American Studies: The Basics
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American Studies: The Basics

Andrew Dix

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American Studies: The Basics

Andrew Dix

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About This Book

American Studies: The Basics is an accessible and concise introduction that aims to unpack what American studies does and why it matters.

From Moby-Dick to baseball, Hollywood westerns to #BlackLivesMatter, and Disneyland to the U.S. Supreme Court, American studies engages with a myriad of topics in its efforts to understand what the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard called 'social and cultural America.' The book begins by considering how America was studied before American studies' emergence as a recognized discipline in the mid-twentieth century. Successive chapters then explore the rise of American studies, its varied subjects, its distinctive methods of research, its geographical framing, and its politics. Throughout the book, explanatory examples are drawn from across American history and culture. Photographs are examined alongside novels, and historical monuments discussed next to films. The text offers an ideal way into an exciting academic subject of continuing growth and relevance.

This book is a must read for those studying and with an interest in American studies.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2021
ISBN
9781317537830
Edition
1

1

STUDYING AMERICA BEFORE AMERICAN STUDIES

DOI: 10.4324/9781315726748-2
As Chapter 2 will show, the history of American studies as a consolidated academic subject is quite short, reaching back only to the middle of the twentieth century. However, a full disciplinary paraphernalia of journals and conferences and degree programmes is not essential for something to register as an object of study, a repository of intellectual energies and imaginative investments. Such was the case with ‘America’, from the early modern period onwards. While the demarcation of American studies as a field and the codification of its methods still lay sometime in the future, America as a focus of inquiry was excitedly engaged by mapmakers and geographers, naturalists and poets, historians and theologians. In this chapter, I consider a number of these pioneering, pre-disciplinary contributions from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the earlier part of the twentieth century. Scattered and fragmentary though it may have been, and powered by the enthusiasm of lay individuals rather than by the organised activity of an established academic community, this work nevertheless identified topics and themes that would later be of interest to American studies itself. It also, on occasion, presented America in ways that American studies would challenge and try to undo.

NAMING AMERICA

Before America could be studied, it had first to be named. Precisely which label, however, to affix to part or all of the continent situated between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans proved a contentious rather than straightforward matter. Indeed, if a proposal made by BartolomĂ© de las Casas in his History of the Indies (1527–61) had been adopted, Columba, and not America, would have prevailed. Kanye West would subsequently have rapped on ‘Who Will Survive in Columba’; Bret Easton Ellis would have written Columban Psycho, and this book would be Columban Studies: The Basics.
In other of his voluminous writings, as well as in his frequent practical interventions as a Roman Catholic monk and bishop in Central and South America, de las Casas advanced a forceful critique of the brutalities of European colonialism in which he had once played a part. On this occasion, however, his grievance was smaller, having to do with the decision to call the vast landmass at the western edge of the Atlantic ‘America’. This name had been chosen in tribute to Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine merchant who participated in several voyages to the region at the turn of the sixteenth century. Yet to de las Casas, Vespucci was a fraud and an egotist whose self-serving account of his travels was intended to erase memories of the pioneering exploration undertaken a little earlier by the Genoese sailor, Christopher Columbus. In de las Casas’ words, ‘the said continent ought to be called Columba’, after Columbus, ‘and not America after Americo [i.e. Amerigo]’ (Vespucci 1894, 76).
Evidently, by the time de las Casas came to write History of the Indies, ‘America’ was fully accredited as a geographical label. Yet, the word had only appeared publicly in 1507, on a map produced near Strasbourg in eastern France by a local scholar and poet Matthias Ringmann and a German cartographer Martin WaldseemĂŒller. Having read with excitement Vespucci’s reports of a continent far across the Atlantic that was abundant in flora and fauna, WaldseemĂŒller and Ringmann temporarily set aside their work on an atlas and instead rushed into print a large map of the world that would feature prominently this newly described land. To contemporary eyes, however, the 1507 map looks curiously uneven or unfinished. For, while Europe, Africa and Asia are broadly convincing in outline and scale, North and South America appear as weirdly thinned down. The continent is presented with roughly the latitudinal sprawl we know it to have, extending between the two poles, but with nothing like its actual longitudinal stretch. A gap is also apparent between the northern and southern landmasses, fantasising free passage to ships where in reality Central America intrudes. More interesting to us in the present context, however, is that on this map, for the first time in published work, the word ‘America’ appears. Not, it is true, where present-day usage might lead us to look for it, printed across the northern geographical territory now occupied by the United States. Rather, the word is inscribed horizontally across the lower part of South America, with this offcentre placement, together with a modest font size, masking the fact that WaldseemĂŒller and Ringmann meant it to stand as the name of the whole continent.
The naming of this newly mapped territory as ‘America’ was unexpected and whimsical. At a time when European cartographers were scrambling to convert reports and measurements brought back from across the Atlantic into comprehensible visual form, many other labels would have been possible. WaldseemĂŒller himself, in fact, came to regret his and Ringmann’s choice, as one that gave too much credit to Vespucci: one of his later maps, the Carta Marina (1516), is notable not only for its much greater topographical detail but for the absence of the word ‘America’. Random or fortuitous as its origin may have been, however, ‘America’ stuck. In Toby Lester’s words, ‘It was a poetic choice, one that would echo down throughout the ages’ (2009, 5). Here, however, rather than reflecting on the name’s poetry, I identify briefly three more of its properties.
First is its narrowing range of reference across time. Though the makers of the 1507 map took ‘America’ to designate the continent at large, rather than simply referring to one of its parts, this expansive spatial implication has not always prevailed. Allusions still to North, Central and South America support the original intentions of WaldseemĂŒller and Ringmann but are complicated by frequent use of ‘America’ now as merely a synonym for the United States. Chapter 5 of this book will build on the point made in the Introduction that much recent work in American studies has aimed at decoupling ‘America’ from the United States and at restoring a sense of the name’s broad territorial range.
Second is the name’s European origin. Later parts of the book will document and evaluate the transnational turn that American studies has taken in the last two decades. We will witness increasing recognition of the extent to which the United States is constituted by ongoing interplay with peoples and ideas and cultures originating from beyond the national borders. However, such transnational dynamics have a long history, as can be seen by Europe’s naming of ‘America’ at the dawn of the sixteenth century. In an interesting meditation on this word, Kirsten Silva Gruesz offers the alternative suggestion that it may actually be derived from ‘Amerrique’, a label applied to part of its territory by an Indigenous community in what is now Nicaragua. The ‘radical proposition’ here, as Gruesz puts it, is that ‘the name “America” comes from within the New World rather than being imposed on it’ (2014, 22). Unfortunately, however, this counter-narrative of America’s naming has much less traction among scholars than the Eurocentric account which traces the word back to Vespucci.
Thirdly, the name’s imperialism. To say that the word ‘America’ is European in origin is also to say that it is informed by imperial ambitions. Just as the map could be filled in with little or no attention paid to Indigenous peoples’ own labels, so too the terrain it referenced could be profitably occupied by Europeans with relatively slight resistance, condemning the native inhabitants to fates variously of being exploited, enslaved or exterminated. One of Vespucci’s letters, written after his second voyage of 1499–1500, evokes these radical asymmetries of power between native and incomer. He describes how, in return for acquiring more than twenty-five kilograms of pearls from one American community, his expedition-ary force offered ‘nothing but 
 looking glasses, and beads, and ten bells, and tin foil’ (1894, 29). This references an opportunistic and fleeting act of appropriation; soon afterwards, however, systemic European colonisation of America would begin, fulfilling the threat of imperial control carried by the very choice of name for the continent.

