Field Of American Studies Research Articles

Introduction. Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music

The medium of music represents a pioneering force of crossing boundaries on cultural, ethnic, racial, and national levels. Critics such as Wilfried Raussert and Reinhold Wagnleitner argue that music more than any other medium travels easily across borders, language barriers, and creates new cultural contact zones (Raussert 1). With the turn to reception and rise of Cultural Studies, the field of American Studies has expanded its focus on literature and historical narratives to include a broad...

Necrology: Daniel Aaron (1912–2016)

Present at the creation of American Studies, Daniel Aaron belongs on the short list of the academy's most learned and admired custodians of the nation's culture, for which President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2011. That would have been close to seven decades after the inauguration of Aaron's teaching career. A president of the American Studies Association (ASA), he held the rank of Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard, where his service included chairing its Committee on American Civilization. The lengthy span of Aaron's life in the profession, punctuated by many other honors (including the ASA's Bode-Pearson Prize), has few, if any, counterparts in duration and distinction. Such was the arc of his career and concerns that, as this necrology is intended to suggest, the field of American Studies will not see his like again.

In the Streets of San Francisco

The presidency of Donald Trump has occasioned critical repercussions within the field of American Studies around the world. This piece is a response from Germany: a country marked by the historical experiences of fascism and a socialist surveillance state, but a country that, in spite of the liberal pluralistic consensus that grew out of these historical traumata, now has to face a similar development as other Western countries: the rise of new forms of nationalist parochialism, racism coupled with white patriarchal nostalgia and a militant anti-humanism. The rise of a new right, the piece argues, must be regarded as the manifestation of deep insecurities about individual and collective identities which are increasingly defined not on the basis of achievement but on the basis of inheritance. Remembering an instance of ‘hospitality toward a stranger’ in 1979 California, the essay evokes the spirit of cosmopolitanism which, though currently under fierce attack, continues to thrive in the United States, thanks to the commitment of local civil actors, and which needs to be defended by comparatively minded American Studies scholars.

The “kgb People,” Soviet Americanists and Soviet-American Academic Exchanges, 1958–1985

Using various case studies – from Oleg Kalugin to Grigorii Sevostianov and Nikolai Sivachev in Russia, and Askold Shlepakov in Ukraine, this article examines different instrumental functions of the KGB people among Soviet Americanists, specialists in the US history, politics, literature and films. It focuses on the KGB influences in the field of American studies in the Soviet Union since the beginning of Soviet-us academic exchanges programs in 1958 till the beginning of perestroika. This article is a part of the larger project about cultural and social history of Soviet Americanists during the Cold War.

“Visions and Versions of America”: Greil Marcus’s Rock Journalism as Cultural Criticism

This article seeks to elucidate to what degree Greil Marcus’s rock journalism can be considered an American cultural criticism. Is it legitimate to advance the idea that his rock journalism is more than rock writing? And what role does America play in this context? When both early American rock journalism and the field of American studies try to answer the question “What is America?” it becomes obvious that the latter would profit from analyzing rock writing. This promising dialogue, however, exists only in rudimentary form. By discussing Marcus’s texts (especially Mystery Train and his writings on punk rock), this article offers one possibility of establishing this dialogue.

Michael Denning, Noise Uprising : The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution

In Noise Uprising, Michael Denning shows why he is by now regarded as a giant in the fields of American studies and cultural studies. Denning recovers the sound and politics of a global “musical revolution” waged over just five or six years in the late 1920s. His central claim is that the early studio recordings of vernacular musicians from all over the world served as a vehicle, as well as a low-rumbling catalyst, for a political revolution: the global uprising against colonialism. Denning’s...

