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By SAM TANENHAUSAPRIL 11, 2014
Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
That adage received a curious twist after the American Studies Association voted in December to boycott Israel’s higher-education institutions to protest its treatment of Palestinians.
A symbolic and nonviolent gesture is what Matthew Frye Jacobson, a former president of the association, called it in a recent interview, adding, “If that’s not allowable, then what is?” Within a month, however, the presidents of more than 100 colleges and universities denounced the resolution. “Academic boycotts subvert the academic freedoms and values necessary to the free flow of ideas,” Drew Gilpin Faust of Harvard wrote in a statement echoing what the other presidents said.
Since then, the controversy has spilled into statehouses and even Congress. A bill introduced in February in the House of Representatives would make an institution that participates in such a boycott ineligible for certain funds. Legislators in at least seven states have introduced similar bills or proposed resolutions condemning academic boycotts (the Illinois effort was voted down in committee last week).
The association’s protest has also provoked larger questions about American studies. Has a discipline that in the 1950s and 1960s was a model of bold interdisciplinary inquiry — fusing literature and history, sociology and economics, popular culture and ethnography — changed, or degenerated, into a bastion of ideological militancy?
“More and more people like me left the A.S.A. over the years because of its increasingly narrow politicization and its preoccupation with race, empire and gender,” said David Hollinger, recently retired from the University of California, Berkeley, after more than 40 years as a teacher and scholar. The field itself, he said, “has become a domain in which folks in ideological overdrive can do their thing with a minimum of skepticism from colleagues.”
But to others, the current thrust of American studies, known as “the transnational turn,” represents a necessary corrective in the new globalist era. As the country’s standing in the world has slipped, so has its claim to “exceptionalism.” One nation among others, it is best understood in relation to the rest of the world and through its transactions with it.
In her 2004 address to the association, its president at the time, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, celebrated the transnational turn by singling out the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chicano studies scholar whose prizewinning memoir, “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” recast the interaction between white and Mexican populations as “the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture.”
The transnational turn has “decentered America by looking at its international embroilments, not just imperialism or immigration,” explained Amy Kaplan, an American studies scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. This has prompted scholars to examine parallels with seemingly disparate countries.
In the post-superpower age, the United States looks increasingly like other nations that have recent origins and troubled ethnic histories — for instance, Australia and Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa. And Israel, too. Connections might be drawn between “settler colonialism” in the Old West (its “virgin land” the habitat of Indians and Mexicans) and Israel’s settlements on the West Bank. And that connection is not just hypothetical. “Some of the actual companies that have built the fences on the Mexican border are also involved in barriers in Israel and Palestine,” Dr. Kaplan said.
All of which is to say that in the end the debate over Israel is really about America, even to the most transnationally minded. And what looks like a bitter ideological battle may be the latest phase in a longstanding family quarrel.
Traditional approaches still flourish on many campuses. Until last year, Harvard called its program — the nation’s oldest, begun in 1937 — the History of American Civilization (it is now American studies). But at other institutions the field seems to be changing, or losing, its identity as it is absorbed into other departments or eliminated altogether, or with professors dispersed among various departments.
Curtis Marez, the current president of the A.S.A., used to teach in the American studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but is now a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. Santa Cruz as well as Wayne State University in Detroit have abandoned American studies programs. Sarika Chandra, formerly Wayne State’s director of American studies, is now a professor of English there. New York University’s American studies doctoral program was rolled into the department of social and cultural analysis in 2005, along with Africana studies and gender studies.
Yale, meanwhile, steers a middle course. Its American studies program, which offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees, mixes the new and the old. Courses last fall included “Caribbean Diasporic Literature” and “Postwar Queer Avant-Garde Film,” but students could also learn about “Marxism and Social Movements in the 19th Century” and “Culture of the Early Cold War.”
What might seem a crisis of identity is rooted, like so many other struggles, in the nation’s changing demographics. Some 40 million people living in the United States are foreign-born, and the Urban Institute has estimated that 65,000 undocumented immigrants graduate from high school each year.
To a new generation, American studies offers, as before, the promise of understanding the American past and of relating it to the present, but through different portals. The old “Am Civ” syllabus of the 1970s, when I was in college, with its selections from Tocqueville and John Dos Passos’ novel “U.S.A.,” has given way to “The Souls of Black Folk,” W.E.B. DuBois’s pioneering study of the color line.
At Yale, American studies is holding its own, and more. “We’re the only humanities unit on campus that’s growing,” said Dr. Jacobson, professor of American studies, history and African-American studies. With about 110 declared majors, American studies is the third most popular humanities major at Yale, after history and English, said Joanne Meyerowitz, the department chairwoman. Undergraduates don’t choose it to discover themselves — “those students tend to major in psychology,” Dr. Meyerowitz said. Instead, they want to know more about their country.
