The Rise of American Cultural Studies: A View From East Texas

John Trombold The Rise of American Cultural Studies: A View From East Texas (on Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease [Durham: Duke UP, 1993]; and The American Literary History Reader, ed. Gordon Hutner [New York: Oxford UP, 1995]) When it was time for my first haircut in east Texas, a smaU-town barber who belongs to the Ku Klux Klan performed the service. A member of my English department later revealed my barber's political affiliations. His politics were something that neither the barber shop's yellowing news clippings concerning the Ruby Ridge incident and the F.B.I., nor the barber's racial slur on African-Americans had hinted to me, a newcomer to east Texas from yet another historically underdeveloped region, one with its own legacy of white supremacism, the Pacific Northwest. There, while evaluating thecharacter of Tom Metzger, an Oregonian T.V. repairman and leader of the White Aryan Resistance, Elinor Langer once rhetorically asked herself : "Would you want your television repaired by this man?" Her answer, even more rhetorical than her question, I suspect, was "Why not?" (88). Such personal accommodation involves an aestheticizing distance from her subject, as Langer's recent conference address, "Notes from the Underground: Skinheads and Neo-Nazis as a 'Literary ' Problem," proposes. In such defensive aestheticization of white supremacism, we find recourse to, even compensation in, national allegory; the travails of individual figures who are political "others" stand in for the methodological tribulations of defining a national culture. Pertinently, for such a process offorced familiarization,James Clifford defines ethnographic, allegorizing practices as a means for portraying "strange behavior ... as meaningful within a common network of symbols—a common ground of understandable activity valid for both observer and observed, and by implication for all human groups" (101). Struggling with theirown national aUegories that, in theend, might not be reducible to literary problems, Americanists in English and American Studies departments have questioned not only the received literary canon but also the traditionalcultural boundaries drawn along race, gender, class, ethnic, and national lines, introducing a series of arduous questions about what constitutes and frames their field of inquiry. Like Langer's literary review of Neo-Nazis and her desire to 184 the minnesota review confront an historical antinomy between, on the one hand, an aestheticized sense of a newly inclusive "literary" and, on the other, a moral and poUtical perspective on American cultures, contemporary approaches toAmerican literature and culture have foregrounded the problem of knowing the object of study and have turned against traditional methods of framing it. WhUe reforming the canon, they have drawn new maps with thematic routes connecting local, national, and international cultures, not to mention the "high" and the "low"; moreover , the assumptions for these constructed categories have undergone steady erosion. Like Langer, revisionists of the canon are challenged , finally, by the possibility raised by cultural studies that our cultural problems in a newly conceived world of producers and consumers of culture might not be strictly literary ones. Two important anthologies of critical writing on American Uterature and culture distinctly advance the ongoing project of increasingly de-literary cultural remapping. With them, regions such as east Texas become a developingpreoccupation ofanAmerican studies concerned with the cultural patterns resulting from emergent issues such as the "peculiar institution" of American slavery and American imperial designs. In fact, these two forces succinctly combine in the title of Randolph Campbell's recent historical study of Texas, An Empirefor Slavery. The state and its cotton plantations invoke a history that traditional conceptuaUzations of the American literary Renaissance have often located outside history (Bérubé 208) and invite inquiry into the "social spaces of everyday Ufe" (Saldívar 308) in what was once a borderland colony ofMexico, as the historianJames Stuart Olson describes it in the years before the creation of Texas as a slave state (175). On this scale, the representative example of Texas cultural history introduces a political terminology ofstate, nation, and imperialism relatively new to Uterary criticism. The phrase "U.S. imperialism," for example, largely relegated in this hemisphere to certain historical museums in Mexico City, to the discourses in Latin American states such as Cuba or...