Italian American literature

Unlike its African-American, Jewish-American, or Irish-American counterparts, Italian American literature still remains in the margins of mainstream American Studies. Many contemporary Italian American writers are virtually unknown to the general public and field scholars alike, while household names such as Don DeLillo deny the influence of Italianita on their works. Yet, as a number of Italian American scholars have been engaged in demonstrating, the narrative arising from the experiences of three generations of Americans of Italian descent can offer significant insights into American culture and socio-economic history. The present article aims to offer an overview of Italian American literature and of the existing Italian American literary scholarship. The article wishes to raise awareness around “the emerging canon of Italian American literature”(Bonomo and Russo) and to underscore the potential for new research perspectives and topics within the broader field of American Studies offered by Italian Americana. Ultimately, the article will posit that the narrative produced by Italian American writers can effectively offer a fresh perspective from which to investigate not only American literature but also a new viewpoint from which to reflect upon some of the distinctive traits that have shaped, and continue to shape, American history and culture.

Americanization of Non-American Storiesin Disney Films

The study is intended to know the Disney’s animation films characteristics which are adapted from non American stories that contain Americanization in order to be American popular culture products. This qualitative and library research is carried out within the field of American Studies. Disney’s animated films which are regarded as artifacts in order to identify American society and culture is used as her primary data. She then compares those Disney films with the original stories to discover the changes in making those stories become American popular products. She furthermore uses the sources such as books, magazines, journals, articles, and also internet data for her secondary data. The result of this study shows that most of folk narratives which were used in Disney films were adapted from other countries’ stories. However, Disney intentionally adapts foreign countries’ stories in its animated films by using Disney formula to blow up the sale of its products. Since Disney is one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world, it works endlessly to set out world entertainment. Disney formula in its animated films which has dominated those adapted films are only intended to obtain as much profit as possible without paying attention to the values in children entertainment.

Americanization of Non-American Storiesin Disney Films

The study is intended to know the Disney’s animation films characteristics which are adapted from non American stories that contain Americanization in order to be American popular culture products. This qualitative and library research is carried out within the field of American Studies. Disney’s animated films which are regarded as artifacts in order to identify American society and culture is used as her primary data. She then compares those Disney films with the original stories to discover the changes in making those stories become American popular products. She furthermore uses the sources such as books, magazines, journals, articles, and also internet data for her secondary data. The result of this study shows that most of folk narratives which were used in Disney films were adapted from other countries’ stories. However, Disney intentionally adapts foreign countries’ stories in its animated films by using Disney formula to blow up the sale of its products. Since Disney is one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world, it works endlessly to set out world entertainment. Disney formula in its animated films which has dominated those adapted films are only intended to obtain as much profit as possible without paying attention to the values in children entertainment.Keywords: Americanization; Non American Stories; Animation; Popular culture; Formula

