Post-Nationalist American Studies

John Carlos Rowe

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780520224384
• eBook ISBN: 9780520925267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Post-Nationalist American Studies seeks to revise the cultural nationalism and celebratory American exceptionalism that tended to dominate American Studies in the Cold War era. The goal of the book's contributors is a less insular, more trans-national, comparative approach to American Studies, one that questions dominant American myths rather than canonizes them. Articulating new ways to think about American Studies, these essays demonstrate how diverse the field has become.

Contributors are concerned with cross-cultural communication, race and gender, global and local identities, and the complex tensions between symbolic and political economies. Their essays explore, among other topics, the construction of "foreign" peoples and cultures; the notion of borders—territorial, racial, economic, and sexual; the "multilingual reality" of the United States; the place of the Mexican-American War in U.S. history; and the significance of Tiger Woods in today's global market of consumption.

Together, the essays propose a renewed vision of the United States' role in the world and how American Studies scholarship can address that vision. Each contributor includes a sample syllabus showing how the issues discussed in individual essays can be brought into the classroom.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies
• Creating the Multicultural Nation: Adventures in Post-Nationalist American Studies in the 1990s
• Rethinking (and Reteaching) the Civil Religion in Post-Nationalist American Studies
• Foreign Affairs: Women, War, and the Pacific
• Making Comparisons: First Contact, Ethnocentrism, and Cross-Cultural Communication
• Race, Nation, and Equality: Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and a Genealogy of U.S. Mercantilism
• Joaquín Murrieta and the American 1848
• My Border Stories: Life Narratives, Interdisciplinarity, and Post-Nationalism in Ethnic Studies
• How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes: Post-Nationalist American Studies as a History of Race, Migration, and the Commodification of Culture
• List of Contributors
• Index