3.19.2006
Post-Nationalist American Studies (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Rowe, John Carlos (ed.) Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Summary
This book is the product of a research group of the same name at UCHRI. It discusses what is at stake in a pot-nationalist american studies and what it should look like, all with a critical eye. "In other words, we need to critique the limits and exclusions of nationalism without forgetting the differences between nationalisms or throwing all nationalisms into the trashcan of history." (2) "The question remained how the new American Studies would find a distinctive, interdisciplinary, scholarly and teaching role for the speciality without slipping again into a rhetoric that privileged national identity. How could the new American Studies take 'nation,' 'nationality,' and 'nationalism' as phenomena that are simultaneously fictional and real?" (6) "We are concerned with how one negotiates among local, national, and global perspectives, while remaining vigilantly self-critical about the epistemologically and historically deep ties that American Studies has had to U.S. imperialism." (7) There is a call to examine the ways in which race and ethncity have been commodified within and without academia. "There is a need for public intellectuals who can engage with a listening and reading audience who see themselves not as the victims of a capitalist market, but as active and empowered consumers." (13) "Scholars in American Studies need to work toward the goal of minimal literacy in all the cultural studies disciplines."(14) John Carlos Rowe's essay, "Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies," deals with "a reconsideration of national cultural boundaries," (23) asserting that a comparitive approach to American Studies must deal with culture not as discrete entities but as constituted through contact and interaction with each other. "The new American Studies requires a new internationalism that will take seriously the different social, political, and educational purposes American Studies serves in its different situations around the globe." (18) The enlightenment model of the University must be challenges and American Studies must work with, not against, Ethnic Studies, Womens Studies, Queer Studies, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory. George Sanchez's essay, "Creating the Multicultural Nation" deals with multiculturalism in the University / Academia (the conflict between American Studies programs and Ethnic Studies programs) and the tendency of the new Left to espouse a post-Ethnic racial paradigm. "I remain skeptical that anyone but those with racial and economic power in American society can truly be "postethnic." (54) "A post-nationalist American Studies must find a way to invorporate the various intellectual traditions in a multicultural United States and the specific histories at individual campuses without assuming a position of ideological control over the study of race and ethnicity." (56) Jay Mechling examines the place of religion in the new American Studies in his essay "Rethinking (and Reteaching) the Civil Religion in Post-Nationalist American Studies." "A workable notion of the 'civil religion' of the United States and other societies needs to be at the center of our thinking about religion in a post-nationalist, postmodern world." (64) Katherine Kinney's "Foreign Affairs" is a doing of post-Nationalist American Studies as she examines Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men, and others to mark how these works "chart similarly transformed geographies, discovering an America in which Asia not only can but must be imagined as partaking." (104) Steven Mailloux examines the ethics of comparison in his essay "Making Comparisons." "The issue of making comparisons between cultures raises the question of the hemeneutic status of such comparisons and the political position of any future comparativist." (111) In his essay, "a Genealogy of U.S. Mercantilism," David Kazanjian, in discussing Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the LIfe of Olaudah Equiano shows one example of the interdisciplinarity of the new American Studies in combing a literary-historical methodology with a economic-historical methodology. Shelly Streeby, in her essay "Joaquin Murrieta and the American 1848" similarly models interdisciplinary methodology. Barbara Brinson Curiel, in her essay, "My Border Stories," examines ethnic life narratives as "hybrid signs which blend both lived experience and textual representation." (203) "Interdisciplinarity, when practiced faithfully, broadens the scope of Ethnic Studies by incorporating a variety of disciplinary evidence. A faithful interdisciplinarity requires that texts from various disciplines not only be taught side by side, but also that they be studied using the critical strategies of more than one discipline." (205) Finally, in his essay "How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes," Henry Yu locates his study of the ways "global capitalism...frames definitions of cultural and national difference" (224) on the body and cultural production of Tiger Woods. "National formation, and the concurrent practices of cultural and radical differentiation, have always been transnational in character, and they have always called for a perspective that can link ethnic formation with processes that transcend national borders. A post-nationalist American Studies, therefore, should strive to place nation formation within transnational contexts of racial and cultural differentiation." (224) "If we are to achieve a post-nationalist American Studies, it cannot be founded on a lack of awareness of how intellectuals in the United States are themselves American and prize their bourgeois professional status." (237) "More than just recognizing the role of these migrations, however, we must also pay attention to the expansion of labor markets and capitalist production and consumption that have at times created these movements of people, and at other times have commodified the cultural differences they are seen to embody." (243) Oh also, each chapter ends with a neat syllabus.
Keywords
Nation, Nationality, Nationalism, Tradition, The Conceptual, The Methogological, New, American Exceptionalism, Comparison.
