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Globalizing American Studies

The University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

Toward a Comparative Analysis of Imperial State Exceptionalisms

Donald E. Pease

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM(S) IN AN EXTENDED FIELD: THE INAUGURATION OF INTERNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

In "Defending America against Its Devotees," the presidential address that he delivered at the Inaugural Congress of the International American Studies Association at Leiden, Netherlands, on May 22, 2004, Djelal Kadir represented the members of the newly formed association as united in their repudiation of the Bush administration's global strategy for planetary dominance "that ratified a version of American exceptionalism." The specific targets of Kadir's denunciation were the members of the Bush administration responsible for the construction of two epochal documents, The National Security Strategy of the United States and the declaration of a "Global War on Terror," which had turned U.S. global dominance into American exceptionalism's new raison d'être. According to Kadir, this new rationale had also effected a new paradigm in American studies, whose pedagogy was encapsulated in Bush's twinned doctrines of preemptive strikes and full-spectrum global dominance. He explained that the combined operations of these doctrines had resulted in the installation of the United States as a State of Exception in the international order, and that it showed little interest in seeing itself through the eyes of the world it sought to dominate. After he characterized Bush's new national defense strategy as the "21st century's Monroe Doctrine on a global scale" (144), Kadir concluded that its enactment "may well prove a watershed for American culture and paradigm- altering for American Studies" (135).

Whereas the Bush administration had installed seemingly insuperable obstacles in between the state's policies and the people's understanding of them, Kadir described the mission of the IASA as a collective effort to break down these epistemological barriers by producing formations of knowledge about America that would undermine this new paradigm. To accomplish this mission, Kadir enjoined the members of the International American Studies Association to scrutinize the significance of this paradigm shift by undertaking a "revisionary self-understanding" of American studies programs across the globe that would entail examining "what these changes mean and articulating their implications for our curricular and investigatory endeavors" (145).

Kadir specifically recommended that international americanist scholars construe these new policies as symptomatic case studies that would comprise the investigative and curricular subject matter of the new field of study. Then he exhorted international americanist scholars to reread the historical archive within a larger context than that which had been circumscribed by the disciplinary parameters of the field instituted by U.S. americanists who had been "trained under the auspices of the Marshall Plan and the Cold War" (143). "We, as Americanists, need to worry about those asymmetrical frames that define our own subject agency, institutional instrumentality, discursive strategies, all of which are part and parcel of the formative complex and transformative thrust that goes by the field designation of American Studies" (141).

When he described the Bush administration's policies as "paradigm-altering," Kadir tacitly characterized Bush's governmental apparatus as the meta-agent of a new American studies, and he conceptualized the doctrines of preemption and global dominance as the core tenets of this new state pedagogy. Kadir described Bush's practices of state governance as inaugurating a new paradigm of U.S. American studies so as to call attention to the "disciplinary exceptionalism" of U.S. American studies. In Kadir's estimation, American exceptionalism did not merely refer to a specific form of knowledge; as the organizing logic of the field's paradigm, American exceptionalism regulated the forms of the knowledge that could be produced about the United States. As the disciplinary medium through which American exceptionalism was regulatively transmitted across the globe, U.S. American studies was construed by Kadir as itself an extension of the state's govermentality: "American Studies is, indeed, very much a discipline in the strongest Foucauldian sense of governmentality. It is so to the point of having disciplined the practitioners of American Studies to deny that their practices form and are formed by a discipline" (147).

After World War II, its status as a form of cultural diplomacy positioned U.S. American studies scholarship within an extraterritorial space that exempted it from subordination to "foreign" knowledge productions about the United States and that rendered U.S. American studies scholars immune to the scholarly influence of "non-American" students of American studies. At the conjunctural moment in which nation-states and newly decolonized regions were determining their individual and collective relationship with the cold war's drastic reorganization of global political and economic processes, U.S. American studies scholars encouraged their international clientele to resort to an American reference in conducting their intranational debates over the role of the state and the rule of law, immigration policies and migrant populations, the underclass and the welfare state, as well as questions of minority rights.

