American Studies in India: a retrospect

Abstract

This article was prompted by John Muthyala's piece in Comparative American Studies entitled ' "America" in Transit: The Heresies of American Studies Abroad' (2003). However, it is not simply a response; it attempts to plug certain gaps in the earlier article and draw attention to a few factual details essential for a proper understanding of the growth and evolution of American Studies in India. During the years when funds from the US government were in ample supply, the discipline flourished in Indian universities. Following the cessation of fiscal support, it has been languishing, but by no means is it dead: committed scholars continue to work in American Studies and a lot of academic activity still takes place. The present article begins with the historical background and the earliest exchanges between India and the USA; it concludes with reference to the scenario now, in 2004, which may not be too bright but is certainly not without hope.     

Defending America against its devotees Presidential Address,First World Congress of the International American Studies Association,Leiden, The Netherlands, 22–4 May 2003

Abstract

This presidential address at the International American Studies Association's first world congress was composed while the invasion of Iraq was under way. Like the Vietnam War that was launched through an historic act of mendacity called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the current pre-emptive war may be based on claims and ideological agendas equally suspect in their veracity that may well prove a watershed for American culture and paradigm-altering for American Studies. This first IASA presidential address traces the historical precedents of the National Defense Strategy of the United States of America of September 2002, since called the Bush Doctrine, and reads it as a Monroe Doctrine writ globally and as a new US Martial Plan that displaces the Marshall Plan on which the current American Studies field was founded. The portentous changes implicit in this displacement bode a transformation in the foundation of American Studies similar to the changes precipitated by the Vietnam War, with the difference that the global scope of American Studies as an international field today will resist the re-absorption of these changes into a national and nationalist project of US Americanism.     

US Americans and 'Us' Americans: South American perspectives on Comparative American Studies

Abstract

This article discusses topics in Comparative American Studies from a South American perspective. If, on the one hand, we no longer restrict a people's history or literary and cultural production to spaces which were arbitrarily constructed for political and economically hegemonic purposes, but rather see these 'national' spaces as plural and movable loci, on the other hand, the very concept of 'America' will require an approach that seeks to deal with the geographic, linguistic, ethnographic, cultural, political and economic hemispheric differences – and the relations between space and power that necessarily come to mind when one thinks about America comparatively. The us/them paradigm, in an inter-American context, becomes highly problematized: in historical terms, America, the New World, is primarily a European construct; later the word America was appropriated to signify the US national space. Thus, America must be approached from a perspective that takes into consideration these very processes; which is to say that, whichever the adopted approach, it will necessarily be one that problematizes 'American' and that develops a form of US Studies that theorizes an interpretive framework for studying how the US exports its image to the rest of the world, the many ways in which the rest of the world has constructed the US and how US Americans have imagined 'us' Americans.     

Measuring Feminist Consciousness

The concept of group consciousness has proven useful in the analysis of political and social groups, and has clear utility in the study of feminism. Although sophisticated measures of feminist consciousness have been proposed to enable scholars to operationalize the concept in the American National Election Studies, these measures have problems with continuity, or have conceptual problems. This paper proposes a measure that can be used in all American National Election Studies since the rise of the feminist movement, and provides data that suggest the measure has external validity.     

Sociology and American Studies: A Case Study in the Limits of Interdisciplinarity

American Studies is an academic discipline whose object of study is the United States of America and everything associated with it, and American sociologists largely ignore it. American Studies largely ignores American sociology. What causes this mutual exclusion? An outline of the disciplinary history of American Studies and journal article citation data show that the relationship between sociology and American Studies is weak and asymmetrical; American Studies cites sociology more often, but very little and not by much. I argue that mutual exclusion is due to mutual distrust in methods: sociology sees itself as a science, while American Studies, with roots in history and literature, does not. This article serves as a case study in the limits of interdisciplinarity.     

‘Tumult and Silence’ in the Study of the American Slave Revolts

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars of the American slave revolts were concerned primarily with what the revolts revealed about the character of slavery and those who resisted it. Recently, in a shift in perspective that has not been fully appreciated, several historians have used the methods of micro-history to focus attention instead on the process by which stories of the revolts were composed. The emphasis of this new approach on silences in the historical record accounts for its immense interest to the historical profession, as well as for its profound limitation as a contribution to our understanding of American slavery.     

