In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 INTRODUCTION What Does an American Studies Scholar Want? What does it mean to be hip in the twenty-first century? If you’re a baby boomer, particularly in academia, you may still think it has something to do with vocal countercultural politics, with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, with rebelling against squares like Dwight Eisenhower and, say, Perry Miller. If you’re an Xer (a term few use anymore), on the other hand, that whole thing has probably long looked kind of played. Back in the 1990s there’s a good chance you read Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, with its bitterness toward “bleeding ponytails” and other “sold-out” boomers who had succeeded simply through “fortunate birth” (21); you listened to Nirvana make fun of the Youngbloods’ “Get Together”; and you tried to make cool all sorts of things the boomers had found square or otherwise offensive: country music, swing dancing, Mel Tormé, trucker hats, Skynyrd. And if you’re a millennial, you probably spent more of the past decade than necessary loitering on hipster-bashing websites, from the pioneering, defunct New York City Anti-Hipster Forum (www.hipstersareannoying.com) up through Look at This Fucking Hipster (www.latfh.com). An abbreviated dialectic of the past forty years of hipness might look like this: hipness was hip, then unhipness was hip, now hipness itself is unhip. Yet if you work in American cultural studies and are younger than fifty, like me you probably found it easier in your professional work to support the boomer project rather than continuing, as they had done, your own project of youthful rebellion and critique. Perhaps without fully realizing it, you too may well have made the Birmingham school’s idea of Subcultures Resisting the Mainstream through Rituals into your own project of Countercultures Resisting the Man through Rituals; your work, you may have told yourself as you prospered in a difficult job market, constituted radical activism, and, like the New Americanists, you argued fiercely with those dead squares who had believed in American exceptionalism (Smith, “Postcolonial” 145; Smith and 2 Introduction Cohn, introduction 12). You were happy when your article on, say, Filipinas who resisted U.S. empire by making subversive textiles appeared in American Quarterly1 and happier still when your Duke book on the same subject earned you tenure at a coastal research university. You were part of a generation that busily confirmed boomer insights that race matters, boundaries are problematic, and cyberspace offers possibilities for self-creation and subversion . When in 2009 an ad in AQ for membership in the American Studies Association declared that asa “members get it,” you knew they were talking about you. From a twenty-first-century perspective, however, this self-congratulatory “cool kids” ethos, derived (I will argue) from a simplification of Birmingham school principles and part of the reason for the past decade’s exodus from the asa of so many who work on places and times that don’t fit a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies model, looks decidedly uncool. But I do not mean in what follows to supplant boomer American studies’ tendency to reify (its own) 1960s-style hipness by shallowly reifying 2010s-style hipness, by offering up post-hipness as the Next Big Thing. Nor do I mean to denigrate the field’s oft-stated commitment to social justice. My concern is that, with the exception of the Ruthie Gilmores and Angela Davises of this world, the most meaningful social justice work performed in the field is being done primarily by unglamorous people teaching critical thinking skills to first-generation college students, evangelical Christians, rural African Americans, and other graduates of horrible school systems out there in Flyover Country, working to make, as one former president of the University of Montevallo liked to put it, “a more enlightened Alabama.” One doesn’t hear from such folk— professional subalterns don’t speak—in large part because they are too busy each semester teaching four courses and marking hundreds of compositions. In the ever more rarefied portions of contemporary American cultural studies where people actually have time to write—time usually obtained by exploiting the ever-growing ranks of part-time and graduate teaching labor— such a commitment is much more likely to operate, as in the arts, chiefly as a structure of feeling.2 I thus want to examine, and maintain some critical distance from, the ways such disciplinary structures of feeling shape what we do. I...

Share