Boundary as Center: Inventing an American Studies Culture

Abstract

When the American Studies Association chose “Boundaries of American Culture” as the theme and San Diego as the site of its 1985 biennial convention, it made a particularly appropriate match between theme and site. Seen from my hotel balcony in a hazy autumnal glow, San Diego appeared a boundary city in at least three senses of relevance to the Association's work. First, lying at the border of the United States and Mexico, it hinted at the rich possibilities available to an American Studies willing to reach imaginatively beyond national boundaries, both north and south, toward a genuinely pan-American studies. Second, as a three-block walk to the beach from the convention hotel amply confirmed, San Diego borders what several commentators have called “the Mediterranean of the future”–a major arena of the globe too long and too much neglected by most Americans and Americanists. It was stimulating to welcome to the convention distinguished visitors from a dozen Asian and South Pacific countries, and more than a few speakers expressed the hope that such interaction would significantly further the comparativist and internationalist perspectives that they believed increasingly incumbent upon a nonparochial American Studies. Certainly the heartening presence in San Diego of both long-time and new colleagues from Europe, Canada, Latin America, Asia, and the South Pacific reflected a slowly but steadily growing impulse in the Association, a concrete dramatization of the premise that ideas and values, not to mention trade and power, do not stop at a nation's borders, although they may be often slowed down or even transformed at those borders.