Animal Activism and Environmentalism in an Age of Extinction

Animal Activism and Environmentalism in an Age of Extinction John Kinder (bio) Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture. By Gwyneth Anne Thayer. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2013. The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation. By Adam Rome. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. 2013. Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement. By David Naguib Pellow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2014. On June 19, 2015, a team of biologists, including Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the 1960s bestseller The Population Bomb (1968), published a brief study in [End Page 17] Science Advances on the future of life on the planet. Their forecast was dire: the world is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, a cataclysmic biotic collapse on par with the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Since 1900, more than 450 vertebrate species have disappeared, an extinction toll that will continue to increase over the next few centuries. “If the currently elevated extinction pace is allowed to continue,” they warn darkly, “humans will soon (in as little as three human lifetimes) be deprived of many biodiversity benefits” (read: the basic ecological conditions necessary to sustain life as we know it). And it is not like we can simply wait for things to improve: “On human time scales, this loss would be effectively permanent because in the aftermath of past mass extinctions, the living world took hundreds of thousands of years to rediversify.”1 As if that were not enough, the report’s authors blame human activity for the looming crisis. In their reckoning, global society has exploited the Earth’s living systems to the breaking point—and everyone, every thing, will pay the price. Ehrlich and company are the latest in a long line of commentators to raise the specter of anthropogenic (human-induced) extinction. As journalist Sarah Kaplan points out, a 1998 poll of four-hundred scientists taken by the American Museum of Natural History found that “70 percent believe the Earth is in the midst of one of its fastest mass extinctions, one that threatens the existence of humans as well as the millions of species we rely on.”2 Since that time, warnings of global catastrophe have only gotten louder. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), writer Elizabeth Kolbert predicts the current extinction event will “continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.”3 Recently, world leaders have also begun to raise alarms about the implications of environmental destruction. At the 2015 graduation of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Barack Obama called climate change a “serious threat to global security.”4 And just one day before the release of the Science Advances report, to the outrage of climate-change deniers and Earth exploiters worldwide, Pope Francis issued a more than one-hundred page encyclical condemning human destruction of the world’s ecosystems.5 Meanwhile, twenty-first century popular culture churns out apocalyptic visions of mass extinction and environmental collapse. Looking toward the future, films like John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009), David Michôd’s The Rover (2014), and Frank Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) paint a grim picture of a biosphere on the brink of destruction. And yet, when confronted with the most important topic of our time—possibly of all time—the field of American Studies has largely responded with silence.6 In a recent article in American Quarterly, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson observes, “American studies, the academic discipline arguably most dedicated to progressive political engagement, social justice, and activism, has for the most part ignored climate change and the still-accelerating consumption of fossil fuels despite our awareness of the catastrophic environmental and human consequences.”7 Much the same can be said about American Studies’ engagement [End Page 18] with human-animal studies (HAS), an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex relationships between human and nonhuman animals. Over the last two decades, HAS...

American Studies in the Shadow of Orientalism

The introduction of American literature in departments of English at Egyptian state-funded universities in 1959 coincided with the rising role of the US as a global power post World War II, its overtly imperial interests in the Middle East and the Arab World, and its support for the State of Israel. It became necessary then to engage with the US. This essay examines the fledgling attempts to develop American literature curricula into programs of American studies. It examines the neo-imperialist setup that gave rise to these attempts, and shows how public diplomacy initiatives which used American studies to propagate for American exceptionalism negatively influenced the development of these programs into academic platforms that engage critically with the US. The essay focuses on the case of the English Department at Cairo University, and attempts to read its history with American studies within the framework of transnationalism. It questions the term transnational, the relationship between US. And non US-based Americanists, the nature of their scholarship, and their contribution to reshaping the field of American Studies.

Transposing Pedagogic Boundaries: Global America in an Australian Context

AbstractThis article reflects on an interdisciplinary first-year course titled “Global America,” which I have co-taught at the University of Sydney. “Global America” examines how the forces of globalization have shaped the United States, but also how the U.S. projects itself within a global sphere. The article outlines the particular challenges and opportunities involved in teaching such a course within an Australian context, before suggesting new scholarly directions in the field of American studies. One key aim of the course was to reformulate the central issues of globalization as experiential rather than abstract phenomena. In this way, the course used the experience of teaching American texts from an external vantage point to challenge institutional as well as the geographical boundaries. In its traditional interdisciplinary framework, American studies invariably attempts to either export U.S. culture to the world or else to represent American liberalism as a universal value. The paper argues for a more materialist, transnational approach, which attempts to bring local narrative and global compass into a mutually enlightening dialogue. Ultimately, the article reveals how a transnational pedagogy of American studies can help creatively to transpose the boundaries of “Global America” and thus foster a productive state of intellectual defamiliarization.

From the virgin land to the transnational identities of the twenty-first century: Exceptionalist rhetoric in the field of American studies