Other Thoughts
"Race and cultural are not sociological categories, but definitions predicated upon historical narratives of identity. Definitions of what someone is now are tied biologically to a national origin in the past; these definitions were made in localized contexts, defining who belonged to a particular geographical locale and who else was a foreigner from somewhere else. But even though the distinctions were made in specific sites, they always invoked the international by imagining foreign nations with theoretically homogenous populations from which migrants originally came. Population migrations have always produced definitions of the difference between the local and the foreign, imagining a set of movements between here and somewhere else." (242)
Other QE Works Cited
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain (History and Theory of the Body)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Dirlik, Arlif. What's in a Rim? (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Rowe, John Carlos (ed.) Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Summary
This book is the product of a research group of the same name at UCHRI. It discusses what is at stake in a pot-nationalist american studies and what it should look like, all with a critical eye. "In other words, we need to critique the limits and exclusions of nationalism without forgetting the differences between nationalisms or throwing all nationalisms into the trashcan of history." (2) "The question remained how the new American Studies would find a distinctive, interdisciplinary, scholarly and teaching role for the speciality without slipping again into a rhetoric that privileged national identity. How could the new American Studies take 'nation,' 'nationality,' and 'nationalism' as phenomena that are simultaneously fictional and real?" (6) "We are concerned with how one negotiates among local, national, and global perspectives, while remaining vigilantly self-critical about the epistemologically and historically deep ties that American Studies has had to U.S. imperialism." (7) There is a call to examine the ways in which race and ethncity have been commodified within and without academia. "There is a need for public intellectuals who can engage with a listening and reading audience who see themselves not as the victims of a capitalist market, but as active and empowered consumers." (13) "Scholars in American Studies need to work toward the goal of minimal literacy in all the cultural studies disciplines."(14) John Carlos Rowe's essay, "Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies," deals with "a reconsideration of national cultural boundaries," (23) asserting that a comparitive approach to American Studies must deal with culture not as discrete entities but as constituted through contact and interaction with each other. "The new American Studies requires a new internationalism that will take seriously the different social, political, and educational purposes American Studies serves in its different situations around the globe." (18) The enlightenment model of the University must be challenges and American Studies must work with, not against, Ethnic Studies, Womens Studies, Queer Studies, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory. George Sanchez's essay, "Creating the Multicultural Nation" deals with multiculturalism in the University / Academia (the conflict between American Studies programs and Ethnic Studies programs) and the tendency of the new Left to espouse a post-Ethnic racial paradigm. "I remain skeptical that anyone but those with racial and economic power in American society can truly be "postethnic." (54) "A post-nationalist American Studies must find a way to invorporate the various intellectual traditions in a multicultural United States and the specific histories at individual campuses without assuming a position of ideological control over the study of race and ethnicity." (56) Jay Mechling examines the place of religion in the new American Studies in his essay "Rethinking (and Reteaching) the Civil Religion in Post-Nationalist American Studies." "A workable notion of the 'civil religion' of the United States and other societies needs to be at the center of our thinking about religion in a post-nationalist, postmodern world." (64) Katherine Kinney's "Foreign Affairs" is a doing of post-Nationalist American Studies as she examines Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men, and others to mark how these works "chart similarly transformed geographies, discovering an America in which Asia not only can but must be imagined as partaking." (104) Steven Mailloux examines the ethics of comparison in his essay "Making Comparisons." "The issue of making comparisons between cultures raises the question of the hemeneutic status of such comparisons and the political position of any future comparativist." (111) In his essay, "a Genealogy of U.S. Mercantilism," David Kazanjian, in discussing Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the LIfe of Olaudah Equiano shows one example of the interdisciplinarity of the new American Studies in combing a literary-historical methodology with a economic-historical methodology. Shelly Streeby, in her essay "Joaquin Murrieta and the American 1848" similarly models interdisciplinary methodology. Barbara Brinson Curiel, in her essay, "My Border Stories," examines ethnic life narratives as "hybrid signs which blend both lived experience and textual representation." (203) "Interdisciplinarity, when practiced faithfully, broadens the scope of Ethnic Studies by incorporating a variety of disciplinary evidence. A faithful interdisciplinarity requires that texts from various disciplines not only be taught side by side, but also that they be studied using the critical strategies of more than one discipline." (205) Finally, in his essay "How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes," Henry Yu locates his study of the ways "global capitalism...frames definitions of cultural and national difference" (224) on the body and cultural production of Tiger Woods. "National formation, and the concurrent practices of cultural and radical differentiation, have always been transnational in character, and they have always called for a perspective that can link ethnic formation with processes that transcend national borders. A post-nationalist American Studies, therefore, should strive to place nation formation within transnational contexts of racial and cultural differentiation." (224) "If we are to achieve a post-nationalist American Studies, it cannot be founded on a lack of awareness of how intellectuals in the United States are themselves American and prize their bourgeois professional status." (237) "More than just recognizing the role of these migrations, however, we must also pay attention to the expansion of labor markets and capitalist production and consumption that have at times created these movements of people, and at other times have commodified the cultural differences they are seen to embody." (243) Oh also, each chapter ends with a neat syllabus.
Keywords
Nation, Nationality, Nationalism, Tradition, The Conceptual, The Methogological, New, American Exceptionalism, Comparison.
Other Thoughts
"Race and cultural are not sociological categories, but definitions predicated upon historical narratives of identity. Definitions of what someone is now are tied biologically to a national origin in the past; these definitions were made in localized contexts, defining who belonged to a particular geographical locale and who else was a foreigner from somewhere else. But even though the distinctions were made in specific sites, they always invoked the international by imagining foreign nations with theoretically homogenous populations from which migrants originally came. Population migrations have always produced definitions of the difference between the local and the foreign, imagining a set of movements between here and somewhere else." (242)
Other QE Works Cited
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain (History and Theory of the Body)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Dirlik, Arlif. What's in a Rim? (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
# posted by SMRT : 9:21 PM
