Trans-Atlantic American Studies: A Critical Comparativist Analysis
Donald Pease (Dartmouth College)
In post-war Europe, American studies functioned as at once a restricted area of
inquiry and a generalizable symbolic economy. As an area studies program,
American Studies supplied an interdisciplinary methodology for studying the
literature, history, politics and territorial geography of the United States. As an
agency that legitimated processes of Americanization, American Studies instructed
European scholars in how to use the field of American Studies as an encompassing
medium of translatability. The discourse of American Exceptionalism set vertical
operations into motion that presupposed a hierarchical relationship between the
culture to be translated and the culture translating it. Exceptionalism at once
monitored how American culture was studied, and regulated these processes of
translatability.
With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, and the formation of the European Union,
the US lost its threatening Socialist totalitarian Russian Other as well as its
destabilized dependent European Other. The dismantling of the exceptionalist
paradigm resulted in a fundamental reshaping of accounts of the US place in world
history. With the elimination of relations that were grounded in such macropolitical
dichotomies, representations of multiple, interconnected and heterogeneous
developments emerged into view that were not reducible to such stabilized
dichotomizations. Transnational accounts of American Studies replaced the coreperiphery paradigm that American exceptionalism buttressed with a model of the
transverse relations of power that criss-crossed the globe.
The demands of a newly globalised world order required an understanding of the
United State’s embeddedness within transnational and transcultural forces rather than
scholars’ reaffirmations of US exceptionalism. In response to these demands,
americanist scholars have redescribed the US as inhabiting but one node in a vast
interlocking network of commercial, political and cultural forces. As part of the
world historical processes from which it formerly described itself as exempt, the US
answered less to unique historical necessities than to transcultural historical processes.
The disabling of American exceptionalism’s ability to install and regulate the
asymmetrical positioning of the participants in the dialogue between US americanists
and their European counterparts undermined the dependency complex of americanist
scholars based outside the United States. In place of describing Americanization as a
form of cultural imperialism, European americanists constructed more complex
models of reappropriation, negotiation and creolization. The archive of Comparativist
works from which historians and literary scholars drew in the wake of US
exceptionalism has extended dramatically. Along with Aztlan, the Pacific Rim, and
the Afro-Caribbean, the emergent field of Transatlantic Studies has become one of the
chief beneficiaries of the dismantling of the exceptionalist paradigm. These emergent
fields of Comparativist Analysis describes a form of cultural production that would
facilitate an understanding of the intricate relationships that pertain among literary
textualities, historical explanations and lived cultural experience as they are in
circulation throughout the global system. But the practitioners of this emergent field
operate according to a broad array of assumptions concerning what is at stake in their
project.
In presupposing the national standing of the literatures that circulate through it, some
transatlanticist scholars have deployed the global literary system to retrieve preexisting forms of cultural containment. But the transatlantic analytic frame does not
necessarily presuppose a nationalist paradigm. It can also facilitate the revaluation of
such disparate practices of spatialization as evidenced in diasporas, migrations and
borderlands discourses that pose insuperable challenges to containment cultures.
Transatlantic studies can valorize deterritorializations that serve the interests of the
market and transnational corporations; but transatlantic studies can also construct
relays to transnational movements that advance the concerns of eco-politics, of
feminists, of Amnesty International, Oxfam and world peace. Transatlantic studies
can ratify the presuppositions of the empires and world markets (who were its original
backers and beneficiaries), and Transatlantic studies can construct relays to the
various global formations that have emerged to resist the resurgence of empire.
In my week-long seminar at the Clinton Institute, I intend to try to find terms to
compare and evaluate disparate accounts of this Trans-Atlantic reconfiguration of
American Studies. Each of the seminar sessions will be taken up with a discussion of
an essay or a chapter of a book. The assignments will draw upon the following
materials.
Readings for the workshop
Monday :
"Futures "Introduction to Donald E. Pease, Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of
American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); 1-42
Donatella Izzo, "Outside Where? Comparing Notes on Comparative American
Studies and American Comparative Studies" (to be distributed).
Tuesday:
Paul Giles, "Transnationalism and Classic American Literature" PMLA, 2003 pp. 6277 (118, no. 1).
Paul Giles, Virtual America: Transnational Fictions and the Transnational Imaginary
(Duke, 2002); chapters 1 and 2; pp.1-468
Guenter Lenz, "Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies:
Transnationality, Border Discourses, and Public Culture(s)," in: Donald E. Pease,
Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002), pp. 461-85.
Liam Kennedy, 'Spectres of Comparison: American Studies and the United States of
the West', Comparative American Studies (March 2006), 135-50.
Wednesday:
C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville
and the World We Live In (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001);
"Introduction" pp 1-37.
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,
Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon,
2000); chapter 5 pp143-172.
Thursday:
José Martí's "Our America": From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, edited
by Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández (Duke, 1998), chapter "Tocqueville and Marti:
Politics of Displacement."
Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United
States (Duke, 2005); Introduction and Chapter One.
Friday:
Wai Chee Dimock, "Literature for the Planet," PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001), pp. 173-186.
Franco Moretti, "Conjectures of World Literature," New Left Review, 1 (JanuaryFebruary 2000): 54-68.