Abstract In the age of globalization, American Exceptionalism remains a ubiquitous subject of debate within academic circles as well as society in general. The intention of this article is to reveal the coherent narrative that accompanies the notion of exceptionalism that stretches from the ‘city upon a hill’ in the seventeenth century to the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Puritans like John Winthrop, historians like Alexis de Tocqueville and presidents like Woodrow Wilson embraced exceptionalism as a concept, but its most important base of support, other than political leaders and scholars, was America’s working class. The premise of this article is to explore the nature of this very concept, whether we call it an ideology, myth or God-given truth and why it has become such an imperative part of the political, cultural and intellectual life of the United States. By looking at the work that has been administered in the field of American studies over the last decades, dating back to the mid-twentieth century, I wish to expose the malleability of exceptionalism, a quality that not only allows it to reject any definition but also enables it to turn into a metaconcept that will never lose its appeal, according to Donald E. Pease. I argue that the manifold qualities of this metaconcept, whether we call it a political doctrine or a national fantasy, enable the citizens of the United States to define themselves within the framework of a larger American identity. I intend to highlight the problems around the United States’ self-proclaimed status as an exceptional nation in a postnational world defined by diasporic and transnational affiliations. By doing so, I will put emphasis on the punitive ideology of exclusion and demonization that surrounds the notion of American Exceptionalism.

Response to Eric Cheyfitz's “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli—Palestinian Conflict”

NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Response to Eric Cheyfitz 147 STEVEN SALAITA Response to Eric Cheyfitz’s “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict” I WAS DELIGHTED to read Eric Cheyfitz’s “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict” and am excited to offer this brief response. This conversation is one that must necessarily continue. It is appropriate for a variety of reasons that it happens in a space of Indigenous reflection and theorization. I found it of particular value that Cheyfitz begins with analysis of the Balfour Declaration, which, beyond its obvious historical importance, is profoundly interesting as a rhetorical document. It promises a classically humanistic version of coexistence but is simultaneously a promissory certificate of colonial intent, attempting to assuage the anxieties of those its drafters were secretly planning to displace. In these contradictions we find ample opportunity to imaginatively assess the modern history of Palestine. In many ways, the state of Israel has indeed failed to live up to Balfour’s discourse. In that most important way, however, the behind-the-scenes conflation of “homeland” with “nation-state,” Israel managed to fulfill the declaration’s unspoken logic. It did so in large part through the exceptionalism Cheyfitz so ably explores . Here the colonial discourses of the United States and Israel exist in close proximity, if not in juxtaposition. I am interested in the ways that the Nazi Holocaust helped enact the performance of Israeli exceptionalism, because of the fruitful narratives of religious persecution as a precursor to settler colonization. One comment that Cheyfitz offers requires, I think, further conversation: “While the field of American studies, within which I include Ethnic and Native American studies.” Drawing from my readings of Robert Warrior, Jodi Byrd, Dale Turner, and others, I would argue that it’s useful to complicate the positionality of these fields in relation to one another. The move toward disciplinary independence—which is not to preclude interdependence—draws from (and contributes to) a particular narrative of decolonization that deeply informs the material politics of North America and Palestine. While Norman Finklestein, from whom Cheyfitz draws significant supporting material, has produced important work, I’m fond of the recent Steven Salaita NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 148­ writings of Waziyatawin, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, and Steven Newcomb. There is a body of scholarship emerging that more robustly situates itself in decolonial paradigms that Finkelstein either ignores or refuses to engage. Those paradigms are crucial because Natives and Palestinians seek forms of self-­ determination that move beyond the conventional frameworks of Western human rights or international laws. Cheyfitz writes movingly in his conclusion of a Jewish presence in the Middle East that is integrative rather than isolated. This vision is one that advocates of decolonization should pursue vigorously, for it provides a model not only for a democratic Palestine but also for the engagement of Indigenous communities in North and South America with the institutions from which they have been excluded and from which they have endured considerable violence . In order for these forms of democratic engagement to become reality, they must, as Cheyfitz notes, disengage themselves from the ethnonationalism of the settler state. This is not an easy or especially realistic task. But I find any scholarly or material aspiration that stops short of this desired result to be unworthy of our time. And I’m quite unmoved by the hegemony of realism. I hope that our pieces can move beyond conversation with one another and into a broader discussion of what it means to dismantle and recreate the histories of our dispossession. I stand firm in my belief that it won’t happen in Palestine unless it happens in North America. STEVEN SALAITA is an independent scholar. ...

