American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture by Neil Campbell and Alasdair Kean (review)

Just as there is no definitive answer to how the Western Hemisphere was named America, there is likewise no simple response to what it means to be American. The names of the continents and who counts as American are equally contested, with histories convoluted by anecdote, appropriation, wishful thinking, colonialist theft, and the purposeful erasure or re-writing of past events. U.S. citizens call themselves Americans, willfully ignoring the many millions of people who also inhabit America north and south of U.S. borders. This myopia is symptomatic of a national ideology and identity built upon several “foundation myths,” convenient fictions crafted over the last two centuries to forge a coherent national identity, used to justify the colonization and assimilation of diverse and disparate colonized, colonizing, enslaved, and immigrant peoples and cultures.

These myths about “America”—the Doctrine of discovery, American exceptionalism, meritocracy, Manifest Destiny, the American Dream, Democracy, missionaries of progress, the melting pot, defenders of freedom—are connective threads that bind each chapter in the fourth edition of American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture, which exposes their generative and reproductive power through time, across regions, and within language, politics, peoples, and cultures. Neil Campbell and Alasdair Kean trouble and disrupt these myths, which exclude many bodies and voices from their imaginative vision. They then trace how people historically excluded from the American narrative masterfully use these myths in acts of resistance that create powerful counter discourses, belying the true heterogeneity and heteroglossia within the United States and the Americas. They challenge readers to begin thinking of the United States more hemispherically in relation to its continental neighbors and to the global flows of culture—both into and out of the United States—in more dynamic ways.

The first chapter, “New beginnings: American culture and identity,” identifies the myths, outlines the principles of American and Cultural Studies, and introduces the narrow discipline of American Cultural Studies to college students. The multicultural and multi-perspectival critical approaches to Cultural Studies are used to interrogate American Studies’ interdisciplinary exploration of U.S. popular and high culture artifacts, including images, films, novels, histories, and speeches. This chapter also establishes the authors’ intent to hear marginalized voices; to identify patterns of “power, inequality, domination, and resistance” (19); and to seek possibilities for change, by challenging “mythic unity with diversity and critique” (20).

Chapters 2 and 3 examine how the “American” identity was constructed as “white” through extermination and assimilation policies that absorb some while marking “others” through racial difference. “Ethnicity and immigration: between many worlds” challenges the notion that the United States is a “melting pot,” a nation of immigrants blended together through their new national identities as “Americans.” By exposing U.S. assimilation policies, including the genocide of the continent’s original Native inhabitants (whose culture was too different and too great a challenge to the new national identity) and its invitation to immigrants (who were considered easier to assimilate), Campbell and Kean posit that “American” identity is best described by the ambiguous and contrary term “hybrid” (75). In “African Americans: ‘I don’t sing other people’s voices,” the authors trace the development of an affirming set of African Americans values and collectively constructed identities from slavery to the present. Connecting slave narratives to early and modern fiction, film, music, and political oratory to President Obama, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Ferguson, Missouri, the authors explicate the power of counter-memory written into counter discourses and the limits of elections to combat racism (97). The recent election of Donald Trump as president, as a white supremacist backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency, lends credence to their final assessment.

“In God we trust?: Religion in American life” explores the contradictions and tensions of religious freedom, religious pluralism, the separation of Church and State, and the primacy of Christianity inside and outside of U.S. government and culture. This chapter examines the...