Even in its great early period, the 1950s and ’60s, American studies was attuned to the controversies of the moment. “In intellectual terms it was progressive,” Dr. Jacobson said. “It was chafing against academic disciplines, was pressing against boundaries in intellectual terms. But in political terms it was conservative. It tended toward a kind of totalizing notion of Americanness.”
The first Americanists subscribed to concepts like “American exceptionalism,” “the American mind” and the “American way of life,” arguing that the United States had its own independent culture and was not just the stepchild of Europe.
An essay like John A. Kouwenhoven’s “What’s American About America,” published in Harper’s in 1956, daringly suggested that clues to a coherent culture could be found in the skyscraper and the Model T, as well as in jazz, soap operas and comic strips. This analysis reflected the consensus outlook of the mid-20th century, premised on the belief that the United States was a beacon of democratic progress.
And even if individual American studies scholars pointed out the nation’s shortcomings, the discipline itself could seem boosterish, particularly at Yale. In “Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale,” Michael Holzman includes a 1949 note to Charles Seymour, then president of the university, in which a dean suggests that the program could find financing if it was pitched to backers as “a weapon in the Cold War.” It should also convey the message that the “magnificence and variety” of a nation were rooted in “the superb English stock which first settled and consolidated our Eastern Seaboard.”
But the idea of an agreed-upon, and homogeneous, American identity “couldn’t stand during the tumult of the ’60s,” Dr. Jacobson said. “The civil rights era, the antiwar movement, the rise of feminism” — all these pushed the field in new directions. First came the rise of ethnic and gender studies, which led to an ambitious rethinking of the American past in works like “The Legacy of Conquest,” Patricia Nelson Limerick’s 1987 revisionist account of the West (chapters include “The Persistence of Natives” and “Racialism on the Run”). Out of this came the transnational turn.
In the fall I sat in on a lecture by Jean-Christophe Agnew. Dr. Agnew, a cultural historian who joined the Yale faculty in 1978, falls on the more traditional end of the American studies spectrum. He is also a renowned lecturer. “From Theology to Therapy,” the topic of the talk I attended, examined how the transition happened in the late 19th century, weaving together the sermons of the Congregationalist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, the Wild West fiction of Owen Wister, the philosophy of the psychologist William James, the “mind-cure” preachments of the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and the caricatures of Thomas Nast. A highlight, on PowerPoint, was a visual comparison of Velazquez’s 1656 “Las Meninas” (“The Maids of Honor”) and what the Americanist scholar Ellen Wiley Todd has suggested was a feminist reimagining in 1909 by the Boston artist Marie Danforth Page.
In the space of 75 minutes, Dr. Agnew reconstructed a vanished era and showed how seemingly unrelated developments — the transformation of the sermon into the sales pitch, the rise of psychology and of accredited medical professionals, the emergence of feminism — overlapped to create a cultural transformation.
Two weeks later I sat in on a very different class, “Approaches to American Studies,” an introductory survey taught at New York University by Nikhil Pal Singh, a prominent scholar in the transnational vein. The topic, “The Politics of Memory,” centered on a pair of essays about war memorials. One described the ceremonial reopening of the Confederate White House as a museum in 1896. The other revisited the controversy surrounding Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
This was not a lecture but a discussion, and it ranged from the past to the present, and from America to the outside world, as Dr. Singh patiently led two dozen students eager to state their opinions. The results were surprising.
The students showed some sympathy for the Confederate point of view (since it defiantly challenged the mythology of boundless American progress) but were critical of Ms. Lin’s memorial, which they found too accepting, in its beautiful geometric abstraction, of an American-centered view of Vietnam — as if the war’s greatest traumas had been confined to our shores. Dr. Singh mentioned a visit he made to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and to its war memorial, which includes an exhibit on the victims of the contaminant Agent Orange.
If Dr. Agnew and Dr. Singh seem to occupy different places on the American studies continuum, both also are heirs to its history of cultural and historical synthesis. As it happens, Dr. Agnew is not involved with the American Studies Association and said that although he sympathizes with the purpose of the resolution he opposes all “intellectual boycotts,” adding: “I wouldn’t have voted ‘Aye.’ More like ‘Oy.’ ” Dr. Singh is a member of the association council that wrote the resolution.
In the end, it may not matter. Long after the episode has been forgotten, scholars like Dr. Agnew and Dr. Singh will continue to thrive in that other important “borderland,” the classroom, where new generations of students come, eager to learn “what’s American about America,” even if no one really knows the answer.
Sam Tanenhaus is a writer at large at The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/e...yond-its-borders.html?hpw&rref=education&_r=0
Whats going on? Whats with all this change is it all good? @VCheng @KingMamba @qamar1990 @Informant
Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
That adage received a curious twist after the American Studies Association voted in December to boycott Israel’s higher-education institutions to protest its treatment of Palestinians.
