When a colleague asked me some months ago about my plans for directing Princeton University’s American-studies program, I responded with an old civil-rights slogan:"Integration now.”
“Watch out,” he replied in mock horror."Before long, people will be calling you a liberal.”
His comment was a friendly reminder that American-studies programs have become embroiled in the recent clashes over multiculturalism and diversity in the curriculum. Such a battle is not new to American studies: Over most of the discipline’s 50-year history, it has been hospitable to viewpoints, such as Marxism and feminism, that have not fit easily into the rest of the curriculum. That openness has led to repeated debates about how the field ought to be taught and studied.
The latest controversy, now several years old, has focused on how American-studies programs should study ethnicity and respond to the rising ethnic-studies movement. Several colleges and universities have been struggling with the question of whether American studies can serve as an inclusive home for the study of the different ethnic groups and cultures that make up the United States, or whether scholarly study and teaching about those groups would be better served by separate ethnic-studies departments or programs. Different institutions have arrived at different answers.
In 1994, a Princeton committee of faculty members and students, led by the undergraduate dean, Nancy Malkiel, and by Cornel West, then director of Princeton’s African-American-studies program, issued a report on curricular diversity that stressed the university’s need for"a broad array of courses throughout the curriculum which are comparative in conception and which highlight connections and relations among groups and across what may ordinarily seem to be cultural and social divides.”
The report urged the university to bolster its teaching and scholarship in a number of areas, including Latino-American and Asian-American studies. But the document also argued strongly against allowing these subjects to become ghettoized. Further, the committee advised that the"intellectual leadership” for putting these recommendations into effect should come from the American-studies program, which it deemed “particularly well-suited to encompass studies of the comparative experience of the peoples of America, broadly defined.”
It’s no secret that this approach raises suspicions on American campuses today. At a time when the celebration of fragmentation and difference is in vogue, an emphasis on exploring"relations and connections among groups” evokes the ideas of assimilation and homogenization, which many scholars decry. Up-to-date educators instead advocate"cross-cultural communication” -- by which they mean promoting tolerance while validating supposedly essential group characteristics based on sex, skin color, and ethnic background.
But in the context of American studies, important questions remain about how clear-cut those identities really are and how ethnicity should be studied.
Some history will help explain these issues. In the early 1960s, stimulated by the civil-rights movement, a torrent of research and writing on the enduring ethnic factors in our politics, literature, and culture began to appear. This work argued that the old idea of America as a"melting pot” was misconceived. Even among groups long resident on our shores, ethnicity turned out to be a persistent and inescapable feature of American life, best seen as arising not from static group identities but from a complex process of cultural adaptation and counterinfluence (both among and within ethnic groups). The process varied at different times, for different groups of Americans, in different regions of the country. Most of the research concentrated on European-born immigrants and their descendants, paying scant attention to Asians, Latin Americans, and other immigrant groups.
Meanwhile, scholarship on black Americans, long resisted by the mainstream academy (including American studies), fell under the heading of"race” and not"ethnicity.” It found its home in new departments and programs, including Princeton’s program in African-American studies, which was established in 1969.
In the 1980s, with the arrival of record numbers of Latino and Asian-American students on campus, interest in the study of ethnicity rose -- with a harder separatist edge than two decades earlier. In part, the souring of national political discussions of racial and immigration issues after 1980, and individuals’ difficult social adjustments on many newly integrated campuses, fostered this separatism. In addition, the political legacy of the New Left led advocates of the new ethnic studies to think about Asian and Latino immigrants, along with blacks, as constituents of the third world, distinct from European immigrants. For reasons that are not entirely clear, proponents of the study of Asian and Latino immigrants seized upon the terms ethnicity and ethnic studies; race was still largely reserved for specialists in African-American studies.
