Small Steps Towards a Long Journey: American Studies From Confined Space to International Practice
Context situates everything—texts, ideas, events, people, and fields of research—in their specific historical and cultural place. When it comes to understanding “American culture past and present, as a whole,” there are (at least) two different ways to approach “context” (Smith 197). First, by examining the histories of American Studies, and second, by considering American Studies in a global context; I will discuss both of these approaches in this essay, exploring histories of American Studies over the past century as well as the turn towards a more international, global position that occurred in the latter decades of the 20th century. These two ways of contextualizing American Studies go hand in hand, because the history of the field of American Studies has pointed to the need for a more global approach to American Studies.
In his essay “Can American Studies Develop a Method?” Henry Nash Smith argues that context is necessary to develop a method and illustrates the importance of context through the work of Mark Twain. In order to understand Twain’s work, he argues, a reader has to be familiar with Twin’s life—“life,” here, means the context in which he wrote his work. Twain includes his social status, the society he was a part of, and society’s attitudes to social classes (Smith 199). Smith uses Twain’s use of language as an example and says there are three distinctive prose styles in his work. First is the “vernacular style,” based on people with little education; the second contains more “elevated” rhetoric, copying that of the church and politics; the third is a more “direct, unpretentious” style, such as that of a reporter (Smith 200). Twain would not have assigned these prose styles to particular groups of people (i.e. characters in his books) had he not been taught so by the social culture he lived in, Smith argues. He states: “An examination of these aspects of Mark Twain’s style requires a careful discrimination between attitudes toward social classes that he has taken over unconsciously from the culture and attitudes that spring from his conscious recognition of social stratification and of his place within the status system” (Smith 200). Both existing in a particular class system and his place within that system, affected his work. It is necessary to know this information when reading his work, to draw correct conclusions about Twain’s own attitudes to the culture he lived in.
To extend Smith’s argument to the field of American Studies, then, in order to understand how American Studies works as a methodology today, it is necessary to understand how it has worked in the past. He points out that the “problem” in developing a method in American Studies arises because “the investigation of American culture as a whole,” as it was in 1957 when the article was published, included limited perspectives and thus, limited views on how American Studies could operate as a method. If a method of a culture includes only parts of that culture, because it excludes other crucial parts, it cannot function as a method. To make this claim more concrete, what the field of American Studies was lacking for a long time was inclusivity of the African American, Asian American, Chicano/a American, and Native American parts of American Culture, as well as putting American Studies into a wider, global context. Instead, Smith argues, it had a much more narrow view of the American national identity.
This changed in the 1980s when the “International Turn” occurred in American Studies. In her book The International Turn in American Studies, Marietta Mesmer argues that in the last decades of the 20th century, developments in “global, political, and economic interdependence” and “increasing mobility of people and commodities worldwide” have started to shift American Studies scholars’ understanding of the discipline (Messmer 7). The result is a call for a redefinition of what the discipline entails (Messmer 8). She discusses different internationalizing approaches to American Studies that took place at the time and distinguishes between post-national and trans-national American Studies, International American and American American Studies and Inter-American and Hemispheric American Studies. Post-national American Studies questions the idea of the United States as a unique entity and vouches to consider how the United States has been shaped by events that happened outside of its borders (Messmer 12-13). Transnational American Studies emphasizes the way in which the US interacts with other countries, both influencing them and being influenced by them (Messmer 14-17). Messmer emphasizes the importance of International American Studies as opposed to American American Studies as the former posits the United States as an international entity, not simply and American one, and seeks to view American Studies in a global context (Messmer 19-21). Finally, Inter-American studies considers not only the United States but includes North-, Central- and South America as well as the Caribbean to belong to American Studies scholarship; Hemispheric American Studies broadens this scope and views the Americas as a single sphere that is interconnected (Messmer 21-23).
These new approaches to the field of American Studies have significantly changed the field. Mary Helen Washington, as president of the American Studies Association (ASA) from 1996 to 1997, proudly shares the rewards of the international turn. Her address at the 1997 convention, titled “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies if you put African American Studies at the Center?” was a remarkable and memorable speech: it decentered traditional narratives of American Studies, inspired other scholars to reconsider the way they view American Studies physical and metaphorical boundaries, and reimagined the future of American Studies. In her speech, she compares the convention of 1985 to that of 1997 and highlights the changes between the two conventions. In 1985, African American voices were not included in the ASA: “They were separate, and their paths did not cross at all” (Washington 5). Neither was there space for Asian American and Chicano/a voices. From 1985 to 1997, African American, Asian American and Chicano/a scholars “push[ed], protest[ed], and organiz[ed]” a place for them in the ASA. Their efforts would be rewarded: in 1997, “categories like race, gender, sexuality, and language cross-cut, intersect, and impact one another” in such a way that it became impossible for these categories to remain separate (Washington 7).