DREAMING AMERICA

Given their tightly defined fields and systematic methodologies, and their frequently dry institutional arrangements, we tend not to think of academic disciplines as having dream lives. But if academic American studies has a relatively sober disposition, the same cannot be said of pre-disciplinary accounts of America, produced from the sixteenth century onwards. On the contrary, these are clearly infused with desire and yearning. For multiple constituencies, extending from religious radicals through merchants and entrepreneurs to naturalists, America was not only a location in geography but a dreamscape (Lawrence Buell, the contemporary Americanist, speaks of ‘its centuries-old history as a dream space’ [2013, 24]). The name itself, in fact, rapidly became a metaphor for a heightened object of aspiration. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘America’ in such dreamlike terms as ‘A place which one longs to reach; an ultimate or idealized destination or aim; an (esp. newly identified) object of personal ambition or desire’. Immediately beneath this definition, the OED gives historical examples of the term used in this desiring way. The first is by the English metaphysical poet John Donne (1572–1631), writing most likely in the mid-1590s in his elegy, ‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’. In relation to the woman’s progressively naked body, as she is imagined undressing, the poem’s male speaker casts himself in terms of a contemporary transatlantic explorer: ‘Licence my roving hands, and let them go/Behind, before, above, between, below./O my America, my new found land’ (Donne 2008, 13). Two lines later, the speaker discloses still more blatantly the contemporary dreams of imperialistic dominion and material acquisition in America, recasting his lover’s body as ‘My mine of precious stones, my empery [i.e. empire]’ (13).
An argument might be made that Donne is able to think of America as a dreamscape or site of wish fulfilment because he had no personal familiarity with the place itself. His main habitats were the law courts and, later, the churches of Elizabethan and Jacobean London, not territories far across the Atlantic; he could therefore fantasise freely about a realm he would never visit. However, a sense of fantasy, an atmosphere of heightened desire, is apparent also in early writing about America done by people who did have intimate knowledge of the terrain. To give some indication of this, I discuss briefly now two very different sets of texts which date from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries: firstly, writings by Puritans who left England to forge a godly society across the Atlantic; secondly, accounts of this ‘New World’ aimed more at readers with material enrichment on their minds. The point is not to establish a stark divide, whereby in this chapter are pioneering reflections on America that we understand to be false or fictional because of their patently wish-fulfilling quality, while in later parts of the book is a professionalised American studies committed soberly to rigorous scholarship and to truth-telling. So pure a distinction is untenable: the work that contributes to academic American studies itself emerges from multiple moments and locations, directed by a host of perspectives and agendas, and so cannot claim in any simple sense to be expressing the ‘truth’ of America. Thus, the aim of the present section is not to expose falsehoods in these early attempts to study America, but rather to identify their orientations and assess their worldly effects.
One last preliminary observation: all of the texts discussed here orbit around territory now comprising part of the United States. As indicated previously, the name of ‘America’ gradually became more parochial, referring most often not to the continent in its entirety but only to a portion of the northern landmass. When, for example, the Puritan minister and scholar Cotton Mather began his colossal Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England (1702) by declaring, ‘I write the Wonders of the Christian Religion, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand’ (Mather 1855 [1702], 25), his readers would readily have understood that he meant America in this geographically circumscribed sense.