Culture, Memory, and the Legacies of Lynching

Culture, Memory, and the Legacies of Lynching Christopher Metress (bio) Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture. By W. Jason Miller. Gainesville: UP of Florida. 2011. xiv + 168 pp. $44.95 cloth. $19.95 paper. Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching. By Julie Buckner Armstrong. U of Georgia P. 2011. xii + 255 pp. $69.95 cloth. $24.95 paper. More than fifteen years have passed since the 1997 publication of Joel Williamson’s “Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the American Historian.” In this controversial essay, Williamson confessed to readers of the Journal of American History that he “learned about white people massively lynching black people only as a scholar in the middle years of the 1960s,” and “learned about it by accident” while he was “looking for something else”: the origins of segregation. According to Williamson, “Nothing in my living experience as a southerner and an American, nothing in my training and practice as an historian and a professor, had prepared me for this.” Much has changed in the fifty years since one of the South’s leading historians stumbled upon lynching by accident. Seminal works by Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Trudier Harris, Fitzhugh Brundage, James Allen, and Jacqueline Goldbsy—to name just a few—require that any good training in the field of American studies will acknowledge lynching’s deep and lasting impact upon our national conscience. That impact, of course, is varied and contested, and two recent studies by W. Jason Miller and Julie Buckner [End Page 127] Armstrong indicate that the field continues to attract original and creative voices intent upon expanding our understanding of lynching’s complex legacies. According to Miller, Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture is “first full-length study devoted solely to any one writer’s lifelong responses to the subject of lynching.” Ranging widely over Hughes’s career, Miller focuses mainly on seven poems, placing each in the context of what he terms our national “lynching culture,” shorthand for the “varying inflections of lynching that saturated the literal and cultural landscape of the United States throughout the twentieth century.” Attuned thus, Miller persuasively argues that Hughes’s poetry serves as “an important reminder” of how art can respond creatively to “a culture that invented new ways to defer delivering on its promises of equality, free speech, integration, and social justice.” In his opening chapter, Miller reminds us that Hughes composed his first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” while riding on a train headed south during the Red Summer of 1919. That Hughes discovers his affection for rivers while crossing the Mississippi, and that he does so during a summer of heightened racial violence, requires that we re-interpret the poem “within the context of spectacle lynching.” Understood as such, the poem’s insistence on “reclaiming beauty by overcoming the dangers associated with American riverscapes” allows it to emerge as Hughes’s “first record of personal resistance against the threats of lynching.” This resistance is explored more fully in Miller’s most impressive chapter, a sustained reading of “Christ in Alabama” and “Bitter River” in the context of Scottsboro and the failed anti-lynching legislation of the 1930s and 40s. In an astute reading of the publication history of “Christ in Alabama,” Miller shows how both Hughes and his publisher, the liberal-leaning southern journal Contempo, “paid a dear price for carrying the flag to the field in this particular battle.” Undeterred, Hughes increased his efforts; as Miller notes, Hughes “addressed lynching during this time period [1941–1950] in more poems than he did in the previous two decades combined.” Although lynchings had decreased dramatically during the 1940s, Hughes was outraged by the hypocrisy of fighting a war against racism abroad while ignoring such injustices at home, and fueled by a “passionate desire to keep the subject of lynching alive in the nation’s consciousness,” he crafted some of his most important poems, including his longest meditation on lynching, “Bitter River.” In his third and fourth chapters, Miller argues that the cultural climate of the 1950s, marked by “blatant censorship and repeated accusations of communism,” forced Hughes “to discover new strategies for responding to lynching in his poetry.” Hughes...