Social order,cultural capital and citizenship*

The question of whether education should be seen as an instrument of social order is an old topic in the social sciences. There exist several theories concerning this question. Two of these rival theories are dealt with in this paper. On the basis of each, historical data have been looked at anew and empirical research has been carried out into the prevailing conditions in the Netherlands. On the basis of the first theory, which was inspired by Bourdieu and which concerns economic, cultural (including educational) and social capital, data on the Dutch history between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries have been reanalysed with respect to the attitude of the diverse sections of the dominant class towards culture in general and the university in particular. Dutch history can be regarded as a national variant of the universal tensions between ‘culture’and ‘knowledge’and between ‘culture’and ‘economics’in human societies. On the basis of Bourdieu's theory it is assumed that under the prevailing social conditions elementary schools will differ in ‘educational status’in the schools market. Empirical investigation confirms this hypothesis. The ‘educational status’of elementary schools mediates (reproduces) almost all of the influence of the childrens’social background on their school career, and reinforces this influence. On the basis of the second theory, which is based on the work of Meyer, Boli and Ramirez, data on the Dutch history in the Enlightenment period have been reanalysed with respect to the rise of mass education. These historical data give substantial evidence to the theory that the construction of the nation-state is of decisive importance for the rise of mass education. Our empirical investigation, however, does not confirm the hypothesis that in the actual situation elementary schools differ in ‘comprehensiveness’. Neither schools nor parents are oriented towards integration. Rather, the contrasts seem to be getting sharper in the 1980s and the schools as well as the social classes seem to be distancing themselves further from each other. Various sections of the dominant class are busy strengthening their position of power in education. In short, the use of schools to constitute citizens does not lessen the pressure towards differentiation. Thus, the theory of Boli and Ramirez explains the rise of mass education, but cannot explain its social class bound form, a fact that can be explained very well by Bourdieu's theory. Therefore the theories of both Bourdieu and Boli and Ramirez should be regarded not as rivalizing, but as complementary.     

The Resistible Rise of Sarah Palin: Continuity and Paradox in the American Right Wing1

Sarah Palin clearly holds a powerful appeal for a right‐wing constituency although even her most fervent followers may doubt that she is electable. This article examines the basis of her appeal. We argue that it can be summed up as an appeal to American authenticity, which consists of several elements: the valorization of small town ordinary life takes second place to faith and religious commitment; an equal faith in American exceptionality implies that Americans should never be apologetic about their country and never waver in their belief in its special greatness; the final elements are a foundational libertarian creed and a peculiar brand of right‐wing populism. However, for all her affinities with classical right‐wing sentiment, Sarah Palin, we argue, brings something new to the mix: a genuinely maverick right‐wing feminism. That is why in the end, we call the Palin phenomenon a paradoxical one.     

¿Qué hacen los nuevos americanistas? Collaborative strategies for a postnationalist American Studies

Abstract

This article advocates that the field of American Studies institutionalize Spanish as its second language in order both to address the cultural importance of the growing US Spanish-speaking population and to ensure productive scholarly dialogue within the context of the Americas. Its ideas follow up on recent proposals for 'new' or 'postnationalist' American Studies. It warns that Americanists must be conscious of unresolved issues raised in recent debates on Latin Americanism regarding the increasingly privileged status of English (vs. Spanish) language and US (vs. Latin America) based scholarship in the globalized field of Latin American Studies, problems sure to be exacerbated by a globalizing but US centered and monolingual American Studies. It concludes by suggesting a series of strategies to promote the incorporation of Spanish into both undergraduate and graduate level pedagogy, as well as to foment bilingual scholarly dialogue across the disciplines in the context of the Americas.     

Resisting terror,resisting empire The evolving ethos of American Studies

Abstract

The internationalization of American Studies is a reflection of its evolution from provincialism into a new regionalism. This raises the question of coping with the transnational while problematizing the national, thus landing American Studies in the welter of globalization both as a process and as a discourse. The global engagements of the US have produced global anti-Americanism. Terror in conjunction with globalization appears to have subsumed all other discourses in our times. To pursue American Studies in an environment of terror becomes more complicated by the fact that America itself is perceived by many as a source of global terrorism, evoking the chimera of the return of empire as envisaged in the recent work of Hardt and Negri. Resistance to the global reach of the American Empire and a global percolation of terror appear to be the two most crucial intellectual concerns of American Studies at the moment.     

