Evolving Approaches to U.S. Culture in the American Studies Movement: Consensus, Pluralism, and Contestation for Cultural Hegemony

Canadian Review of American Studies Volume 23, Number 2, Winter 1993, pp. 1-55 1 Evolving Approaches to U.S. Culture in the American Studies Movement: Consensus, Pluralism, and Contestation for Cultural Hegemony MarkHulsether Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. Epistemology is about knowing the difference. Donna Haraway1 At one extreme [scholars of culture] have seen a resistance to theory, an anti-intellectual dismissal of new methods and approaches . . . . At the other extreme, they have seen a reification of theory into a 'magic bullet' that can itself position scholars outside the oppressions and exploitations of history. The tragedy of this debate--as is often the case in such moments of antagonism-is that each side misses what the other has to offer. George Lipsitz2 This essay interprets major methodological trends in the history of the movementknown as "American Studies," and argues for a particular current approach-a focus on the ways cultural traditions are contested within a frameworkof struggles for hegemony-which isinformed by that history and represents one major trend in the present context. Theories of cultural hegemonyhighlight how ideas, attitudes, and cultural practices legitimating unequal power relationships come to be accepted as common sense, and 2 Canadian Review of American Studies how the nature of such common sense is continually renegotiated in specified pragmatic situations involving conflict over cultural and sociopolitical resources. I argue that the most useful approaches to hegemony stress the limits of dominant culture (without ignoring its disproportionate power) and highlight how a variety of culturally plural subcultures engage in such renegotiation as part of complex, often informal, processes of building hegemonic and counterhegemonic coalitions. This position unfolds through an account of how recent debates are informed by evolving trends in the American Studies movement. The movement has gone through three broad stages: from the ascendancy of consensus approaches; through a period which redefined consensus as domination and/or stressed radical social and linguistic pluralism; to a current tendency to explore contestation over culture involving both elites and various people excluded from power, within a field informed by concerns and methods which have evolved from both earlier periods. Sophisticated forms of hegemony analysis can build upon and integrate positive insights from both consensus and pluralist scholarship, as well as address important limitations of earlier scholarship. It is better to map changing methodological boundaries and divisions within the American Studies movement, than to search for one approach called "the disciplineof American Studies." A few general comments about the field are appropriate. It is a loose alliance of historians, literary scholars, cultural analystsin the social sciences, and others who use interdisciplinary approaches, whose general question is how to understand North American culture and society, and who encourage various approaches to cultural critique. And, it is possible to describe some major trends in the movement: conceptions of "the point of it all" which have waxed and waned in popularity over time. But it is essential to remember that, within the movement, people using many approaches coexist and debate with each other. There is no single reigning vocabulary and paradigm for scholarship, and scholars are forced to be self-conscious about their methods. 3 This essay represents my attempt to orient myself in the larger landscape. It should not be read as an attempted objective overview-one which all-too-conveniently demonstrates that "History" has been leading toward my own positions. I do believe that the trends I describe, while Mark Hulsether I 3 neither all-encompassing nor inevitable, are real. And I hope that the "map" ofthis landscape which I have sketched-and perhaps even my thoughts on using this map to travel somewhere worthwhile-will prove perceptive enoughto be useful for some others. Yet having said this, I wish to highlight myspecific standpoint. I recognize all scholarlywork as necessarily situated (because no one can write "from nowhere" or "from everywhere") and selective (because no one writing from anywhere can address every dimension of even a limited topic). Thus, the pragmatic focusing of questions is an unavoidable moral-political choice-and to understand and evaluate it we must know who is doing such focusing, in what context(s).4 First of...