Rethinking American Literary Studies/American Studies: 

Allen, Ray. “Unifying the Disunity: A Multicultural Approach to Teaching American Music.” American Studies 37 (1996): 135-47.
 

American Literature 65 (1993): 325-61: Forum: What Do We Need to Teach? [JSTOR] 

American Literature 66 (1994): 769-829: Forum: Repositionings: Multiculturalism, American Literary History, and the Curriculum [JSTOR]

American Literature 67 (1995): 793-853: Forum: American Literary History: The Next Century [JSTOR], esp. Laura Romero. “Nationalism and Internationalism: Domestic Differences in a Postcolonial World” (795-800).

Bender, Thomas. “Where Is America? A Planning Conference on Internationalizing American History.” OAH Newsletter (Nov. 1997): 21.

Bender, Thomas. La Pierta Report: Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History, A Report to the Profession. Bloomington, IN: Organization of American Historians, 2000.

Bender, Thomas, ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. 

   reviews:

Perez, Louis A., Jr. “We Are the World: Internationalizing the Nation, Nationalizing the International.” Journal of American History 89.2 (2002): 558-66.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. “America as Canon and Context: Literary History in a Time of Dissensus.” American Literature 58 (1986): 99-107. [JSTOR]

Writing as the general editor of the Cambridge History of American Literature, projected at the time to be in 5 volumes beginning in 1989 (but now expanded to 8? volumes, the first of which appeared in 1994; volumes 1-2, 5-8 are in Fenwick Reference), Bercovitch offers an overview of some of the issues involved in the project. Relatively thin; see essays by, Annette Kolodny and Emory Elliott (below).

Brenkman, John. “Multiculturalism and Criticism.” English Inside and Out: The Places of Literary Criticism. Eds. Susan Gubar and Jonathan Kamholtz. 1993.

Cain, William E., ed. Reconceptualizing American Literary/Cultural Studies: Rhetoric, History, and Politics in the Humanities. New York: Garland, 1996. 

Cheyfitz, Eric. “What Work Is There for Us to Do? American Literary Studies or Americas Cultural Studies.” American Literature 67 (1995): 843-53.

Cheyfitz, Eric. “Redistribution and the Transformation of American Studies.” Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature: Politics, Curriculum, Pedagogy. Eds. James F. Slevin and Art Young. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1996.

Davis, Allen F. “The Politics of American Studies.” American Quarterly 42.3 (1990): 353-74.

De La Campa, Román. “Latin, Latino, American: Split States and Global Imaginaries.” Comparative Literature 53.4 (2001): 373-88.

Desmond, Jane and Virginia Dominguez. “Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism.” American Quarterly 48 (1996): 475-90.

Dimock, Wai-Chee. “Deep Time: American Literature and World History.” American Literary History 13 (2001): 755-75.

Elliott, Emory. “New Literary History: Past and Present.” American Literature 57 (1985): 611-21. [JSTOR]

Erkkila, Betsy. “Ethnicity, Literary Theory, and the Grounds of Resistance.” American Quarterly 47.4 (1995): 563-94.  

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “InterrogatingWhiteness,' ComplicatingBlackness': Remapping American Culture.” American Quarterly 47 (1995): 428-66.

Fitz, Earl E. Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991.

Fluck, Winfried. “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism.” Cultural Critique 40 (Fall 1998): 49-71; rpt. in The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Weigman. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 211-30.

Fluck, Winfried. “The Americanization of Literary Studies.” American Studies International 28 (Oct. 1999): 9-21.  

Ford, Stacilee and Clyde Haulman. “’To Touch the Trends’: Internationalizing American Studies: Perspectives from Hong Kong and Asia.” American Studies International 34.2 (1996): 42-58.

George, Olakunle. “Alice Walker’s Africa: Globalization and the Province of Fiction.” Comparative Literature 53.4 (2001): 354-71. [JSTOR; ABELL]

Giles, Paul. “Reconstructing American Studies: Transnational Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives.” Journal of American Studies 28 (1994): 335-58.

Giles, Paul. “Virtual Americas: The Internationalization of American Studies and the Ideology of Exchange.” American Quarterly 50.3 (1998): 523-47.

Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.

Gish, Robert Franklin. Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo American, Native American, and Chicano Literature. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1996.

