Re-thinking “American Studies after US Exceptionalism”

Over the last 15 years, I have devoted a substantial portion of my work to analyzing the discourse of American exceptionalism so as to advocate for a post-exceptionalist American studies.¹ After analyzing what I called the Janus face of American Exceptionalism, I concluded that the relations between US citizens’ belief in US exceptionalism and the state’s production of exceptions to its core tenets might be best described in psychosocial terms as structures of disavowal. By the state’s exceptions I referred to measures, like the “Indian Removal Act” and the “Fugitive Slave Law” in the nineteenth century and “Operation Wetback” and the Vietnam War in the twentieth, which violated the anti-imperialist norms that were embedded within the discourse of American exceptionalism. In enabling US citizens to disavow the state’s exceptions that threatened their beliefs, the discourse of exceptionalism regulated US citizens’ responses to historical events.

The standpoint from which I had conducted this analysis correlated the US disavowal of its imperial history with the Cold War state’s need to represent the US as uniquely positioned to oppose the imperialist ambitions of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the discourse of American exceptionalism had legitimated America’s dominance within a dichotomized world order by supplying the rationale for America’s moral superiority to Russian communism. Throughout the Cold War, US dominance was sustained through the US’s representation of itself as an exception to the rules through which it regulated the rest of the global order. But with the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the formation of the European Union, the US lost its threatening, socialist, totalitarian Russian Other as well as its destabilized, dependent European Other. After the historical conditions that had formerly undergirded its assumptions faded into the historical past, the exceptionalist paradigm was unable to recoup the absences of these historical processes as signs of US uniqueness. With the loss of the geopolitical rationale for the representation of the US as an exception to the laws of nations, the US also lost the putative right to establish the rules for the global order.

The dismantling of the exceptionalist paradigm required a fundamental reshaping of accounts of the US’s place in world history. The discourse of exceptionalism had grounded its representation of US global dominance upon representations of a destabilized world order in need of US power to maintain order. But with the disappearance of relations that were grounded in these macropolitical dichotomies, multiple, interconnected, and heterogeneous developments emerged that were irreducible to such stabilized oppositions. The demands of a newly globalized world order solicited an understanding of the US’s embeddedness within transnational and transcultural forces rather than reaffirmations of its unique isolation from them.²

When the conditions that lent the discourse of American exceptionalism its plausibility had passed away, two interrelated dimensions of the disavowed underside of American exceptionalism—US imperialism and US global interdependencies—emerged simultaneously into view. In the wake of the Cold War, I joined a cohort of Americanist scholars who embraced globalization as an interpretive framework and transnational American studies as an arena of research. One of the welcome challenges of globalization as a horizon of intelligibility for scholars in American studies was that, in its displacement of the centrality of the American nation-state, globalization appeared to solicit the wholesale reconfiguration of the terrain of the object of study. Rather than construing the territorial nation-state as the instrument for evaluating and representing America’s global inter-relationships, this transnational model called for the reconceptualization of social movements as models for transnational understandings of cultural and political processes as passing back and forth between disparate cultural systems, whose analyses required the retrieval of forgotten histories and the imagining of new geographies. In adopting this transnational model of knowledge production, I recommended that the focus of scholarly attention be shifted away from US culture and society as an identifiable unit so as to effect a redescription of the US as inhabiting but one node in a vast interlocking network of commercial, political, and cultural forces.

Aztlan, the...