An American Studies Dilemma

Abstract

Although these two important books deal with different periods in twentieth-century history, their motivation and strength come from strikingly similar analyses of the same moment in the postwar period, namely the rise of the US civil rights movement. Both authors argue that the gains of the 1950s and 1960s were made at the expense of an earlier American politics rooted in transnational solidarities (of both race and class), which was destroyed by the exclusive attention paid to the “American dilemma” of internal racism. James’s and Von Eschen’s revisionary works demonstrate the necessity for, and the potential of, a new post–Cold War, post–civil rights dialogue between US ethnic studies, especially African-American studies, and the more internationally oriented discourses of postcolonial studies and diaspora studies—and it is in the interests of furthering this dialogue that I am reviewing these books here.