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. "The Multicultural Paradigm: An Open Letter to the National Arts Community." High Performance (Fall 1989): 18-27.

Green, Roland. “Wanted: A New World Studies.” American Literary History 12 (2000): 337-47.

Gura, Philip F. “Turning Our World Upside Down: Reconceiving Early American Literature.” American Literature 63 (1991): 104-12. [JSTOR]

Horwitz, Richard P. “The Politics of International American Studies.” American Studies International 31.1 (1993): 89-116.

Ickstadt, Heinz. “American Studies in an Age of Globalization.” American Quarterly 54 (2002): 543-62.

Jay, Gregory. “The End of ‘American’ Literature: Toward a Multicultural Practice.” College English 53 (Mar. 1991): 264-81.                                         

As against a reform of American literary study in the direction of “pluralism” (i.e., recognizing the existence of multiple—but mutually independent—cultural traditions within the domain of American literature), Jay argues that “[o]ur goal should be rather to construct a multicultural and dialogical paradigm for the study of writing in the United States (264).The emphasis on the interplay among the multicultural traditions of the United States is the central thrust of his argument: “Within the boundaries of the US, the lines between cultural groups do not form impassable walls, though they often take oppressive shape.Historically these zones are an area of constant passage back and forth, as each culture borrows, imitates, exploits, subjugates, subverts, mimics, ignores, or celebrates the others.The myth of assimilation homogenizes this process by representing it as the progressive acquiescence of every other group to a dominant culture” (268).Jay adopts Gerald Graff’s notion of “teaching the conflicts” as a term for describing the pedagogy he advocates: “Facile pluralism might be avoided through demonstrations of the real conflicts between texts and cultures.I advocate courses in which the materials are chosen for the ways in which they actively interfere with each other’s experiences, languages, and values and for their power to expand the horizon of the student’s cultural literacy to encompass peoples he or she has scarcely acknowledged as real” (274).These “interference” might occur between texts, but it might also occur within a given text: e.g., Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle (1961) in which “the contrast between Jewish-American and Mexican-American assimilation unfolds a multicultural fable of the politics of recollected identities” (273).“Clearly a multicultural reconception of ‘Writing in the United States’ will lead us to change drastically or eventually abandon the conventional historical narratives, period designations, and major themes and authors previously dominating ‘American literature’” (275).

Jay, Gregory S. American Literature and the Culture Wars. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.

Jay, Paul. “The Myth of ‘America’ and the Politics of Location: Modernity, Border Studies, and the Literature of the Americas.” Arizona Quarterly 54 (1998): 165-92.

Kaplan, Amy. “Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture.” Cultures of United States Imperialism. Eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. 3-21.

Kaplan, Amy and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993.

King, Richard C., ed. Postcolonial America. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000.

Kolodny, Annette. “The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the United States.” American Literature 57 (1985): 291-307. [JSTOR]

Kolodny, Annette. “Letting Go of Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers.”American Literature 64 (1992): 1-18. [JSTOR]

Laguardia, Gari and Bell Gale Chevigny. Introduction. Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature in the United States and Spanish America. Ed. Chevigny and Laguardia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 3-33.

Lauter, Paul. “The Literatures of America--A Comparative Discipline.” Redefining American Literary History. Eds. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. New York: MLA, 1990. 9-34; rev. version in his Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. 48-96.

Lauter, Paul, ed. Reconstructing American Literature: Courses, Syllabi, Issues. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist P, 1983.

Lenz, Günter H. “Transnational American Studies: Negotiating Cultures of Difference—Multicultural Identities, Communities, and Border Discourses.” Multiculturalism in Transit: A German-American Exchange. Eds. Klaus J. Milich and Jeffrey M. Peck. New York: Berghahn, 1998. 129-66.

Lenz, Günter H. “Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies: Transnationality, Border Discourses, and Public Culture(s).” Amerikastudien/American Studies 44.1 (1999): 5-23; rpt. in The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Weigman. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 461-85.

Lenz, Günter R., et al. “Transculturations: American Studies in a Globalizing World—The Globalizing World in American Studies.” Amerikastudien 47.1 (2002): 97-119.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. “Frontier.” A Companion to American Thougth. Eds. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 255-59.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. “Insiders and Outsiders: The Borders of the USA and the Limits of the ASA: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association 31 October 1996.” American Quarterly 49.3 (1997): 449-69.