1) PURITAN VISIONS

By the time Mather came to write his book at the start of the eighteenth century, there was a lot of New England history for him to narrate. Since the 1620s, English emigres had settled in the north-eastern quadrant of the present-day United States, concentrating especially in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. They came, at least initially, for mainly religious reasons, seeking a terrain that was more hospitable than their own country to their Calvinist or ‘Puritan’ version of Protestantism. America, as a potential community of ‘saints’, was thus often figured in early Puritan representations in utopian terms. The most enduring trope in this tradition was probably first put into circulation at sea, rather than on American soil itself. As the flagship Arbella, packed with Calvinist emigrants, sailed towards the port of Salem in Massachusetts in 1630, John Winthrop is said to have preached the sermon that would later be called ‘A Model of Christian Charity’. Near the end of an address which bracingly reminded his listeners of the many trials they would face in raising their new settlement, Winthrop offered a vision of America as a transfigured and resplendent space: ‘we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us’ (2015 [1630], n.p.).
The notion here of American distinctiveness, even exceptionalism, has survived from these precarious beginnings even into contemporary discourse in the United States. Metaphors may vary – President Donald Trump’s American ‘city’, for instance, was not so much visible on a hill as hunkered down behind a militarised wall – but the promise of utopia remains. Yet any utopian vision is inevitably accompanied, as its shadow, by a dystopian counter-narrative. This notion is captured in Margaret Atwood’s term Ustopia, a word that she coined ‘by combining utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because 
 each contains a latent version of the other’ (Atwood 2011, n.p.). Thus, if America is considered exceptional in its possibilities, it is thereby exceptional too in its potential iniquities and its capacity to disappoint – something acknowledged by Buell when he describes it as ‘a dream space, meaning simultaneously also of course a nightmare space’ (2013, 24). Such a pessimistic turn is apparent in this early Puritan discourse. The supposedly devout were often portrayed by sermonisers as falling all too easily into ungodliness, thus squandering rather than realising America’s unique promise. So, for example, the Massachusetts pastor, poet and astronomer Samuel Danforth assailed his congregation in a sermon entitled ‘A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness’ (delivered in 1670, published the following year): ‘Doth not a careless, remiss, flat, dry, dead, cold frame of spirit, grow in upon us secretly, strongly, prodigiously?’ (2006 [1671], 14). Rather than surviving in piety, Danforth’s listeners were in danger of perishing in ‘the Gulf of Sensuality and Luxury’ (17). For Michael Wigglesworth, Danforth’s fellow Massachusetts minister, imaginings of an American dystopia were similarly omnipresent. In his poem, ‘God’s Controversy with New-England’ (1662), he detected in the Puritan ‘folk’ not ‘holiness’ but ‘Carnality’; not ‘flaming Love’ but ‘key-cold Dead-heartedness’ (Gunn 1994, 212, 213).
For our purposes here in introducing American studies, several points can be made about this Puritan stencilling of America in alternately utopian and apocalyptic terms. The first is that New England religious discourses of these kinds would later be of great interest to American studies in its first institutionalised phase during the mid-twentieth century. One of the books by Perry Miller, the great U.S. scholar of Puritanism, actually echoes Danforth’s sermon in being called Errand into the Wilderness (1956) – and Miller’s work on this period will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2.
Secondly, the Puritans’ oscillation in mood between a euphoric celebration of and crushing disillusionment by the society they fashioned valuably alerts us to one of American studies’ key insights (noted briefly in the Introduction): namely, that the meaning of America has never been settled or uncontentious, but on the contrary is always open to struggle and negotiation. Interventions in America’s discursive framing or rhetorical construction are ongoing, as can be seen by attending for a moment to Trump’s preside...

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