When it worked in tandem with the Marshall Plan, U.S. American studies was a scholarly field as well as an international movement that functioned as a cultural diplomacy extension of U.S. international policy. U.S. American studies referred at once to a restricted area of scholarly inquiry as well to the agency responsible for the propagation of a generalizable symbolic economy. As an area studies program, American studies supplied an interdisciplinary methodology for studying the literature, history, politics, and territorial geography of the United States. As an agency that legitimated processes of Americanization worldwide, American studies also instructed international scholars in how to deploy the field of American studies as an encompassing medium of acculturation (translatio studii imperii americani).

The discourse of American exceptionalism monitored how American culture was studied, and it regulated these processes of translatability. Stipulating that the nation's uniqueness required that the U.S. state remain apart from the national cultures whose processes it regulated, American exceptionalism installed an asymmetrical relationship between international scholars and U.S. americanists. By setting vertical operations into motion that presupposed a hierarchical relationship between the U.S. culture to be translated and the national cultures translating it, the discourse of American exceptionalism deployed this asymmetrical relationship between international scholars and U.S. americanists to regulate these interactions. When engaged in a dialogue about American culture with an international scholar, a U.S. americanist could act at once as a dialogue partner and as the agent who controlled the discourse through which the dialogue was initiated, its terms defined, its concepts interpreted, and its disputes resolved.

American studies scholars within the international community, however, never identified themselves as docile recipients of U.S. americanists' scholarship. International scholars in American studies devised methodological "tool kits" that enabled them to design versions of American exceptionalism that isolated aspects of American history and political society suited to the particular ideological needs of the nation-states in which they practiced. In selectively adopting the discourse of American exceptionalism to their own research protocols and ideological purposes, international americanists wielded American studies as a double-edged sword. When they held up what they found exemplary about U.S. political culture, international americanists fostered changes within their own national cultures. But when they isolated what they found either pernicious or unassimilable about the American way of life, these scholars did so to ward off U.S. cultural imperialism. After World War II, American studies scholars in Europe in particular devised paradoxical scholarly representations of American exceptionalism as a democratizing countermodel to European political norms that inspired resistance to political repressions within their home countries; they also negatively described American exceptionalism as the ideology of a global hegemon whose imperial ambitions they subjected to critique. Each national American studies association thereby particularized its knowledge about America through the practicing of an alternative American modernity.

Despite the fact that international americanists produced innovative scholarship about the United States, the terms of comparative analysis formulated within the territorial United States reduced americanist scholarly works produced outside of U.S. borders into pale reflections of U.S. americanists' scholarly prerogatives. Insofar as American exceptionalism installed an americanist frame of reference designed to promote the transformation of the international scholar's native culture, it recast the international scholar into a secondary participant in the American way of life. Feeling diminished by terms of comparison whose grounds were outside of their control, internationalist americanist scholars felt insulted by a field of scholarship that transposed the structural similarities between U.S. and international American studies into the occasions to reassert U.S. geopolitical dominance.

In inaugurating the International American Studies Association, Kadir aspired to redress this imbalance in the intercultural dialogues between U.S. and international americanists. Throughout his address, Kadir urged the members of the International American Studies Association to undertake critical reassessments of their previous relationship to U.S.-based American studies so as to construct a range of scholarly alternatives.

As these observations indicate, Kadir directed his critique primarily against the globalization of U.S. American studies. After describing the Bush administration's global dominance as the new paradigm for U.S. American studies, Kadir criticized U.S. American studies' engulfing of every national American studies association within its encompassing vantage point. Kadir insisted that the status of American studies as an international field should oblige americanist scholars outside the United States to resist the reabsorption of their scholarship into the globalizing agendas of U.S. American studies, and he urged the international scholars in the IASA to view America from national points of view that remained ineluctably "nonamerican": "The internationalization of the term 'America' as referent for the whole hemisphere helps us to understand what non-Americanized Americanists, or those scholars and historians worldwide who have studied and written on America as a global phenomenon have always understood: that the ideologically circumscribed reduction of America, and of American Studies, to the United States screens out history's documentary archive that could help understand what is occurring presently on a global ... scale" (143).

