Globalizing American Studies

Globalizing American Studies
Author: Brian T. Edwards
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2010-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226185087

The discipline of American studies was established in the early days of World War II and drew on the myth of American exceptionalism. Now that the so-called American Century has come to an end, what would a truly globalized version of American studies look like? Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar offer a new standard for the field’s transnational aspiration with Globalizing American Studies. The essays here offer a comparative, multilingual, or multisited approach to ideas and representations of America. The contributors explore unexpected perspectives on the international circulation of American culture: the traffic of American movies within the British Empire, the reception of the film Gone with the Wind in the Arab world, the parallels between Japanese and American styles of nativism, and new incarnations of American studies itself in the Middle East and South Asia. The essays elicit a forgotten multilateralism long inherent in American history and provide vivid accounts of post–Revolutionary science communities, late-nineteenth century Mexican border crossings, African American internationalism, Cold War womanhood in the United States and Soviet Russia, and the neo-Orientalism of the new obsession with Iran, among others. Bringing together established scholars already associated with the global turn in American studies with contributors who specialize in African studies, East Asian studies, Latin American studies, media studies, anthropology, and other areas, Globalizing American Studies is an original response to an important disciplinary shift in academia.

American Studies Encounters the Middle East

American Studies Encounters the Middle East
Author: Alex Lubin
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2016-08-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1469628856

In the field of American studies, attention is shifting to the long history of U.S. engagement with the Middle East, especially in the aftermath of war in Iraq and in the context of recent Arab uprisings in protest against economic inequality, social discrimination, and political repression. Here, Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy curate a new collection of essays that focuses on the cultural politics of America's entanglement with the Middle East and North Africa, making a crucial intervention in the growing subfield of transnational American studies. Featuring a diverse list of contributors from the United States, the Arab world, and beyond, American Studies Encounters the Middle East analyzes Arab-American relations by looking at the War on Terror, pop culture, and the influence of the American hegemony in a time of revolution. Contributors include Christina Moreno Almeida, Ashley Dawson, Brian T. Edwards, Waleed Hazbun, Craig Jones, Osamah Khalil, Mounira Soliman, Helga Tawil-Souri, Judith E. Tucker, Adam John Waterman, and Rayya El Zein.

Teaching American Studies

Teaching American Studies
Author: Elizabeth A. Duclos-Orsello
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2021-08-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700632379

“What if American Studies is defined not so much in the pages of the most cutting-edge publications, but through what happens in our classrooms and other learning spaces?” In Teaching American Studies Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Joseph Entin, and Rebecca Hill ask a diverse group of American Studies educators to respond to that question by writing chapters about teaching that use a classroom activity or a particular course to reflect on the state of the field of American Studies. Teaching American Studies speaks to teachers with a wide range of relationships to the field. To start, it is a useful how-to guide for faculty who might be new to, or unfamiliar with, American Studies. Each author brings the reader into their classes to offer specific, concrete details about their pedagogical practice, and their students' learning. The resulting chapters connect theory and educational action as well as share challenges, difficulties, and lessons learned. The volume also provides a collective impression of American Studies from the point of view of students and teachers. What primary and secondary texts and what theoretical challenges and issues do faculty use to organize their teaching? How does the teaching we do respond to our institutional and educational contexts? How do our experiences and those of our students challenge or change our understanding of American Studies? Chapters in this collection discuss teaching a broad range of materials, from memoirs and novels by Anne Moody and Octavia Butler to cutting-edge cultural theory, to the widely used collection Keywords for American Cultural Studies. But the chapters in this collection are also about dancing, eating, and walking around a campus to view statues and gravestones. They are about teaching during the era of Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, and giving up authority in the classroom. Teaching American Studies is both a new way to think about American Studies and a timely collection of effective ways to teach about race, gender, sexuality, and power in a moment of political polarization and intense public scrutiny of universities.

