American Studies in the 21st Century: A Usable Past

American Studies in the 21st Century: A Usable Past

&nbsp;&nbsp;This article describes some of the transformations taking place in the field of American Studies today, and mines the past for figures who can help light our way. It concludes by describing some instances of model scholarship that exemplify where American Studies is heading. The myth-and-symbol analyses of American national character and the belief in American exceptionalism that dominated American Studies when the field first became institutionalized in the 1950s and 1960s have given way to more complex and nuanced perspectives on American culture as a nexus of multiple cultures constantly influencing and reshaping each other, as a site in which lived experience is inflected by race, by class, by ethnicity, by gender, by sexual orientation, by place of origin, by region, and by religion in complicated and dynamic ways, as a culture whose myths and symbols need to be interrogated rather than reified, and as a culture and nation just as vulnerable as other cultures and nations to the seductions of greed, arrogance and empire. Revisionist historians have re-examined every chapter of U.S. history and uncovered perspectives ignored by previous generations, listening to voices that were previously silenced, exploring conflicts previously erased, and probing power relations that were previously so naturalized as to be invisible. Revisionist literary critics have mined canonical American literature for traces of these silenced voices and evidence of these naturalized power relations and forgotten conflicts. They have recovered vast bodies of texts that have expanded ideas of what American literature is, was, and might be, in ways that their predecessors could not have imagined. Notions of "mainstream" and "margins" that a previous generation of scholars found obvious and unremarkable have been challenged and dismantled. The physical place that is the "United States" has been decentered as the object of study in American Studies by scholars who know that there are stories and histories that don&quot;t take place in the U.S. at all that are central to the field as it is recognized today. We are paying more attention now to American literature in languages other than English, and distinctions between the "domestic" and the "foreign" are increasingly challenged as scholars become more aware of the ways in which each informs the other. As the twenty-first century opens, scholars&quot; ideas about what constitutes "American Studies" are changing in dynamic and exciting ways that make the contributions of international scholars more important than ever.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Where the old American Studies aspired to describe American Culture as a monolithic, stable, homogeneous entity characterized by universally-shared experiences, myths and symbols, the new American Studies increasingly understands American Culture as a crossroads of cultures. In place of exceptionalist, triumphalist narratives of progress, American Studies scholars today are reconstructing complex stories of crossroads and contact zones, of conflict, transformation, and change. Some of the keywords that characterize the new "American Studies" are "transnational," "intercultural," "international" "multicultural," "diasporic," "multilingual," "counter-hegemonic" and "comparative." In place of unitary ascriptions of a particular meaning to a particular event, scholars are contextualizing and historicizing the construction of memory and meaning during different periods, understanding why different pasts become "usable" at different moments in time. Five pioneering figures whose work is particularly "usable" at this juncture in time are Gloria Anzald?a, Robert Morse Crunden, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Mark Twain. These five figures are forebears American Studies scholars today need to embrace and celebrate. Together they point us toward new paradigms for American Studies in the 21st century that are transnational, collaborative, and interdisciplinar