The changes that Kadir called for were more specifically designed to effect a shift in the "disciplinary exceptionalism" of American studies that would undermine the recent "cultural turn" in U.S. American studies in particular. Kadir phrased this reorientation in terms of a series of irreversible transitions that would move America from the originator and propagator of its own epistemic paradigms to the recipient of knowledge production constructed about America globally, that would displace America from a national object of devotion to an international object of secular criticism, and that would uproot U.S. americanists from their privileged positions as the proprietary agents of American studies and reposition them as the targets of a "passive revolution" (136–37). The constellation of scholarly interests that this revolution disassembled would instigate a wholesale realignment of the disciplines within the field of American studies, enabling political science and international relations, economics, demographic analyses, and informational technologies to supplant U.S. literary studies and U.S. cultural studies as the primary architects of americanist scholarly and pedagogical agendas.

Notwithstanding the revolutionary rhetoric at work in Kadir's address, however, the IASA did not in fact institute a radical break from the tenets of American exceptionalism. Rather than condemning it in all of its iterations, Kadir displayed contradictory attitudes toward different versions of American exceptionalism. The vantage point from which Kadir criticized Bush's State of Exception depended on assumptions concerning American exceptionalism that Bush's new paradigm had supplanted but that the majority of the membership of the IASA had endorsed. The good exceptionalism that Kadir recuperated supplied him with a set of ideological themes ("the American Dream," "Immigrant Nation," "the American Way") that authorized his critique of Bush's bad version of American exceptionalism as contradictory to those collective representations. Each of the irreversible turning points that Kadir installed in his convocation address presupposed the use of these exceptionalist attributes for their decisive force. Indeed the keynotes of Kadir's address recalled the governing tropes of American exceptionalism so as to mobilize the IASA's opposition to Bush's "wayward" foreign policy. "Americanists, especially those of us intellectually molded by 'the American Dream' and formed in 'the American Way,' are urgently confronted by what the majority of the world considers a wayward America that would have its way, no matter" (137–38).

The IASA emerged, at the moment of a decisive paradigm shift that had resulted from the massive destabilization of cold war American exceptionalism, as the field-constituting discourse. Arguably, the national and regional associations within the International American Studies Association were formed out of the different significations that their memberships had assigned to American exceptionalism. Kadir's talk set Bush's State of Exception in a relation of opposition to the disparate American exceptionalism(s) espoused by the members of the International American Studies Association. Although he condemned Bush for inaugurating a wayward version of American exceptionalism, Kadir had in fact founded IASA through the retrieval of core themes, events, texts, and personalities that renewed what he considered to be the geopolitically correct exceptionalist convictions that the United States had ostensibly betrayed after September 11, 2001. "The United States of America, then, to the extent that one can identify a nation with its government at the moment, has turned away through its governmental policy from all that we have been taught to value as the best of that America" (147).

Since the Bush administration had undertaken the malicious undermining of them, the President of the IASA felt obliged to reinstate the core tenets of good old-fashioned American exceptionalism as the basis for the Americanness of the newly formed organization. Insofar as all of the international americanists whom Kadir addressed had depended on homegrown versions of American exceptionalism to articulate their field identities, Kadir, in his keynote address, went about the business of rededicating those identities to the exceptionalist precepts undergirding the newly internationalized field. When Kadir thereafter hegemonized the IASA's overall project, he did so from the perspective of an "authentic America" that refused Bush's redefinition of America as a State of Exception: "Our most urgent task ... is to be sure to differentiate between America and the governing regime of the United States of America. Regimes are ephemeral events, with global repercussions, certainly" (138).

(Continues...)

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