The study of ethnicity, like the study of race, in turn became entangled in a postmodernist outlook that blamed Western rationality, universalism, and humanism for the subjugation of non-whites (and, for some writers, women of all colors) by white men. This led students and scholars to depict the United States chiefly in terms of ethnic (or racial) identities and antagonisms and, in some cases, to proclaim that ethnic groups should defend their cultures from assimilation into a hegemonic mainstream"American” civilization.
American studies at Princeton, while rejecting older parochial ideas about American culture, has moved in a different direction. On the one hand, we want to avoid slighting the innumerable features of American life -- including political parties, religions, and the mass media -- whose influence cuts across ethnic and racial lines. We fear, as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has observed, that a fixation on ethnic differences presents a distorted picture of the United States as a country that is all"pluribus” and no"unum.” We are equally convinced, however, that an ethnic or racial approach, narrowly conceived, does not do justice to the numerous ethnic and racial components of American culture. Although ethnicity is a basic feature of American life, its various incarnations cry out for comparative study. And although the United States may not be a melting pot, neither its culture nor that of its ethnic groups is pristine. To paraphrase the writer Ralph Ellison, Americans are all “cultural mulattos.”
Studying one ethnic group, or even a collection of ethnic groups, in isolation can easily obscure that fact and rob the study of ethnicity (as well as of the United States more generally) of some of its most profound complexities. The simplification of American culture can become especially dangerous when assessing a particular work of art, literature, or music. Is it not fallacious to believe that any cultural artifact, from a symphony to a folk painting, is representative of an entire social category, let alone one as diverse as an ethnic group? Is it not equally fallacious to believe that individual artists or writers are beholden only to their specific ethnic or racial backgrounds?
Earlier in this century, the mixing of regional or ethnic cultural styles with more-cosmopolitan experiments in subject and form helped ignite America’s version of literary modernism in the work of writers as different as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Henry Roth. Cultural mixing has also propelled breakthroughs in the more popular American arts, from the classically influenced jazz of Duke Ellington to the blues-influenced rock ‘n’ roll of Elvis Presley. America may be a multicultural society, but it is also a society of multicultural individuals; and the most gifted of them have turned their multicultural visions into art. Yet how are students to grasp all this unless they cultivate their own cosmopolitan view of America?
These questions and imperatives have guided plans to enlarge and restructure our undergraduate program in American studies by 1997-98. Students who wish to earn a certificate in American studies and who are interested in a particular ethnic group will also have to study other aspects of American life -- including works in literature, philosophy, history, religion, and the arts that colleges and universities have traditionally taught. At the same time, students with more-traditional interests will rigorously study the many varieties of American culture. And all American-studies students will have the opportunity to examine American culture from a broader, international perspective, to combat the provincialism that too often besets both American and ethnic studies.
Over the coming year, the core American-studies course will be redesigned to merge greater coverage of immigration, ethnicity, and race relations with the course’s more-familiar themes about American literature, art, and social development. A new upper-level course, developed with the history department, will explore the history of the United States in conjunction with the other nations and subregions of the Atlantic world (Britain, Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada). A related course will consider the United States as part of the Pacific world.
Because American studies at Princeton is an undergraduate program and not a department, we must rely on faculty members from other departments to teach our courses. In light of that, the university has created three full-time positions in other departments for scholars with specialties in Latino-American, Asian-American, and Caribbean studies. We also are exploring the development of courses that would be cross-listed with the university’s African-American-studies program as well as with interdisciplinary programs such as Latin American studies, East Asian studies, and Jewish studies. Doing so will prod our students to deepen their thinking about American culture’s cosmopolitan roots and global impact.
What this will mean structurally is an open question. My own inclination would be to enlarge the American-studies program to embrace all of the American themes primarily taught in other departments and programs. Someday, we might even consider whether American studies and African-American studies (the sole existing program at Princeton devoted to a particular aspect of U.S. life) ought to be united more formally. But whatever the outcome, with a motto of “integration now,” we will remain a program dedicated to studying American culture as comprehensively as our resources allow.
Sean Wilentz is a professor of history and director of the program in American studies at Princeton University.
