A Challenge to Post-National American Studies: George Yúdice’s The Expediency of Culture

Although as Peter Fritzsche rightly asserts, “moving from nation to the world is no guarantee of political virtue,” in the pages of American Literary History and other major journals dedicated to consideration of US culture, calls for reorganizing the field of American literary study along post-national lines have sounded for more than 10 years (283). The authors of these position statements sometimes associate this shift in frame with the political impulse Fritzsche criticizes, but at least as often they are also concerned with the genesis of a new institutional home in the academy—a home in which a new type of not-yet-political knowledge might be produced. They call for a critical project organized around either (i) a postcolonial approach to works written by US citizens, (ii) a comparative literature or area studies revival of attention to the writings of immigrants and other border crossers, (iii) an ideology critique of the investment of literary works in American nationalism, especially as it converges with neo-imperial discourse, or (iv) the employment of new nonnational geographical categories—e.g., ecological regions or urban centers—that can serve as parameters for literary study. Common to all these initiatives is a desire to import critical methods from neighboring disciplines and expand the range of primary materials; their shared goal is to stimulate a post-national scholarship that redirects the critical gaze outward, rather than reinforcing the triply centripetal focus of American-based scholars explicating the works of US writers reflecting on a domestic scene.

Oddly independent of these methodological challenges, however, are the same scholars’ assessments of their incorporation into the field of American studies generally. Roughly contemporaneously, some consider the post-national project as being well under way, while others see it as still in its infancy and hope for its future expansion and institutionalization, and a third group attacks the premises of such a shift in the discipline and denounces the emptiness of yet another fashionable professional piety.¹ In this fast-moving scholarly economy, the post-national position appears to have been evacuated, at least by some, before it was populated—a paradox that confirms the skepticism of critics and allows a second wave of entrants into the field to approach the topic as if it were virgin ground.² In short, as a meta-critical challenge to the discipline of American literary studies, the post-national thesis has been the victim of its own success—generating a buzz of discussion that is not yet strongly attached to a concrete program for scholarship or pedagogy. The post-national position in American literary studies threatens, for this reason, to become an approach within the discipline as already constituted, rather than transforming actually existing institutional boundaries as its strongest proponents have hoped to do.

This is not, however, to say that no scholarship with a post-national focus has been published. To the contrary, a host of specific studies of mobile authors, regional ecologies, cosmopolitan aesthetics, and the like have appeared, some of which are quite excellent on their own terms, and all of which can be plausibly understood as working in a nonnational (if not always entirely post-national) frame of reference. Many of these works are discussed in the same review essays that articulate position statements urging more post-national work be written; I mention two more of these promising projects at the end of this article. What has not appeared, however, is a central text that combines a clear disciplinary call to arms with an exemplary version of its execution. There is as yet no widely accepted book-length work demonstrating the merits of a post-national approach to American literary study, and thus no project that can trigger a Kuhnian post-national revolution either within the academy or without.

What is most needed, in my view, is a clearly written, strongly polemical, brief and brilliant study that does something like what Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought...