Transnational American Studies or, Tainted Love

One peculiarity of cultural life in the United States has been a widespread and remarkably persistent, one might say obsessive, fascination with the question of the nation's identity and character. This might be a symptom of anxiety about the nation's notorious lack of identity or coherence, or it might be a local variant of a more general attribute of modernity, since most nations seem prone to worry about the nature of their communities and to produce more or less imaginary narratives about their special virtues. We Americanists have not generally thought much about national identity in other contexts, because our attention has long been closely focused on celebrating or debunking the many versions of American exceptionalism that traverse the historical, cultural, and political discourses of the United States. The transnational turn, now accelerating in so many areas of literary and cultural studies, might help us begin to get this problem of identity in and of the United States into more balanced perspective, or it may merely furnish a larger stage on which we can continue to enact our own version of the national obsession. The preceding essays by Winfried Fluck and Robyn Wiegman, in their different ways, encourage us to think about these alternatives and to rethink the place of our work as academic writers and critics interested in the United States. In the new transnational turn of American studies, Fluck sees far too much continuity with its old ends; similarly, for Wiegman, the new goal of transnational transformation finds the field still where it started. But if we think of the transnational less as something new in terms of beginnings or ends, we might see how it redefines and renews our commitment to, and even our affection for, the important work, as literary and cultural critics, we have long been doing.

Both Fluck and Wiegman remind us that the shifting framework of American Studies poses problems. Fluck sees the field remaining focused on linked issues of ideological interpellation and identity formation. He fears that these translate too easily into a celebration of fluidity in transnational identities, while failing to recognize the real depredations and the human costs of dislocation that the flux and flow of global capital entail. Robyn Wiegman also analyzes the force of repetition in the discipline's discourse. She identifies ways in which transnationalism is less a critical revolution than yet another instance of the long critique of American exceptionalism, yet another attempt to resist the nation's putatively inescapable ideological pull. In her estimation, the space of critical agency salvaged from ideological cooptation remains primarily reserved for the critic herself. Both essays manifest an air of exhaustion. For neither critic does the opening of American studies to the world beyond the United States seem to reinvigorate the field because, for both critics, American studies remains altogether too American in its obsessions with America's exceptional delusions.

Just as the problem of exceptionalism is not uniquely American, this sense of critical exhaustion is not specific to American studies. Recently many critics have noted their growing fatigue with the "hermeneutics of suspicion," which, after decades of submitting literature and culture to brilliantly engaged acts of ideological critique, seems to have come to a series of impasses.¹ As Rita Felski has put it, "a shape of thought has grown old."² Like Felski, I am loathe to leave the political implication of our work behind to embrace some purer form of aesthetics. But we have, perhaps, reached a limit in our attempt to preserve a suspicious distance from our objects. As Felski notes, the tendency of ideology critique is to reduce the amount of credit critics are willing to give a text: these critic tends to "impute to their own analyses a grasp of social circumstances inherently more perspicacious than the text's own." Thus, "literary works can be objects of knowledge but never sources of knowledge," and the possibility that "a literary text could know as much, or more, than a theory" is ruled "out of court" (6-7). In many ways, this is the problem that Wiegman points to as a...