Globalizing American Studies

Fifty years ago, Marshall Fishwick asked me to write a chapter for his upcoming anthology, “American Studies in Transition” (Penn, 1968). I complied with an essay entitled “America as an Underdeveloped Country” in which I posited the paradox that our main intellectual problem as a country was that we were overdeveloped technologically which left US out of whack with our own underdeveloped median culture. (By “median” I meant we had a flourishing clerisy, crippled by a minuscule audience.) I argued that the best way to encourage our needed maturing was to see how other cultures responded to our ex parte pleas for better understanding. In short, destroy our narcissism by trying to comprehend our interactions with “less gifted” parts of humanity.

Two years of courses: US and Europe (where the most dangerous relations existed --and where it was metastasizing), US and Russia (where we were fatuously fumbling with McCarthyite maneuvers), US and Latin America ( which we had totally ignored—when we weren’t stealing their territory.) Second year: US and Asia, US and Africa, US and Us, as in our ignored minorities. In short, a future-oriented humanism, not the useless whimpering about nineteen century Scots who jeered, “who reads an American book?. . . “ The painful answer then was hardly anyone, Americans included. Not long after I left Academe to transform myself, a professor of American Studies into a Euromensch, having sold my Louis Kahn house in Greenbelt Knoll in 2010 for the top flat of a 178ß villa at Seifengasse 10, Weimar,Germany in 2011—Goethe lived at Seifengasse 1, when this villa was first built!

In this mood of transformation,imagine my pleasant, if stunned, surprise to discover Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds. "Globalizing American Studies” (The University of Chicago Press, 2010)! And to find that I had missed the first Congress of the International American Studies Association(IASA!), convened in 2004 in by one Djelal Kadir (Professor of comparative literature at Penn State) cannily held in Leiden, Netherlands, from whence a small band of British Puritans sailed to Plymouth Rock, thereby hanging John Winthrop’s City on the Hill theological madness on our national neck for almost ever.

And Kadir’s inaugural address, ”Defending America against Its Devotees” got right down to business by indicting George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 as a program for planetary dominance “that ratified a version of American exceptionalism.”He denounced Bush’s two new “epochal documents”, viz.,”The National Security Strategy of the United States and the declaration of a “Global War on Terror.” (“Globalizing”, p. 47.) They transformed global dominance into American Exceptionalism’s new raison d’etre. “He explained that the combined operations of these doctrines had resulted in the installation of the United States as a State of Exception in the international order, which showed little interest in seeing itself through the eyes of the world it sought to dominate. He pleaded for open-minded research into all the imperial colonies contemporaneous with our own U.S. blind imperialism.

The book also analyzes the original formation of our indigenous American Studies as implicitly political both in the Cold War and after. One thinks of the State Department sending poets and jazz orchestras abroad to buff our image—instead,say, of teaching American high school students to love their neglected education in real music compared,say, with Elvis Presley. And one remembers CIA funding for “thoughtful” monthlies like “Encounter” rather than bring the best American media into our common schools. The great black journalist Carl Rowan while he served as our Ambassador to Finland, chided US for PR politics abroad rather than solving the contradictions of our real lives at home.

This book opens new dialogue over such neglected fields of research as our commercial media abroad which often contradict our better selves at home. There’s a groundbreaking essay on the Nixon/Khruschev Kitchen debate in Moscow which points to more fruitful exegeses of our true values at home and abroad.

Our Exceptionalist postures have always in my judgment been instances of “me thinks he protests too much.” Most Americans don’t realize that the rhetoric of “the American Dream” was invented by a historian of the 30’s Depression, a callow whistling in the dark passing by the cemetery. Our PR problems will deepen as BRIC cultures refuse to be intimidated by our big (deficit) budget bluster. As we wallow more and more in the Plundocracy (in which greedy bankers just pocketed $150 billions in “bonuses”) thatword used to mean “good,the very white collar criminals who crippled and may have ultimately destroyed an economy that once gave the world’s hardworking poor a ladder to moderate success,as our “privatizing” and offshoring the economy have given GE and other monoliths a tax free ride.

Our Exceptionalist rhetoric which this collection lays bare from the outside as fatuous special pleading may kill the Golden Goose soon if not already. ISAS has its hands full to teach US to join the rest at our best. We began by lying about the Red Indian and Black African. We may end for good,lying to ourselves. This collection makes it possible if not plausible to avoid collapse, encouraging US to change before it’s too late. At the very least, looking at how other Empires withered and died might squelch the American hubris which has been our endemic weakness. Join the best at IASA!