Postcolonialism, Politics of Gender, and American Studies: An Introduction

Abstract

Versions of the following papers were presented at "North America and the Pacific Rim," the 1991 conference of the Canadian Association for American Studies, organized by professors Ann Cowan and Peter Buitenhuis of Simon Fraser University. In different ways, these essays challenge traditional assumptions about the territory and methodologies of American Studies. Each author engages what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls "the colonial paradigm,"1 situating the United States within a larger framework of political and cultural colonization and resistance, in order to conduct textual readings and argue interpretive strategies. At times the writers' gaze is trained on U.S. subject matter, as conventionally conceived; at other times, they traverse the "rim" of U.S. culture, as Helen Buss puts it, dwelling on the rich complications and hybridities which occupy cross-cultural spaces.