American Studies Today: Critical Relations among Internationalism, Ethnic Studies, and Indigenous Studies

American Studies Today: Critical Relations among Internationalism, Ethnic Studies, and Indigenous Studies

  Originally written and delivered as the Presidential Address to the American Studies Association in November, 2002, the aim of this paper is to expose and discuss some tensions among three important interests in current practices and theories of interdisciplinary American Studies: the interests in internationalism, Ethnic Studies, and Indigenous Studies. At the same time, the paper recognizes the importance of each of these analytical categories and is an attempt to demonstrate productive interactions among them by putting their tensions to use. International practices of American Studies and some theories that have arisen from them (for instance, the development of a “postnational” American Studies) had not been highlighted in a single plenary address to the ASA before this speech was delivered. Internationalism, however, may tend to detract attention from domestic American Ethnic Studies; and longstanding attempts to make Ethnic Studies “central” to American Studies are still in process, perhaps in permanent unsettled dialogue. Like a tautology, Ethnic Studies is central to Ethnic Studies in ways that it is not central to American Studies. Seemingly forgotten in both internationalism and Ethnic Studies is Indigenous Studies of Native Americans and Pacific Islander American subjects. In whatever versions, multiculturalism in Ethnic Studies has displaced the indigenous from a central role in American culture and history. Finally, since the paper was delivered four months before the beginning of the Iraq War, its conclusion about the arriving clouds of war mark the paper with a particular occasion, time and place, in current events. A shortened, spoken version of this paper was delivered at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in May 2003. The full text of the paper was published in American Quarterly 55.3 (September 2003): 333-52.