Do America, do the world

Fall 2007 Interaction

American studies came to life in the 1950s, at a time when one could be confident about what that meant. America was the United States, whose culture was perceived as both exceptional and homogeneous.

Homogeneity, obviously, is no longer on the table. As for exceptionalism, clearly the United States is not just another country. But if globalization means that goods, services, peoples and cultures refuse to be confined behind national borders, it also means that studying “America” has ceased to be an exercise focused exclusively on the 50 states. Nothing happens here outside a larger, international context.

Thus the transnational turn in American studies—a recognition that the multiple links between “here” and “not-here” are omnipresent and run in both directions. This year’s national meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA), in fact, is titled “América Aquí: Transhemispheric Visions and Community Connections.”

The old American studies, said English Professor Ramón Saldívar, “meant looking at the hemisphere through U.S. critical paradigms. Today we see the interrelationships, not just the one-way relations.

“For example, immigration is now at the core of the field: What kind of social and structural forces—say, health, or the arts—cut across nations and boundaries and function independently of them? This doesn’t mean that the concept of ‘nation’ has been abandoned, but rather that it’s been supplemented.”

American studies was born in the years following World War II, at the same time as other area studies programs. It was a modest affair, top-heavy with literature and intellectual history and lacking any urgent agenda, with no nationwide meetings or journal to bind it together.

In 1969, a radical caucus appeared at the second national meeting of the ASA demanding that the organization address the critical political issues of the day: civil rights, the war and the women’s movement. (The ASA was, of course, not the only academic association to find its definitions cast asunder by the 1960s.) The field’s framework was thus pushed outward, and a tradition was born of engaging critically with the meanings of “America.” Pluralism rather than universalism became the watchword. Today, the ASA has chapters nationwide and its own journal, American Quarterly. Similar organizations exist worldwide. There is also an active discussion list on H-Net (h-amstdy).

Watching “The Simpsons”

At Stanford, American studies was first approved in 1975, and the first quarter-century of the program’s existence was fruitful and uncontroversial. But by 2001, some deans and members of the faculty began expressing concerns that the number of majors was declining and that there was not a sufficiently strong intellectual focus to the program, a complaint familiar to other interdisciplinary programs. The program was reauthorized by the Faculty Senate, but for fewer years than in the past. At the same time, it received a mandate to hire a senior director to infuse new direction, and it was given funding for a Humanities Center workshop and postdoctoral fellowships.

The medicine worked, and things were turned around, most noticeably with the hire of Shelley Fisher Fishkin as faculty program director.

Though the program today exudes excitement, “the doubts will never be put to rest, and that’s a good thing,” said Saldívar, the Hoagland Family Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. “We must always be self-critical. American studies needed to be examined very closely back then, and the new leadership was crucial.”

Fishkin, an internationally acclaimed scholar of Mark Twain, started things off with a bang as soon as she arrived in the fall of 2003 by organizing conferences on the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and, for a change of pace, The Simpsons.

“Students all watched The Simpsons, of course, but they never watched it critically,” she said. “The notion that social criticism happens on TV wasn’t something they had ever really thought of.”

Controversy over the field comes with the territory, she suggested recently.

“Those criticisms [by the Faculty Senate] indicated a lack of consensus concerning American studies’ body of knowledge and the appropriate methodologies for dealing with that body of knowledge,” she said. “And American studies is nothing if not a continuing debate on those issues. Ever since the founding of this nation, people have debated over the definition of America.”

But, she cautioned, American studies is not for everyone. “If someone wants a very clear definition, they should probably stay within a discipline. American studies has lots of unresolved challenges, and multiple methodologies are key.”

That multiplicity is what attracts undergraduates. An alumnus of the program who graduated in the 1980s remembered how much he loved his major because, flipping through the course bulletin, he could take any class with the word “America” in its title.

“Undergraduates choose American studies because of its breadth,” Saldívar said. “Students love to ask big questions, and American studies allows them to do that.”

If there is controversy today—and where would academia be without it?—it has nothing to do with the number of majors—which is higher than ever—or the quality of the teaching—Academic Council members are lining up to teach their courses, Fishkin and Saldívar said.

Rather, it might have to do with the limitless possibilities of the transnational turn. Given that there is no corner of the world where the United States has not left an imprint, might that not mean that anything goes? Might that mean, say, that Mexican history becomes just an extension of U.S. history?

Absolutely not, Saldívar said. “Moving away from the specificity of a national history in a way that negates that history is absolutely wrong. If you’re moving away from national identity, that’s wrong.”

Neither Mexican history nor U.S. history, then, can be seen in isolation from one another. Nothing, in fact, can be seen in isolation in today’s world.

Study abroad

“As part of this larger paradigm shift,” Fishkin said, “American studies encourages its majors to go abroad and to study foreign languages. Students are often surprised at how going abroad relates directly to their work here. It’s very exciting.”