A symbolic and nonviolent gesture is what Matthew Frye Jacobson, a former president of the association, called it in a recent interview, adding, “If that’s not allowable, then what is?” Within a month, however, the presidents of more than 100 colleges and universities denounced the resolution. “Academic boycotts subvert the academic freedoms and values necessary to the free flow of ideas,” Drew Gilpin Faust of Harvard wrote in a statement echoing what the other presidents said.
Since then, the controversy has spilled into statehouses and even Congress. A bill introduced in February in the House of Representatives would make an institution that participates in such a boycott ineligible for certain funds. Legislators in at least seven states have introduced similar bills or proposed resolutions condemning academic boycotts (the Illinois effort was voted down in committee last week).
The association’s protest has also provoked larger questions about American studies. Has a discipline that in the 1950s and 1960s was a model of bold interdisciplinary inquiry — fusing literature and history, sociology and economics, popular culture and ethnography — changed, or degenerated, into a bastion of ideological militancy?
“More and more people like me left the A.S.A. over the years because of its increasingly narrow politicization and its preoccupation with race, empire and gender,” said David Hollinger, recently retired from the University of California, Berkeley, after more than 40 years as a teacher and scholar. The field itself, he said, “has become a domain in which folks in ideological overdrive can do their thing with a minimum of skepticism from colleagues.”
But to others, the current thrust of American studies, known as “the transnational turn,” represents a necessary corrective in the new globalist era. As the country’s standing in the world has slipped, so has its claim to “exceptionalism.” One nation among others, it is best understood in relation to the rest of the world and through its transactions with it.
In her 2004 address to the association, its president at the time, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, celebrated the transnational turn by singling out the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chicano studies scholar whose prizewinning memoir, “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” recast the interaction between white and Mexican populations as “the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture.”
The transnational turn has “decentered America by looking at its international embroilments, not just imperialism or immigration,” explained Amy Kaplan, an American studies scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. This has prompted scholars to examine parallels with seemingly disparate countries.
In the post-superpower age, the United States looks increasingly like other nations that have recent origins and troubled ethnic histories — for instance, Australia and Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa. And Israel, too. Connections might be drawn between “settler colonialism” in the Old West (its “virgin land” the habitat of Indians and Mexicans) and Israel’s settlements on the West Bank. And that connection is not just hypothetical. “Some of the actual companies that have built the fences on the Mexican border are also involved in barriers in Israel and Palestine,” Dr. Kaplan said.
All of which is to say that in the end the debate over Israel is really about America, even to the most transnationally minded. And what looks like a bitter ideological battle may be the latest phase in a longstanding family quarrel.
Traditional approaches still flourish on many campuses. Until last year, Harvard called its program — the nation’s oldest, begun in 1937 — the History of American Civilization (it is now American studies). But at other institutions the field seems to be changing, or losing, its identity as it is absorbed into other departments or eliminated altogether, or with professors dispersed among various departments.
Curtis Marez, the current president of the A.S.A., used to teach in the American studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but is now a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. Santa Cruz as well as Wayne State University in Detroit have abandoned American studies programs. Sarika Chandra, formerly Wayne State’s director of American studies, is now a professor of English there. New York University’s American studies doctoral program was rolled into the department of social and cultural analysis in 2005, along with Africana studies and gender studies.
Yale, meanwhile, steers a middle course. Its American studies program, which offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees, mixes the new and the old. Courses last fall included “Caribbean Diasporic Literature” and “Postwar Queer Avant-Garde Film,” but students could also learn about “Marxism and Social Movements in the 19th Century” and “Culture of the Early Cold War.”
What might seem a crisis of identity is rooted, like so many other struggles, in the nation’s changing demographics. Some 40 million people living in the United States are foreign-born, and the Urban Institute has estimated that 65,000 undocumented immigrants graduate from high school each year.
To a new generation, American studies offers, as before, the promise of understanding the American past and of relating it to the present, but through different portals. The old “Am Civ” syllabus of the 1970s, when I was in college, with its selections from Tocqueville and John Dos Passos’ novel “U.S.A.,” has given way to “The Souls of Black Folk,” W.E.B. DuBois’s pioneering study of the color line.
At Yale, American studies is holding its own, and more. “We’re the only humanities unit on campus that’s growing,” said Dr. Jacobson, professor of American studies, history and African-American studies. With about 110 declared majors, American studies is the third most popular humanities major at Yale, after history and English, said Joanne Meyerowitz, the department chairwoman. Undergraduates don’t choose it to discover themselves — “those students tend to major in psychology,” Dr. Meyerowitz said. Instead, they want to know more about their country.