Introduction

Introduction Nancy Bentley (bio) Can something as coolly analytic as scholarship be said to have a mood? If so, there are signs in recent years of a change of disposition within cultural scholarship, a collective mood-shift. Consider the title of an influential 2004 Critical Inquiry essay by Bruno Latour, “Why Did Critique Run Out of Steam?” The title conveys a shared sense of deflation or drift, one that apparently resonated with a great many readers. At the same time, Latour’s titular question may actually beg the question most in need of examination: Has the project of critique in fact reached a point of diminishing returns? Has the effort to unveil the ideological forces at work in art and culture become a less urgent or effective scholarly aim? In the field of American studies, at least, the notion that critique has run its course is belied by vital and ongoing political projects of many stripes, from indigenous studies to work on the hemispheric south. Yet even here, it is hard to miss a change in the tenor of recent discussions, a new “restlessness” (as Caleb Smith calls it) in the way scholars are now regarding both their historical objects and their critical methods. The change is sharpest when seen in contrast. Those of us trained in the 1980s can recall a very different prevailing mood. Fredric Jameson’s call to “always historicize!” distilled a disciplinary conviction common to new historicism, ideology critique, and cultural studies. And almost as significant as the words of Jameson’s slogan was its punctuation mark—that rare bird, an academic exclamation point. For those responsive to Jameson’s call, the exclamation point did not signify the bark of a stern command but the sound of an exhilarating invitation. (Come historicize!) Jameson himself referred to his slogan as the “moral” of his study, a word hinting at a locus of meaning, discoverable [End Page 147] through a rigorous hermeneutics, that could somehow redeem the damage wrought by history. In dazzling acts of counterintuitive reading, Jameson’s brand of critique posited “the political perspective . . . as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.”1 And for Americanists who shared Jameson’s critical aims, that horizon was less a limit or a restriction than an enabling frame that opened to view a more expansive historical landscape. Black vernacular signifying. Abolitionist sympathy. Mythologies of nationalism. Through the critic’s power of historical demystification, these and other formations were dramatically defamiliarized and revalued, dissolving the pieties of a complacent liberal history in order to expose the underlying operations of power. The act of unveiling felt like a kind of secular revelation, the promise of a liberation to come. Today exhilaration is harder to come by. One reason, according to Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, may be that the role of “heroic critic” seems to have been eclipsed. At a time when inequalities are often starkly visible, “the ruses of power no longer seem to require veiling.” Demystification may be less a revelation than a redundancy. In another sign of a shift in academic mood, mood itself has become an object of study. Affect studies has brought new theoretical brilliance and historical perspicacity to the study of the nineteenth century. But can it be a coincidence that the mood most studied has been melancholia? The explosion of digital resources and the new tools for the manipulation of data have produced divergent scholarly feelings: some experience euphoria, others mere vertigo. In either case, the result is an unsettling of reflexive habits of critique. Indeed, observers like the cultural historian Hal Foster have described our present moment as belonging to a “post-critical condition.”2 Other diagnoses are more dire. In the wake of a “post-critical collapse,” some have argued, the task of the scholar or intellectual can only be to understand enough about our networked world to be able to “surf the waves of capital.”3 But however disruptive these new conditions have been to familiar kinds of critique, they hardly condemn us to fore-swearing any form of critical thinking. Going along for the ride on the “waves of capital” (or, perchance, going under) is not an inevitable scholarly fate...

