Response to Jonathan Freedman

It is mightily refreshing to bypass the usual hand-wringing about the relationship between "American" and "ethnic" studies that has characterized so many ponderous conference sessions in recent years. Just a decade ago, David Goldstein-Shirley titled his review essay on this topic with a tense rhetorical question: "American Ethnic Studies, or American Studies vs. Ethnic Studies?" While that tension may never be resolved, it has substantially evaporated, and Jonathan Freedman begins instead from the pragmatic observation that thinking about ethno-racial, sexual, gender, and bodily difference as forms of social power has become fundamental to most (indeed, virtually all) current research presented in American studies journals and at conferences. The scholars who do this work may be affiliated with any number of different departmental homes, underscoring the fact that the whole picture of US ethnic studies can only be grasped as the sum of many complex local situations. However labeled in those specific institutional sites, American/ethnic studies in the aggregate takes up problems of exclusion that its constituent disciplines (history, literature, visual and media studies, and many areas of the social sciences) cannot reliably be counted on to foreground in a consistent way.

Freedman indicts this aggregation—which is so prone to self-scrutiny and so acutely aware of exclusions—for failing to recognize its own instinct to "sidestep belief as an object of inquiry," for ignoring how ethnoracial difference can be produced by religious difference. If his powerful historical examples of the racialization of Jews were not enough, one need only look to how institutions have scrambled to respond to student demands for courses and programs in Muslim-American studies—a category most administrators and students would unhesitatingly locate within the purview of ethnic studies without fully recognizing its reliance on religious practice as a marker of difference. Part of the problem here is that students at secular universities, even those who count themselves as observant, have been conditioned by our culture's relentlessly consumerized mystification of free choice to understand religion as yet another individual "user preference" rather than as another vehicle by which social power and prestige may be unequally distributed. Another part of this issue surely has to do with the decline of religious studies departments in those same universities, a decline that inversely parallels the rise of ethnic studies programs (although this may be a correlation without causality). The awkward situation of the ethno-religious within our limited conception of the ethnic provides yet more proof—if any more were needed—of how impoverished the "four food groups" approach to ethnic-studies programming has become.

Attending to the formation and performance of communal religious identities and to insidious religious normativity—the baseline Christianity of life in the US that can be so difficult to perceive for those who are not excluded by it—would require something besides another add-on to the already proliferating menu of difference at the Ethnic Studies Café. Such invisible normativity also comes into play in Freedman's version of the origin-story of American studies, which recalls Elaine Tyler May's 1995 homage to the field's "radical roots" in her much-cited ASA Presidential Address. May discusses many of the same figures Freedman does, but she makes nary a mention of their ethno-religious affiliations: the word Jew is not uttered once in that talk. Into that telling absence Freedman argues that the more progressive wing of American Studies was "always already shaped not just by Jews but by Jewishness." This of course begs its own question—whose Jewishness, which version of Jewish identity?—although I imagine that is precisely his point: to get past the tactful non-mention and to get that conversation started.

Freedman's eloquent plea for integrating religious difference into our thinking about ethno-racial formations augments that of a growing chorus of scholars who have called for more comparative and connective ways of doing American/ethnic studies. There is a generative paradox here: Freedman wants us to be more comparative but at the same time to seriously question the limits of comparison itself as a mode of thought. Beware of analogical...