Even in its great early period, the 1950s and ’60s, American studies was attuned to the controversies of the moment. “In intellectual terms it was progressive,” Dr. Jacobson said. “It was chafing against academic disciplines, was pressing against boundaries in intellectual terms. But in political terms it was conservative. It tended toward a kind of totalizing notion of Americanness.”
The first Americanists subscribed to concepts like “American exceptionalism,” “the American mind” and the “American way of life,” arguing that the United States had its own independent culture and was not just the stepchild of Europe.
An essay like John A. Kouwenhoven’s “What’s American About America,” published in Harper’s in 1956, daringly suggested that clues to a coherent culture could be found in the skyscraper and the Model T, as well as in jazz, soap operas and comic strips. This analysis reflected the consensus outlook of the mid-20th century, premised on the belief that the United States was a beacon of democratic progress.
And even if individual American studies scholars pointed out the nation’s shortcomings, the discipline itself could seem boosterish, particularly at Yale. In “Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale,” Michael Holzman includes a 1949 note to Charles Seymour, then president of the university, in which a dean suggests that the program could find financing if it was pitched to backers as “a weapon in the Cold War.” It should also convey the message that the “magnificence and variety” of a nation were rooted in “the superb English stock which first settled and consolidated our Eastern Seaboard.”
But the idea of an agreed-upon, and homogeneous, American identity “couldn’t stand during the tumult of the ’60s,” Dr. Jacobson said. “The civil rights era, the antiwar movement, the rise of feminism” — all these pushed the field in new directions. First came the rise of ethnic and gender studies, which led to an ambitious rethinking of the American past in works like “The Legacy of Conquest,” Patricia Nelson Limerick’s 1987 revisionist account of the West (chapters include “The Persistence of Natives” and “Racialism on the Run”). Out of this came the transnational turn.
In the fall I sat in on a lecture by Jean-Christophe Agnew. Dr. Agnew, a cultural historian who joined the Yale faculty in 1978, falls on the more traditional end of the American studies spectrum. He is also a renowned lecturer. “From Theology to Therapy,” the topic of the talk I attended, examined how the transition happened in the late 19th century, weaving together the sermons of the Congregationalist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, the Wild West fiction of Owen Wister, the philosophy of the psychologist William James, the “mind-cure” preachments of the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and the caricatures of Thomas Nast. A highlight, on PowerPoint, was a visual comparison of Velazquez’s 1656 “Las Meninas” (“The Maids of Honor”) and what the Americanist scholar Ellen Wiley Todd has suggested was a feminist reimagining in 1909 by the Boston artist Marie Danforth Page.
In the space of 75 minutes, Dr. Agnew reconstructed a vanished era and showed how seemingly unrelated developments — the transformation of the sermon into the sales pitch, the rise of psychology and of accredited medical professionals, the emergence of feminism — overlapped to create a cultural transformation.
Two weeks later I sat in on a very different class, “Approaches to American Studies,” an introductory survey taught at New York University by Nikhil Pal Singh, a prominent scholar in the transnational vein. The topic, “The Politics of Memory,” centered on a pair of essays about war memorials. One described the ceremonial reopening of the Confederate White House as a museum in 1896. The other revisited the controversy surrounding Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
This was not a lecture but a discussion, and it ranged from the past to the present, and from America to the outside world, as Dr. Singh patiently led two dozen students eager to state their opinions. The results were surprising.
The students showed some sympathy for the Confederate point of view (since it defiantly challenged the mythology of boundless American progress) but were critical of Ms. Lin’s memorial, which they found too accepting, in its beautiful geometric abstraction, of an American-centered view of Vietnam — as if the war’s greatest traumas had been confined to our shores. Dr. Singh mentioned a visit he made to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and to its war memorial, which includes an exhibit on the victims of the contaminant Agent Orange.
If Dr. Agnew and Dr. Singh seem to occupy different places on the American studies continuum, both also are heirs to its history of cultural and historical synthesis. As it happens, Dr. Agnew is not involved with the American Studies Association and said that although he sympathizes with the purpose of the resolution he opposes all “intellectual boycotts,” adding: “I wouldn’t have voted ‘Aye.’ More like ‘Oy.’ ” Dr. Singh is a member of the association council that wrote the resolution.
In the end, it may not matter. Long after the episode has been forgotten, scholars like Dr. Agnew and Dr. Singh will continue to thrive in that other important “borderland,” the classroom, where new generations of students come, eager to learn “what’s American about America,” even if no one really knows the answer.
Sam Tanenhaus is a writer at large at The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/e...yond-its-borders.html?hpw&rref=education&_r=0
Whats going on? Whats with all this change is it all good? @VCheng @KingMamba @qamar1990 @Informant
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whats it about?
sounds familiar...then again I am in the middle of analysis so anything can sound like anything 