American Studies after the Internet

American Studies after the Internet Lauren Frederica Klein (bio) The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Expertise. By Nathan Ensmenger. MIT Series in the History of Computing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010. 336 pages. $30.00 (cloth). Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. By Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. MIT Series in Software Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011. 256 pages. $32.00 (cloth). Race after the Internet. Edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White. New York: Routledge Press, 2011. 352 pages. $150.00 (cloth). $39.95 (paper). Debates in the Digital Humanities. Edited by Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 504 pages. $105.00 (cloth). $34.95 (paper). June 1945: The height of the war in the Pacific, Allied forces in Germany had only just assumed control of the recently defeated nation, and in the United States, citizens continued to mourn the loss of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, their wartime commander in chief. In the midst of this global tumult, six women were summoned to the U.S. Army’s Ballistics Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland, where they were assigned to the top-secret “Project X.” As the women would soon discover, Project X was the code name for the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) project, an enterprise that would culminate in the world’s first electronic, digital, and programmable computer. Upon its completion, in 1946, the ENIAC machine was immediately deployed to calculate the firing tables required for the precision targeting of the Army’s long-range ballistic weapons. However, the “ENIAC girls,” as the women who operated the machine were known, would be acknowledged for their pioneering role in the history of computing—for they were the world’s first computer programmers—only fifty years after the fact.1 [End Page 861] The surprise of this story is not only how strongly it resonates with many of the issues engaged by American studies today—such as the gendering and valuation of labor (or lack thereof) and the rise of the U.S. military-industrial complex—but also that it has only recently begun to be mined for its significance as the starting point of today’s digital culture. It suggests, moreover, how the fields of American studies and the digital humanities, so often viewed as disciplinarily, methodologically, and ontologically distinct, are in fact deeply intertwined. For decades, the creation of digital tools and the application of digital methods was the purview of “humanities computing,” a close-knit field of dedicated practitioners. Renamed the digital humanities in the early 2000s, the field has since been extended to encompass what Kathleen Fitzpatrick describes in her contribution to Debates in the Digital Humanities as the array of “changes that digital technologies are producing across the many fields of humanistic inquiry” (12).2 But if the digital humanities is to become an umbrella term for a generalized epistemology of the digital, it is of the utmost importance that we understand the origins and implications of the digital itself. The origins of the digital humanities are most often traced to 1949, when an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Roberto Busa, approached IBM with an idea of employing a computer to compile an index verborum of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas—nearly eleven million words of medieval Latin.3 This story, replete with anecdotes about punch-cards trucked through narrow, sixteenth-century streets, establishes intellectual ambition, technological resourcefulness, and a not insignificant amount of whimsy as the foundational values in the field. The story of the “ENIAC girls” reveals a more complex prehistory, however—one that, as Nathan Ensmenger’s Computer Boys Take Over and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Programmed Visions each demonstrate, is shot through with contradiction. Indeed, the history of the digital humanities, in both its original and its expanded meanings, is also, necessarily, a history of gender, labor, empire, and—as I discuss below—race. And the ideological and conceptual systems that underpin each of these terms are, in ways that have not yet been sufficiently acknowledged, informed by our ideas about and experience with the digital.4 When Tara McPherson, at the 2011 American Studies Association annual meeting, posed the question...

What Can American Studies and Comparative Literature Learn from Each Other

The fields of comparative literature and American studies long have had a fraught relationship. Although both fields emerged almost contemporaneously in the American academy, flourished during the Cold War era with the support of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and engaged in a reflexive approach to literary studies that addressed diverse topics from an interdisciplinary perspective, the relationship between these two fields, both pedagogically and intellectually, has been rife with anxiety about professional status and a conspicuous lack of interest in each others' disciplinary approaches. This disciplinary tension is evident, for example, in the 1975 Greene Report on Professional Standards to the American Comparative Literature Association, in which the authors of the report drew attention, with evident concern, to “the growth of interdisciplinary programs” such as American studies (30), considering them a factor in the dangerous trend in the academy where, according to the authors, “[i]n at least some colleges and universities[,] Comparative Literature seems to be purveyed in the style of a smorgasbord at bargain rates” (31). Although both fields have undergone major transformations since the mid-1970s, most importantly the rise of “high theory” and the growing interest in non-European literary traditions in comparative literature and the integration of ethnic literatures and the emergence of an anti-exceptionalist critical attitude in American studies, comparative literature and American studies continue to maintain strict disciplinary boundaries as demonstrated by the marginalization of American literature and culture in the field of comparative literature, and the persistence of a monolingual and exceptionalist approach to literature in the field of American studies.

