Since the field of American studies was founded in the 1930’s, it has won academic influence and respectability. But in the process, it also has become far too parochial.
At its birth, the American-studies movement celebrated the vitality and uniqueness of American culture. Challenging the obsequious approval of European culture and denigration of native genius in the American academy, pioneers in the field demanded that American civilization be considered worthy of academic concern. Constance Rourke, for example, turned her attention to American humor, while Perry Miller examined American Puritanism and Henry Nash Smith the American frontier. This early work was also interdisciplinary, drawing on such fields as history, literature, and art to define culture broadly, and to validate the study of such popular cultural forms as the tall tale and the dime novel.
The early scholarship provided a necessary corrective to the cultural elitism and narrow disciplinary focus of academe. But we, as its heirs, must do more than perpetuate the past: For our generation, the challenge is to reinvigorate the field by introducing the cross-cultural perspective that it lacks. Comparing the United States with other nations will compel us to find a new prism of interpretation through which to view American culture and to question the myth cherished by many of the founders of American studies -- that American civilization is unique and exceptional.
It is not that our scholarship has remained unchanged. In the decades following the founding of their discipline, American-studies scholars continued to address myths and symbols that were uniquely American, but they paid increasing attention to popular culture, for example, looking at rock music and break dancing. They also documented cultural stresses where their predecessors had looked for consensus.
More recently, scholars in American studies have devoted far more attention to issues of class, race, gender, and ethnicity in American culture. This growing concern with diversity has shifted our discipline’s emphasis from text to context, so that we now focus less on cultural artifacts themselves -- such as art works or literary texts -- and more on the social context in which they are produced.
What remains constant, however, is a nearly uniformly myopic concern with a purely American setting for a consideration of these issues of diversity. While many current apostles of American studies may have steeped themselves in the reading of such foreign theorists as Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, or Antonio Gramsci, they are far less conversant with foreign cultures and the ways in which such cultures treat problems rooted in social diversity and contention.
As a result, our interpretive framework is often parochial. When we examine classic texts in American studies, such as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, to test Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis that American character has been peculiarly shaped by the availability of land on the frontier, we find they fail to compare our frontier experience with those of other new societies. The Eurocentrism of historians like Turner and the pioneers of American studies has led us to accept uncritically the notion that our experience was unique, since Europe no longer had a frontier. The frontier experiences of Latin America, Canada, or Australia, however, might shed light on our own.
We also assume the universal validity of our cultural assumptions, because we have not tested them rigorously outside of the context of American culture. Believing that America has developed a unique ideology, many scholars in American studies have implicitly suggested that our viewpoint can serve to enlighten the rest of mankind. Thus, some scholars have assumed that democracy will always take an American form, not recognizing that it can be fused in a nation like Japan with cultural traditions that perpetuate monarchy and traditional forms of deference, hierarchy, and authority.
Similarly, our belief that the ironic stance of postmodernist literature precludes political commitment, concerning itself more with debunking social beliefs than with constructing alternative civic goals, may be called into question if we look at postmodernism in other cultures. As Roger Bartra, a senior researcher at Mexico’s Institute of Social Research, noted recently at a meeting at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Latin American postmodernist literature of the sort created by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Carlos Fuentes is characterized both by irony and by political commitment.
The picture is not entirely grim. While much of our scholarship remains parochial, individual scholars have benefited from cross-cultural experiences. The Fulbright Fellowship program that sends academics to teach and do research in foreign countries exempts scholars in American studies from its lifetime limit of three awards, so many scholars in the field have multiple opportunities for exposure to different cultural values. In fact, about one-fifth of the Fulbright Scholar Awards granted to post-doctoral faculty members go to scholars in American studies.
Moreover, since 1962 the publications of American Studies International, the scholarly association that promotes American-studies teaching and research abroad, have focused on how the history, literature, politics, and culture of the United States are taught and studied in different countries. Similarly, recent conventions of the American Studies Association reflect growing interest in cross-cultural concerns. The group’s latest meeting, for example, held in Toronto last year in conjunction with the Canadian Association for American Studies, considered such issues as the politics of creating public spaces in Budapest and New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the uses of wildlife imagery in public discourse throughout North America, and the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the literature of the Americas.
However, a cross-cultural perspective is virtually absent from American-studies curricula at colleges and universities. In 1988 I surveyed American-studies departments and programs before renovating our own department at Rutgers. I was struck by the paucity of cross-cultural courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. For undergraduates, the University of Kansas required one course focusing on Latin American, Canadian, or Native American (Indian) history, culture, or society. Barnard College demanded one course providing a comparative perspective on American culture. At the graduate level, the University of Minnesota stipulated two comparative-culture courses covering international or non-United States subjects, and Boston University demanded two courses on the literature, culture, art, history, or politics of a single non-American society. But other programs and departments made no such demands, and only about a dozen cross-cultural courses appeared among the courses offered by the American-studies units themselves.
Moreover, it has become more difficult, because it has become more expensive, to foster international exchanges. Witness the fact that the United States Information Agency has decided to phase out its long-time financial support for foreign scholars attending American-studies meetings in the United States.
We must work to reverse such a trend. Last winter I attended an international American-studies conference in Israel, sponsored by Rutgers University and the University of Haifa. What impressed me was not just the lively discussions of such topics as the reception of American film, literature, and advertising abroad, or the nature and function of political and social satire in Israel and the United States. It was also chastening for all of us to be forced to consider the cultural and historical biases that have unconsciously shaped our scholarship. For example, Willi Paul Adams of the Free University of Berlin prodded American scholars to question our basic assumptions, saying “Of course, you believe in American exceptionalism. You don’t bother with contrary evidence from other cultures.”
All of us in American studies can learn from Adams’s remark. If our field is to thrive as a discipline, it must abandon its insularity and parochialism. We need to examine whether other cultures have shared some of our dominant myths, for example the importance of a frontier to the development of democracy, a fascination with machines, a nostalgia for the Garden of Eden -- the notion that abundance has peculiarly determined the national character. At this juncture, we especially need to know how other societies have dealt with issues of race, gender, and ethnicity; how they have coped with popular resistance to the cultural hegemony of their dominant classes. Only then can we begin to know ourselves. Only then can we escape the excessive introspection that has marked the birth of American studies and truly mature as a field of scholarly endeavor.
Leslie Fishbein is an associate professor of American studies at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.