Post-Nationalist American Studies

by John Carlos Rowe (Editor)

Post-Nationalist American Studies seeks to revise the cultural nationalism and celebratory American exceptionalism that tended to dominate American Studies in the Cold War era. The goal of the book's contributors is a less insular, more trans-national, comparative approach to American Studies, one that questions dominant American myths rather than canonizes them. Articulating new ways to think about American Studies, these essays demonstrate how diverse the field has become.

Contributors are concerned with cross-cultural communication, race and gender, global and local identities, and the complex tensions between symbolic and political economies. Their essays explore, among other topics, the construction of "foreign" peoples and cultures; the notion of borders―territorial, racial, economic, and sexual; the "multilingual reality" of the United States; the place of the Mexican-American War in U.S. history; and the significance of Tiger Woods in today's global market of consumption.

Together, the essays propose a renewed vision of the United States' role in the world and how American Studies scholarship can address that vision. Each contributor includes a sample syllabus showing how the issues discussed in individual essays can be brought into the classroom.

Genres: Academic

Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. From 1975-2004, he taught at the University of California, Irvine, where he was Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Director of African-American Studies, Chair of Comparative Literature (during its successful move to departmental status), Director of the Critical Theory Emphasis, and Director of the Critical Theory Institute (sponsor of the annual Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory and three-year research projects, both series published by Columbia University Press), which he helped found in the mid-1980s.

Reviews

[Bud · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although the articles are 10-15 years old, a very important resource.