Template:ISBN
  • Lipsitz, George. American Studies in a Moment of Danger (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Template:ISBN
  • "American Studies at a Crossroads https://web.archive.org/web/20120508024141/http://ragazine.cc/2011/12/discourse-american-studies/
  • Marx, Leo (1964). The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Matthiessen, F. O. 1949. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Harvard, Boston
  • Meyers, Marvin 1957 The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief Stanford Press, California
  • Lewis, R. W. B. 1955. The American Adam; Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. [Chicago]: University of Chicago Press.
  • Smith, Henry Nash. 1950. Virgin Land; the American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • John William Ward 1955. Andrew Jackson, Symbol for an Age. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • John William Ward. 1969 Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture . New York: Oxford University Press

Library guides

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