Reflections on Teaching America Abroad: Introduction

American studies scholarship and pedagogy tend to devote themselves to demystifying hegemonic American culture; we ask readers and students alike to examine their subject positions within American ideology. But what happens when we teach America in foreign contexts? Many recent North American Ph.D.'s, pursuing academic careers in a tight job market, find themselves teaching abroad. This collection of essays, which grew out of a special session at the 2000 Modern Language Association convention in Washington, D.C., addresses some of the pedagogical challenges that arise in local contexts around the globe. The regions and countries discussed here, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Francophone West Africa, and Turkey, all have selective memories when it comes to the culture and history of the United States, but their views rarely resemble those that we have learned to engage and critique in North American classrooms. From Christchurch to Ankara, the notion of America assumes disparate manifestations. Each essay in this collection therefore considers what motivates particular ideological constructions of American life abroad. It is hoped that the collection will provoke a discussion of the pedagogical techniques that the authors have developed for their predicaments in the classroom, especially as they relate to other cultural situations.

In "Teaching (Less of) Hollywood in Australasia," Adam Knee analyzes the predominance of Hollywood cinema in Thailand, Taiwan, and Australia and, while emphasizing the differences among their ideological investments in Hollywood, discusses how filmic expectations can be undermined in the classroom in all three countries. In "Documenting the Other Others in Bicultural New Zealand," Sharon L. Mazer examines notions of cultural safety in New Zealand that explicitly refer to the prohibition on violating Maori customs. Mazer complicates this cultural model with a student theater project, drawing on her own American Jewish identity and its forbidden place in Christchurch. As her students interviewed Jewish and Gentile New Zealanders about the meaning of Jewish identity, they discovered how the ideologies of the United States and New Zealand shape the politics of otherness. Mazer describes the "performance" of these interviews, which used the work of Anna Deavere Smith as a model and that of Bertolt Brecht as a theoretical base.

In "Teaching American Literature in Francophone West Africa," David G. Nicholls details his experiences teaching American studies in Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Togo, where he discovered an extraordinary emphasis on black American writing in the university system. This phenomenon corresponds, Nicholls writes, to a West African fascination with and appropriation of African American popular culture. In "Teaching Social Conflict in Turkish American Studies," finally, Stephanie C. Palmer interrogates how American problems can induce non-American students to forget about their own historical, ideological, and political dilemmas. Palmer offers methods of contextualizing social conflict in such a way that Turkish students engage their own culture as they engage American culture.

Much recent scholarship on globalization addresses the prevalence of American popular culture worldwide, but rarely have American scholars abroad addressed the pedagogical implications. In view of globalized trends in education and the paucity of academic jobs in North America, many other teachers, in widely dispersed regions, may see in the experiences of Knee, Mazer, Nicholls, and Palmer reflections of the challenges and predicaments they themselves face.