American Studies: History

Abstract

In the age of globalization, scholarship in American history throughout the world has considerably come to resemble its American counterpart, even if it lags behind scholarship in the United States. Even so, it seems that some approaches and conceptualizations that America specialists abroad invent and utilize in their American Studies must be original and, therefore, different from their American counterparts. This short article intends to describe the present state of American history as one of the components of American Studies. With particular emphasis on American Studies in Japan, it surveys a 30-year US historiography of American history, and, then reviews, from a Japanese perspective, some of the important Japanese works that have been written in American Studies since the 1970s. It examines what Japanese scholars have studied in American history and how they have done it, delineating changes in the milieu of their profession, as well as current trends that are seen in Japan and the United States. Our survey suggests simultaneity and interaction in the scholarship in American history that has taken place in and between Japan and the United States, but at the same time it shows the independence of one from the other. In the age of globalization, American Studies specialists in Japan at last seem to be catching up with their American counterparts in terms of the times as well as the quality of the scholarship they produce. From now on, non-American scholars like the Japanese are increasingly expected to exchange ideas and thoughts freely with US scholars on an equal footing, contributing to a deeper understanding of the United States.