Aesthetic matters: writing and Cultural Studies

What would it mean to treat Cultural Studies as a project that has had amongst its accomplishments the production of new forms and styles of writing, and a generative approach to aesthetics? An initial answer to this question would be that this would recognize how Cultural Studies interceded in an academic environment not only through its concern with supplying ambitious questions and insisting on a broad range of objects of scrutiny, but also by showing how this often entailed reconfiguring the forms through which intellectual inquiry conveyed its cargo. This article doesn’t seek to provide a taxonomy of Cultural Studies’ forms and styles; what it seeks to do is to encourage a self-reflexive attention to aesthetics within Cultural Studies as a form of practice. It suggests that there are two guiding questions that might frame such an attention: how might Cultural Studies generate forms that are adequate to the complexity of the configurations that it seeks to register; and how might Cultural Studies generate forms that could reach the ear of new audiences not attuned to the cadences of scholarly writing? The tension between these two questions should be seen as an invitation to purposeful experimentation within Cultural Studies.     

IMMIGRANTS AND ETHNICS:

Immigration is both an historical and contemporary phenomenon in the United States. As a result, various ancestral generations coexist. For example, third generation Polish American ethnics share social space with recent Polish immigrants in Chicago. While common ancestry leads immigrants and ethnics to think they ought to work together, dissimilarities between the groups lead to conflict. Two sources of conflict are identified. First, disparate cultural identities emerge because immigrant culture is embedded in the homeland, while ethnic culture is constructed over generations in the context of the host country. Second, immigrants and ethincs have different needs: the newcomers need to learn the culture of the host society, the established ethnics need to maintain an attachment to the culture of the home country. The findings suggest that ancestry does not always function as a basis for solidarity between immigrant and ethnic populations.     

War and the contest over national identity

This paper looks at a recent historical moment in which the American national identity was defined and contested in the public arena. The Persian Gulf crisis of 1990‐91 presents a case in point in which official actors attempted to define the American character and in so doing prescribed particular actions necessary to fulfill what it means to be an American confidence. He described Americans as unique in esteemed values and America as the only country capable of leading the world. In so doing, he invited American participation in support for US military intervention. On the other side, the peace movement chose to emphasize American weaknesses, domestic problems, and the gullible nature of the American people. In so doing it attempted to shame Americans into supporting the anti‐war movement.     

Research on international migration and census data co-operation in Latin America

Population censuses in Latin America have generally recorded the place of birth of all persons enumerated. The use of those data for the study of international migration has been less common because international movements were judged to be a relatively weak factor determining demographic change in the majority of Latin American countries and because the data gathered were generally not tabulated with sufficient detail. During the 1970s, the UN Latin American Demographic Center (CELADE) realized that international migration was not necessarily a minor factor in their evolution and launched a program to improve the quality and availability of census information on the foreign-born population enumerated by each country. The program on International Migration in Latin America (IMILA) has therefore been in operation for more than 10 years and has been successful in eliciting the in-depth tabulation and exploitation of census information in the majority of Latin American countries and in the 2 main receivers in the Americas: Canada and the US. As part of the IMILA project, CELADE has become the depository of magnetic tapes with census information on the foreign-born population, thus gaining greater flexibility in the exploitation of the data available. On the basis of the information gathered, CELADE has published twice in the past decade a compilation of tabulations of the foreign-born population by country of enumeration, country of birth, age, and sex. Although census data on place of birth are not free from problems, particularly in countries where illegal migrants may not be adequately enumerated by a census, they are a valuable source of reasonably comparable information on the overall impact of migration in receiving countries and are often the only source of information on emigration from the sending countries.     

华尔街时代:纽约国际金融中心演变及发展趋势分析

纽约自"新阿姆斯特丹"伊始,就成为美国的重要贸易海港,并逐渐成为国家的经济支柱。除却地理因素,政策因素和人文形态也是其重要的原因。100多年来,纽约的主导产业随着时代变迁,从占尽天时地利而发展的制造业,到如今引领全球的金融业。其中,华尔街在城市的发展中扮演了重要的角色,道琼斯指数揭示了美国政治和经济对金融业发展的影响。如今,华尔街又一次面临着衰退和必然的变革,然而华尔街在世界经济中的影响力仍然不可小觑。     

Sister outsider: an enduring vision embracing myself, my sister and the 'other'

This piece reflects on and reacts to Audre Lorde's critique of racism within Lesbian communities. One purpose of the article is to honor and rescue Lorde's wonderful insight into the power of words when uttered and shared by women, as well as her ideas about differences and connections that exist between Black and white feminisms. Lorde's insistence on a 'sisterhood,' which embraces the 'other' and ourselves at the same time, is a recurrent thought throughout this paper. The article is also firmly grounded in the author's own experience of alienation and racism in the European context of Women's Studies. The second purpose of this position piece is to offer practical suggestions for how to keep Lesbian Studies alive.     

