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[5] new americanist turns: empire, transnationalism, and utopianism Empire Criticism when revising the American Studies paradigm of the Cold War era, New Americanists turned their attention to two related fields of inquiry that, in their perception, were foreclosed by the “field imaginary” of the founders of American Studies. One was the complex of race, class, and gender , which brought questions of identity and recognition to the table (as discussed in chapter 3). The other field concerned the United States’ role in the world. Exploring the imperial character of the United States became a hallmark of New Americanist scholarship, and it resulted in the influential 1993 anthology Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, which inaugurated Pease’s New Americanists series at Duke University Press.1 As the title Cultures of United States Imperialism indicates, the critical point of the volume lay not only in replacing the ideology of American exceptionalism with an account of U.S. imperialism but also in extending the critique of empire from foreign policy and economics to culture itself. As Amy Kaplan wrote in her widely noted introductory chapter “Left Alone with America,” the anthology’s goal was to explore “empire as way of life.”2 This connected the question of America’s role in the world, and its cultural expressions, with the issues of race, class, and gender (and ultimately with the question of identity) within the borders of the nation: Not only about foreign diplomacy or international relations, imperialism is also about consolidating domestic cultures and negotiating intranational relations . To foreground cultures is not only to understand how they abet the subjugation of others or foster their resistance, but also to ask how international relations reciprocally shape a dominant culture at home, and how imperial relations are enacted and contested within the nation. (Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America,’” 14) 176 emerson and the nation Imperialism was seen to work both at home and abroad, so that the exclusion of minorities and women addressed by multiculturalism and gender studies had to be read as a manifestation of imperialism as much as a culturally constitutive force that propelled U.S. imperialism. Anticipating the transnational turn, Kaplan argued that the connection between imperialism on the one hand, and race, class, and gender on the other, forced scholars to question the form of the nation itself. Multicultural studies that left the national form intact as the container of diverse cultures missed the point that injustice at home could not be explained and resisted without looking at imperial injustice abroad. If the nation acted imperially at home and abroad, then the very distinction between inside and outside became fragile. As Donald Pease put it in an interview: You cannot produce a sense of internal counter-hegemony without opposing the us global hegemon. Internal hegemony and global hegemony are interlinked projects, and the critique has to be a double critical consciousness, so that the elsewheres onto which the us imperium projected the dimensions of its own history that it didn’t want to acknowledge are also linked to the excluded internal alterities.3 In her later essay “Manifest Domesticity,” included in her 2002 study The Anarchy of Empire, Kaplan exemplified the combined attention to imperialism , class, race, and gender by arguing that, in the aftermath of the annexation of Texas, there was an intimate link between “the language of political union and marital union,” based on the common fear of racial intermixture .4 At a time when imperial expansion destabilized national borders , the language of imperialism was applied to the home, and, likewise, “the discourse of domesticity was deployed to negotiate the borders of an expanding empire and divided nation” (Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 28). Kaplan’s investigation of the intersections between the domestic and the imperial certainly offers valuable insights into how the external and internal, the national and the foreign, constitute each other, although the allegedly literal identity of the domestic and the imperial discourses at times begs the question of whether such literalness was really necessary for the ideological work described. In any case, Kaplan’s studies are based on a rather commonsensical point. If the United States engaged in expansion and imperialism (and there is no doubt that it did; indeed, it now seems almost incredible that for a long time U.S. historians insisted that the United States has not, at least at times, acted imperially), then this must have some correlations in culture. In addition , the notion that the...

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