The Futures of American Studies

The Futures of American Studies
Author: Robyn Wiegman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 631
Release: 2002-10-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0822384191

Originating as a proponent of U.S. exceptionalism during the Cold War, American Studies has now reinvented itself, vigorously critiquing various kinds of critical hegemony and launching innovative interdisciplinary endeavors. The Futures of American Studies considers the field today and provides important deliberations on what it might yet become. Essays by both prominent and emerging scholars provide theoretically engaging analyses of the postnational impulse of current scholarship, the field's historical relationship to social movements, the status of theory, the state of higher education in the United States, and the impact of ethnic and gender studies on area studies. They also investigate the influence of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies on U.S. nationalist—and antinationalist—discourses. No single overriding paradigm dominates the anthology. Instead, the articles enter into a lively and challenging dialogue with one another. A major assessment of the state of the field, The Futures of American Studies is necessary reading for American Studies scholars. Contributors. Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Günter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, José Estaban Muñoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos

Handbook of Latin American Studies

Handbook of Latin American Studies
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 808
Release: 2007
Genre: Latin America
ISBN:

Contains scholarly evaluations of books and book chapters as well as conference papers and articles published worldwide in the field of Latin American studies. Covers social sciences and the humanities in alternate years.

The American Studies Anthology

The American Studies Anthology
Author: Richard P. Horwitz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780842028295

A rich and rewarding subject of popular imagination, the United States is compellingly portrayed in this first anthology designed specifically for American studies courses. Offering an indispensable introduction to the long and varied history of generalizing about America, leading scholar Richard Horwitz has compiled the definitive anthology for American studies and American culture courses. Brimming with imaginative selections, the reader contains essays, plays, songs, comedy, legal documents, speeches, and poems by a rich array of authors-both domestic and international-whose writings echo recurring American themes. Collectively, the anthology identifies the ways in which scholars and popularizers have attempted to characterize America. Horwitz's insightful introduction summarizes key themes in the study of American culture as he traces the history of the field as well as current controversies. He avoids heavy jargon yet presents a nuanced view of the foundational works in American studies. Preceding the readings with concise, informative introductions, Horwitz seamlessly guides the reader through this distinctive collection.

American Studies as Transnational Practice

American Studies as Transnational Practice
Author: Yuan Shu
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611688485

This wide-ranging collection brings together an eclectic group of scholars to reflect upon the transnational configurations of the field of American studies and how these have affected its localizations, epistemological perspectives, ecological imaginaries, and politics of translation. The volume elaborates on the causes of the transnational paradigm shift in American studies and describes the material changes that this new paradigm has effected during the past two decades. The contributors hail from a variety of postcolonial, transoceanic, hemispheric, and post-national positions and sensibilities, enabling them to theorize a "crossroads of cultures" explanation of transnational American studies that moves beyond the multicultural studies model. Offering a rich and rewarding mix of essays and case studies, this collection will satisfy a broad range of students and scholars.

God is Red

God is Red
Author: Vine Deloria
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2003
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781555914981

The seminal work on Native religious views, asking questions about our species and our ultimate fate.

American Studies in a Moment of Danger

American Studies in a Moment of Danger
Author: George Lipsitz
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780816639496

The America that seems to be disappearing before our very eyes is, George Lipsitz argues, actually the cumulative creation of yesterday's struggles over identity, culture, and power. At a critical moment, this book offers a richly textured historical perspective on where our notions of national knowledge have come from and where they may lead. Showing how American studies has been shaped by the social movements of the 1930s, 1960s, and 1980s, Lipsitz identifies the ways in which the globalization of commerce and culture are producing radically new understandings of politics, performance, consumption, knowledge, and nostalgia. Book jacket.

America Observed

America Observed
Author: Virginia R. Dominguez
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785333615

There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon. Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected here offer a critique of such an absence, exploring its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. This volume contains an introduction written by the editors and fieldwork-based essays written by Helena Wulff, Jasmin Habib, Limor Darash, Ulf Hannerz, and Moshe Shokeid, and reflections on the broad issue written by Geoffrey White, Keiko Ikeda, and Jane Desmond. Suitable for introductory and mid-level anthropology courses, America Observed will also be useful for American Studies courses both in the U.S. and elsewhere.