Ling, Amy. “The Representation of Asian American Poetry in The Heath Anthology of American Literature.” Reviewing Asian America: Locating Diversity. Ed. Wendy L. Ng. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1995.

Lowe, Lisa. “The International within the National: American Studies and Asian American Critique.” Cultural Critique 40 (Fall 1998): 29-47; rpt. in The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Weigman. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 76-92.

Mackenthun, Gesa. “Adding Empire to the Study of American Culture.” Journal of American Studies 30 (1996): 263-69.

Mailloux, Steven. “Making Comparisons: First Contact, Ethnocentrism, and Cross-Cultural Communication.” Post-Nationalist American Studies. Ed. John Carlos Rowe. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 110-25 (plus syllabus, 126-28).

Uses Rorty to discuss two aspects of ethnocentrism—hermeneutic and political—in the activity of cultural comparison.Mailloux accepts the inevitability of hermeneutic ethnocentrism, drawing on the relativist and antifoundationalist “sophistic” tradition of rhetoric, since the act of comparison takes place in relation to criteria or standards that are always specific to a particular historical community: “at any point in the [cultural] space/time continuum, our own web of vocabularies, beliefs, and desires—the communal and individual subjects/agents that we are—comprise the delimiting and enabling conditions of our comparative activities.We can never stand completely outside all cultural positions objectively comparing our ethnos with another alien one, but neither are we free to actualize any position whatsoever or convincingly make any comparisons we want through some imagined freedom of absolute relativism.We are ‘we’ because of our being positioned within a culture in a particular set of practices // that empowers and constrains acts of interpretive and evaluative comparison” (117-18).While he acknowledges that this situation can produce unjust evaluations (as Lyotard emphasizes through his notion of a “differend”), Mailloux denies that it can produce incommensurability, complete failure of communication: “No community can be so different from // another than cross-cultural communication is in principle forever doomed to fail” (120-21).Mailloux raises large and important theoretical issues, but it’s not exactly clear what the implications of his argument are at the level of practice (cross-cultural interpretive practice).

Menand, Louis. “Diversity.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd edn. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 336-53.

Mergen, Bernard. “Can American Studies Be Globalized?” American Studies 41.2-3 (Summer/Fall 2000).

Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Random House, 1993.

Muthyala, John. “Reworlding America–The Globalization of American Studies.” Cultural Critique 47 (Winter 2001): 91-119.

Newfield, Christopher and Ronald Strickland, eds. After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s. Boulder, CO: Westview P, 1995.

O’Hearn, Claudine Chiawei. Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural. New York: Pantheon, 1998.

Ortíz, Ricardo L. “Hemispheric Vertigo: Cuba, Quebec, and Other Provisional Reconfigurations of ‘Our’ New America(s).” The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Weigman. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 327-40.

Pease, Donald. “National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives.” National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives. Ed. Donald Pease. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994. 1-13.

Pease, Donald. “C.L.R. James, Moby Dick, and the Emergence of Transnational American Studies.” Arizona Quarterly 56.3 (2000): 93-123; rpt. in The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Weigman. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 135-63.

Pease, Donald. “The Politics of Postnational American Studies.” European Journal of American Studies 20.2 (2001): 78-90.

Pease, Donald E., ed. National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994.

Pease, Donald and Robyn Wiegman, eds. The Futures of American Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.

Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo, ed. Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

Peyser, Thomas. Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism.

  reviews:

      Diller, Christopher. Nineteenth-Century Literature 56.1 (2001): 110-14.

Giles, Paul. Journal of American Studies 36.1 (2002): 177-78.

Porter, Carolyn. “What We Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies.” American Literary History 3 (1994): 467-526.

Rowe, John Carlos. “A Future for American Studies: Comparative U.S. Cultures Model.” American Studies in Germany: European Contexts and Intercultural Relations. Eds. Günter H. Lenz and Klaus J. Milich. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1995. 262-78.

Rowe, John Carlos. “Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies.” Cultural Critique 40 (Fall 1998): 11-27; repr. in Post-Nationalist American Studies. Ed. John Carlos Rowe. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 23-37 (plus syllabus, 38-39); repr. in The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Weigman. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 167-82; repr. in his The New American Studies (see below).