The AALA, and the emergence of Asian American Studies in Japan

This article sets forth the history of the academic activities of the Asian American Literature Association (AALA) in order to explore the evolution of Asian American Studies in Japan. When the AALA was established in 1989, several scholars had already published research papers on Asian American literature, as had researchers involved energetically in the study of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. Around the time when AALA was established, other research groups focusing on immigration studies were formed. In 1993, several members of the AALA presented their papers at the annual meetings of other associations and, as a result, the activities of the AALA became known to a wider academic community. In 1994, the AALA published its first annual journal and, around 1995, the number of papers on Asian American literature and culture accepted by authoritative journals in Japan began to increase. By the end of the 1990s, Asian American studies made its presence conspicuous in the field of American studies in Japan. Since the turn of the century, a growing number of Asian Americanists in Japan have become engaged in interdisciplinary studies, thus providing new perspectives.

The Civil and the Human

The Civil and the Human David L. Eng (bio) There will never be a stable definition of “the human”; the concept is grounded not in biology but in stories. Like organic life, stories change, but their evolution is considerably more rapid. In her dazzling presidential address, from which I draw the above epigraph, Priscilla Wald retells the story of Henrietta Lacks with great political passion. Wald reveals in the process the remarkable power of narrative to shape the ways in which we view the world and the human beings who inhabit it. How we choose to tell Lacks’s story in the world is, at once, how we might reimagine the world picture. It is also how we might work to repair and to transform it. As Wald narrates it, the invention of the immortal HeLa cell line in 1951 by the researchers George and Margaret Gey at Johns Hopkins University Hospital—unbeknownst to the African American patient whose genetic materials were exploited for its creation—is a story about the emergence of new biotechnological practices for the manipulation and commodification of human life. Simultaneously, it is a story of how enduring patterns of institutional racism and structural violence in U.S. society gave global shape to new life forms under the shadows of Cold War conflict, the threat of universal nuclear annihilation, and the concomitant rise of decolonization movements worldwide. As Wald puts it, these significant postwar transformations of the human being “dovetail with Foucault’s contemporaneous coinage of ‘biopower,’ but they focus on the differential effects of that power across stratified populations.” Wald’s retelling of the creation of the immortal HeLa cell line immediately implicates postwar U.S. civil rights battles for African American inclusion and enfranchisement in the liberal polity under the racial politics of “separate but equal.” At the same time, it calls attention to equally urgent problems concerning the figure of the human that cannot be easily ignored. It draws immediate awareness, that is, to the differential distribution of humanity, human life, and human suffering in a long history of colonial modernity, in the United States as elsewhere. The account of Cold War struggles for black civil rights and national belonging, along with their trenchant interrogation of citizenship and liberal inclusion, is a familiar one in the field of American studies. However, [End Page 205] the problem of the human being after genocide, one issuing from both radical geopolitical metamorphoses and scientific innovation in the postwar period, deserves greater consideration. Indeed, Wald’s retelling of the story of Lacks allows us to reexamine the problematic relationship between civil and human rights in American studies and, more specifically, to reconsider what is at stake in their shifting relationships. It is to this cleaving between the civil and the human that I devote the remainder of my brief comments. In April 2010 the human rights organization Amnesty International issued a report, “Un-natural Disaster: Human Rights in the Gulf Coast,” indicting the U.S. government across federal, state, and local levels for human rights violations. Nearly five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the report observes, victims of this “un-natural disaster” continued to suffer from inadequate housing, unequal access to health care, and disparate standing in the criminal justice system. Consequently, “rights violations in these three areas not only are mutually reinforcing, but also combine to have a disproportionate impact, severely affecting low income communities and communities of color while creating the circumstances which prevent their return. As a result, the demographics of the region are being permanently altered, in contravention of the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.”1 The right of return, the report highlights from its cover page, is “a human right,” thus connecting Katrina and the right of return to other global struggles such as the question of Palestine. Amnesty International’s configuration of the U.S. state as a perpetrator of human rights abuses (in the context of not only Katrina but also the U.S. prison–industrial complex) might be interpreted as a bold rhetorical stand, resonating strongly with Wald’s assertion that “injustices made visible could be altered.” This audacious legal strategy, aligning...