Washington’s address influenced American Studies scholars in the decades that followed. Scott Kurashige, president of the ASA from 2019 to 2020, mentioned Washington in his own address to the participants of the 2020 ASA convention. He calls Washington’s address “the most indispensable reading we have about our field” (Kurashige 309). Since 1997, he argues, the field of American Studies has worked towards becoming a more inclusive space. The 2020 convention represents the American demographic and the Association can, as a diverse and inclusive entity, effectively tackle American issues concerning its peoples, places, and times (Kurashige 311). Thus, between 1985 and 2020, American Studies did what Henry Nash Smith had wanted it to do: it broadened its boundaries, welcomed subcultures of the US and made steps toward developing a methodology.
With the International Turn, not only did American Studies in the United States begin to include perspectives of cultures that were part of the US but not yet part of its scholarly field, as discussed above, but American Studies appeared in countries outside of the United States, such as in The Netherlands. Doeko Bosscher examines how American Studies is taught in the Netherlands. After World War II, interest from the Netherlands in the United States increased due to the growing influence of culture and politics in Europe (Bosscher 3-4). At the same time, American Studies established itself as a discipline and questioned its possibilities and limitations such as those posed by Henry Nash Smith. Thus, the United States became a country of interest. Bosscher argues that American Studies as it is taught in the Netherlands is shaped by Dutch influences. Scholars are able to posit Dutch and European history, culture, and politics against that of the United States. Far away from the national identity of the US, the Netherlands and Europe have their own perspective on the US which influences the way they view American culture and studies. This, in turn, contributes to the field of American Studies, because the more perspectives are included in the field, the more of a complete overview it contains; Smith, in his words, wanted “to take into account as many aspects of it [new perspectives] as possible” (Smith 197).
In conclusion, internationalizing American Studies is necessary to create a complete, all-encompassing interdisciplinary field of scholarship. Developing an American Studies method, or, in other words, describing a fashion in which to teach and practice American Studies, requires knowing its context, and part of this context is its history, the way in which the field of American Studies has developed over time. The American Studies Association used to be a white, male-dominated field with a narrow view of which aspects of the culture it should include in its scholarship. Through critical scholars, this view broadened, until in the 1980s/1990s the International Turn emerged. This turn from “America” as a single, unique entity towards an understanding of the United States as part of both a hemispheric and global unit where it interacts with other countries, has significantly changed the field of American Studies over the decades.
Context continues to matter to American Studies scholars because the context continues to change. Change is never finite; so, neither can the development of American Studies be. As Kurashige also states in his presidential address of 2020, we are living in a “once in a millennium” moment where “the perils of mass extinction and immense suffering meet the necessity and possibility to restore and create ways of living in harmony with all living things and the Earth” (330). Summed up quite philosophically, American Studies scholarship will continue to change and thus, understanding its context will continue to be important to understand the field as a whole. Additionally, American Studies as it is today does not fully include all of the histories of the United States. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Linda Tuhiwai-Smith argue in the introductions to their respective books, research within American Studies has often served colonial agendas, disregarding Native American peoples’ perspectives. The American Studies Association has improvements to make when it comes to properly including these peoples’ history in its field. In order to understand their history, as a crucial part of American Studies, their voices should be heard. As Kurashige says in his presidential address: the ASA has taken “small steps towards a long journey”; it is a journey, not a quick trip to a paradisal Eden, which the field of American Studies is still on.
Works Cited List
Bosscher, Doeko. “American Studies in the Netherlands,” European Journal of American Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2006.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. “Introduction,” in An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, 2014, pp. 1-14.
Kurashige, Scott. “Unruly Subjects: American Studies from Antidiscipline to Revolutionary Praxis,” American Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 2, 2020.
Messmer, Marietta. “Transcending Borders: The International Turn in American Studies,” in Messmer and Frank (ed.), The International Turn in American Studies, 2015, pp. 7-44.
Smith, Henry Nash. “Can American Studies Develop a Method?” American Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1957, pp. 197-208.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwei. “Introduction,” in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, University of Otago Press, 2008, pp. 1-18.
Washington, Helen Mary. “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens If You Put African American Studies at the Center?” American Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1, 1998.
Iris Elske 