The rise of chemsex: queering collective intimacy in neoliberal London

Since 2011, various public health organizations have observed the growth of the sexual practice ‘chemsex’ in the UK, primarily in London. The term chemsex refers to group sexual encounters between gay and bisexual men in which the recreational drugs GHB/GBL, mephedrone and crystallized methamphetamine are consumed. This article uses a conjunctural perspective to make sense of the rise of chemsex within the historical conditions in which it has emerged. Drawing on a document analysis as well as interviews with 15 gay and bisexual men, this article argues that the rise of chemsex can be interpreted as an embodied response to material conditions shaped by neoliberalism: specifically as a desire for an intimate mode of collectivity during a historical moment when collectivity itself is being superseded by competitive individualism as the privileged mode of being in the world (Gilbert, J. [2013]. Common ground: democracy and collectivity in an Age of individualism. London: Pluto Press). In doing so, this article provides a different account to pathologizing media and medical representations of chemsex that appeared in 2015, whilst also contributing to a growing literature that attempts to map the balance of forces of the present conjuncture.     

Towards a critical geography of American Studies

Abstract

Our argument in this article is based on the premise that 'geography' refers not simply to location within a spatial frame but also to geographical knowledge as it is variously produced, taken for granted, contested, and negotiated. As taken-for-granted geographical knowledge is central to the discipline of American Studies not only in the framing of its subject matter but also in the spatialization of its disciplinary practices, we propose the development of a critical geography of American Studies. We argue that geographies of subject and practice are actively produced by Americanists not only in academic argument but also in the discourse of practical disciplinary texts. Performing close critical readings of two such routine texts in order to bring to attention some of the ways in which they produce at times contradictory geographies, we end with a call for wider recognition of the contingent nature of the contested geographies of international American Studies.     

Binding the Generations: Household Formation Patterns among Vietnamese Refugees1

Much of the analysis of refugee and immigrant adaptation has stressed the interaction of prior experience with the requirements of life in a new country. For refugees, that interaction has often been jarring because of the after‐effects of their flight and their relative inability to prepare for a new life in a new country. Yet refugees have often done rather well in economic terms in that new country. The reasons for that relative success have been phrased in cultural terms (e.g., the predisposition toward education) and in general socioeconomic terms (e.g., refugees as educated and skilled). This article examines a set of factors that lie between these customary cultural and socioeconomic categories. Specifically, the paper examines key features of household formation among Vietnamese refugees. An examination of historical data from southern Vietnam indicates patterns in household formation that appear durable over time yet are not shared across the breadth of Vietnam and cannot thus be viewed as “cultural” in the usual sense. A comparison of the historical data with recent national survey data on refugees in the United States indicates that these patterns continue among Vietnamese refugees and are ‐ as compared to other refugees ‐ distinctive to them. These patterns of household formation provide Vietnamese refugees with important options in adaptation to a new country.     

Known-unknowns: Matthew Arnold,F. R. Leavis,and the government of culture

This essay reflects on the lives of two people whose publications, pedagogy, lectures, and crucially, whose experiences helped set the terms of the debate about so-called high culture in Cultural Studies: Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) and Frank Raymond (F. R.) Leavis (1895–1978). Who was Matthew Arnold? F. R. Leavis? What were the conditions of possibility of their work and words – that is, for the practices and positions for which they advocated? What new questions might emerge by sharing in detailed and perhaps unexpected stories of individuals who, presently, seem to function in Cultural Studies mainly as known-unknowns? The argument is that the details of both Arnold and Leavis’ lives are integral to understanding the conditions of possibility of their work, both individually and collectively, and indeed to more fully appreciating the meaning and implications their work holds for Cultural Studies. Apropos, this piece refines the methodology of keywords introduced by Raymond Williams [1958. Culture and society, 1780–1950. New York, NY: Columbia University Press; 1983.