Rowe, John Carlos. The New American Studies. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.

Rowe, John Carlos, ed. Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.
Emphasizing the need to connect “the research and teaching components of the new American Studies” (x), this volume brings together critical essays and syllabi for sample (imaginary) courses that embody the outlook presented in the essays: “’How would you develop a course out of these ideas?’ was the question we asked ourselves” (xi).Notes omissions in the volume: Native American Studies; Western hemisphere approaches (e.g., Caribbean, Latin American, Canadian comparativist studies) (xii).The contributors seek “to contribute to a version of American Studies that is less insular and parochial, and more internationalist and comparative.In this sense, our efforts to formulate a post-nationalist American Studies respond to and seek to revise the cultural nationalism and celebratory American exceptionalism that often informed the work of American Studies scholars in the Cold War era” (2).

   reviews:

          Adams, Rachel. “The Worlding of American Studies.” American Quarterly 53 (2001): 720-32

Saldívar, José David. The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

Saldívar, José David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.

Sánchez, George J. “Creating the Multicultural Nation: Adventures in Post-Nationalist American Studies in the 1990s.” Post-Nationalist American Studies. Ed. John Carlos Rowe. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 40-58 (plus syllabus, 59-62).

A useful discussion of the claims of Ethnic Studies programs and particular areas of study (African American Studies, Latino/a and Chicano/a Studies, Native American Studies, Asian American Studies) vis-à-vis the current move towards a “post-nationalist” or “cosmopolitan” emphasis in American Studies.Sánchez’s discussion illuminates how vexed these issues are, how much they are overdetermined by various agendas, and how moves to a revised and multicultural American Studies can work to marginalize (once again) the perspectives brought into academic circulation by advocates of Ethnic Studies programs.“[I]f a true conversation is to exist between Ethnic Studies and American Studies,” he writes, “we must collectively fight off the tendency to collapse difference into some new nationalist paradigm, even if ‘multicolored’” (56).

Sandoval, Chela. “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World.” Genders 10 (1991): 1-24.

Sharpe, Jenny. “Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race.” Diaspora 4.2 (Fall 1995).

Simonson, Rick and Scott Walker, eds. Multi-Cultural Literacy. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf P, 1988.

Singh, Amritjit and Peter Schmidt, eds. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2000.
reviews:
Adams, Rachel. “The Worlding of American Studies.” American Quarterly 53 (2001): 720-32.
Handley, George. Mississippi Quarterly 55.1 (2001/02): 158-60. [ABELL]

Smithson, Isaiah and Nancy Ruoff, eds. English Studies/Cultural Studies. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994.

Sollors, Werner. “For a Multilingual Turn in American Studies.” American Studies Association Newsletter 20.2 (1997): 13-15.

Sollors, Werner, ed. Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. New York: New York UP, 1998.

Sollors, Werner, ed. An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New. New York: New York UP, 2002.

Sollors, Werner and Marc Shell, eds. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. New York: New York UP, 2000.

Sollors, Werner and Marc Shell, directors, Longfellow Institute, Harvard Univ. (www.fas.harvard.edu/~lowinus): dedicated to the study of “non-English writings in what is now the United States” and to reexamining “the English-language tradition in the context of American multilingualism.”

Spanos, William V. “American Studies in the ‘Age of the World Picture’: Thinking the Question of Language.” The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Weigman. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 387-415.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Who Cuts the Borders? Some Readings on ‘America.’” Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense J. Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Tyrell, Ian. “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History.” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1031-72.

Wald, Alan. “The Culture of ‘Internal Colonialism’: A Marxist Perspective.” MELUS 8.3 (1981): 18-27. [JSTOR]

Wald, Priscilla. “Minefields and Meeting Grounds: Transnational Analysis and American Studies.” American Literary History 10 (1998): 199-218.

Walker, Robert. “The Internationalization of American Studies.” American Studies International 26.1 (1988): 67-71.

Washington, Mary Helen. “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?” American Quarterly 50.1 (1998): 1-23.

Williams, Jeffrey, ed. PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Wise, Gene. “’Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement.” American Quarterly 31 (1979): 293-337.