She pointed to examples such as a 2006 honors thesis on Allen Ginsberg (sparked by Stanford’s acquisition of the poet’s papers), which took a student to Prague, where Ginsberg had moved in dissident circles; or another student whose project on Chilean farm workers in the 19th-century U.S. Southwest took her to Chile; or senior Caley Anderson, who got a better sense of U.S. environmental management by studying similar issues in Australia.

“American studies was the only major in the entire bulletin that fit what I wanted to get out of my Stanford education,” said Anderson, formerly a biology major. “American studies appealed to me because you could create your own concentration. I chose environmentalism.”

She found her calling, she said, in the late Jay Fliegelman’s course on American literature and culture. An intern with the Environmental Protection Agency last summer, Anderson is now interested in communications and the environment.

Nationwide, too, the country’s most prestigious American studies departments and programs are requiring students, especially graduate students, to be proficient in foreign languages. They collaborate with centers and programs in African American, Chicano, Asian American and Native American studies.

In her widely publicized November 2004 presidential address to the ASA, Fishkin explicitly and powerfully addressed the transnational turn, calling it essential for overcoming the “nationalism, arrogance and Manichean oversimplification” often attributed to Americans.

“Whenever people with power act on visions of America that rest on oversimplification, myth and a blind faith that America is always right—or, for that matter, always wrong—that is a call to us as American studies scholars to do our work,” she said.

The work—combating stereotypes and simplifications—leads one quickly to the realization that national boundaries are not the most useful way of assessing cultures. “We are likely to focus less on the United States as a static and stable territory and population ... and more on the nation as a participant in a global flow of people, ideas, texts and products,” she went on to say.

Humanities Center workshop

Stanford does not have a PhD program in American studies, but the Program in Modern Thought and Literature (MTL) comes pretty close. MTL students often work as teaching assistants for American studies classes.

They also have been in charge of the occasional “American Cultures” workshop at the Humanities Center. That was the workshop encouraged by the Faculty Senate in 2001.

In 2006-07, it was called “American Cultures/Transnational American Studies.” The fall workshop addressed the interaction of Asian and Latino cultures in the United States; winter quarter was devoted to the transnational life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin; and spring brought speakers on anticolonialism and attitudes in the Soviet Union toward black American writers.

One of the organizers of that workshop was Steven Lee, an MTL student writing a dissertation comparing multiculturalism in the Soviet Union and the United States, an obviously transnational theme. He cautioned, however, that in general “the celebration or fetishization of the transnational turn as something inherently innovative is a real risk.”

“The nation isn’t going anywhere anytime soon,” he said. “There are specific contexts and histories that have to be respected.”

Lee was off to St. Petersburg, Russia, the following day to attend an American studies conference. His colleague and co-organizer of the Humanities Center workshop, Nigel Hatton, had spent the summer at similar meetings in Ireland, Denmark, England and the Czech Republic.

There are some Europeans who are skeptical about U.S. scholars imposing an American studies paradigm on the rest of the world, Hatton admitted, adding that “it will require a constant conversation.”

“Being in all those places certainly broadened my view,” he said, and that in large part is the point: to show Americans that the world, including the world of American studies, is larger than they thought.
Undergraduates are figuring that out. To help them along, Fishkin has taught a 2-credit course to prepare students to attend a national ASA meeting. Hatton was the teaching assistant.

“The students were great,” he said. “They spent the quarter studying the conference program, figuring out which sessions they wanted to attend and doing research on the speakers. They dressed well; they even made business cards. It was a great way to acclimate them to academia and to American studies. The class really spoke to the vibrancy of Stanford’s program.

“And they danced their heads off at the reception the closing night.”

Hatton and Lee furthermore are associate managing editors of a brand-new publication, The Journal of Transnational American Studies, to be launched in 2008 by Stanford’s American studies program and the University of California-Santa Barbara’s American Cultures and Global Contexts Center. Fishkin is a founding editor of the refereed journal, which will be offered online for free.

Making connections

Lest anyone think that the linkages between U.S. and non-U.S. topics are forced, Fishkin offers examples of how one thing leads to another.

During her presidential address to the ASA, she told her audience about 19th-century Scots oppressed by England who idealized American Indians struggling against the same enemy. One such Scot went by the name of Teyoninhokarawen, as he was half Mohawk and a chief in Canada; he fought the United States in 1812. He also translated the Bible and works by Sir Walter Scott into Mohawk to prepare the Indians for the white society that awaited them.

A story like that, she said, epitomizes a transnational vision that doesn’t hold much store by national boundaries and that can reshape our understanding of North American history and culture.

Even Mark Twain is not off-limits. Several years ago, Fishkin famously uncovered a play by Twain at UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library; the play, Is He Dead? opens on Broadway this autumn.

It turns out that Twain wrote it while living in Vienna in the 1890s (his daughter was studying music there), and he set it in 19th-century France. “So even Twain, that most American of American authors, had important links to non-U.S. cultures,” she said. Twain also was an early animal-rights advocate, and he shaped the movements both here and in Britain. So, yet another transnational story.

“I tell my students, even though it’s an oxymoron, stalk serendipity and keep an open mind,” Fishkin said. “And students find it exciting to explore all the unexpected places their research can take them.”