Costa Mesa, California -- Debate is mounting over whether -- or how -- new research on race, class, gender, and ethnicity is changing the field of American studies.
Some scholars, particularly those in ethnic studies, say that American studies still places too much emphasis on white, Anglo-American culture. Others charge that the field pays too much attention to multicultural topics, and is losing sight of the ties that bind American society together.
The debate, which has surfaced in several places recently, came up in formal and informal discussions at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association here this month.
“For some of us, the conference raised the question: How much is American studies still white studies?” said Ronald Takaki, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
But Wilcomb Washburn, director of American studies at the Smithsonian Institution, said the meeting had raised a different question: “Is there still room in American studies for conservatives and for those people not caught up in the mantra of race, class, and gender?”
The program for this year’s conference -- like those of several recent annual American-studies meetings -- emphasized American pluralism and diversity. Taking as its theme “Exploration/Exploitation: The Americas,” the meeting featured numerous sessions on multicultural topics.
But several scholars in ethnic studies said the problem is not that American studies ignores them, but that it treats race and ethnicity as an “add-on” to the traditional study of white, Anglo-American culture.
“In a lot of ways, the experience of people of color is still seen as marginal or outside the main story,” said Mr. Takaki.
He and others said too much of the research in American studies emphasizes white attitudes toward members of minority groups; it views them as victims, rather than as active participants in historical processes; and it paints minority and white cultures as separate and unequal.
“Too often,” said Mario T. Garcia, a professor of history and Chicano studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, “what we are not doing is reconceptualizing what we mean by American culture and looking at the ways a variety of influences, from within and without our borders, have always interacted,” he said.
While a number of scholars at the conference here presented research on “cultural borderlands,” looking at how diverse cultural identities have crossed at various times and places in the United States, much of that research was presented by minority scholars, Mr. Garcia said. “I found it curious that when I attended more minority-oriented sessions, I saw mostly minorities there,” he said.
Conversely, Mr. Takaki said that the sessions that had presented an overview of American studies as a field -- such as one that reported on the undergraduate curriculum -- drew mainly white scholars.
American studies is struggling with reconceptualizing its view of American culture, said Gail M. Nomura, a professor of American culture at the University of Michigan, at a workshop here for program directors. But the effort needs to be more conscious and less superficial, she said.
“We in ethnic studies have been doing work for decades. Now, suddenly, other scholars come in without the background, and act as if they have discovered multiculturalism. Sometimes they seem to be saying that they can be more objective, because they are white,” Ms. Nomura said in an interview.
Not everyone here agreed that American studies is not yet multicultural. At a session that called for “A Change of Course for American Studies,” several scholars said that the field focused too exclusively on multicultural topics.
“The tensions on campus today are not really about multiculturalism, but about imposing a single point of view -- usually from a third-world culture that is thought to be more progressive than American culture,” said John Patrick Diggins, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “One group has been excluded from American studies. I do mean conservatives.”
As a result, the field of American studies has lost sight of topics that used to be central to its research, such as the study of religion, of business, and of the Constitution, he said.
In the most contentious presentation at the session, David Horowitz, editor of Heterodoxy, a conservative publication, decried “the monolithic quality of the panels here” in their devotion to multiculturalism and gay and lesbian studies.
The Smithsonian’s Mr. Washburn, who chaired the session, said in an inter view that “my concern is that at the annual meeting, and in the field of American studies, race, class, and gender have become a mantra, without a lot of scholarly depth.”
At another session here, Robert Rydell, a professor of history at Montana State University, noted that Europeans who study American culture are often more willing than Americans to identify what unites American culture.
“There is room in American studies to look both at what unites us and at what divides us,” he said.
The debate over the relationship of multiculturalism to American studies is heating up in journals, books, and American-studies programs.
This fall’s issue of Radical History Review, for example, contained two articles calling for American studies and other fields in the humanities to stop marginalizing racial and ethnic perspectives. Mr. Garcia wrote one of the articles and Hazel V. Carby, a professor of English, African-American studies, and American studies at Yale University, wrote the other.
In a recent volume on The New American Studies (University of California Press), editor Philip Fisher warned against a “new regionalism of gender and race.” The essays in the book were first published in the journal Representations.
Mr. Takaki said the recent decision by his own institution, the University of California at Berkeley, to start up a new American-studies program had made many faculty members in ethnic studies there angry.
“We felt that we were left out of the planning, and that American studies was going to teach ethnic studies as white faculty understood and defined it,” he said.
Richard Hutson, a professor of English at Berkeley who will teach one of the core courses in the new American-studies program, said that “most of those fears have been dispelled.”
“We are involving faculty from ethnic studies,” he said, “and we are paying attention to issues of race, class, and gender.”
He added, however, that “American studies has traditionally done other things as well.”
Some scholars at the meeting here also said that financial pressures in higher education had begun to force previously separate interdisciplinary programs -- such as American studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies -- to work together more closely.
Michigan’s Ms. Nomura added: “At least American studies recognizes the need to struggle with these issues. Over the last decade, the field has made a conscious effort to incorporate people of color and their research. It’s just that change is not easy.”