Class, Multiculturalism and the American Quarterly

Introduction

Our purposes here are two-fold, one empirical, the other more speculative. First, we adduce systematic evidence from the pages of the American Quarterly since 1949 to explore the dominant questions, organizing concepts, and analytical frames of American studies. Motivated generally by the contradictory assessments of the field's commitment to the study of social class, and particularly by the 1993 debate between John Higham and his critics in AQ about "multiculturalism and universalism," we focus on the supposition that theory and research on race, gender, and ethnicity have replaced class analysis in American studies' premier journal. ¹ Second, we use the fifty-year patterns we uncover to speculate on why American studies--at least as we see its intellectual preoccupations expressed in the Quarterly--has failed to embrace more thoroughly class and its attendant struggles.

As Higham argued in 1993, "American universalism" has served as motivation and means to attack unwarranted class burdens. American studies' fascination since the 1970s with what he labels "cultures of endowment"--multicultural group difference and identities--has, in his argument, come at the expense of the one historically validated way to deepen and extend the promise of America to its victims of class privilege--that is, laying at the door of, and on behalf of, universalism the claims of those disadvantaged by the systemic workings of class. If Higham is correct that multiculturalism has displaced class analysis, critics of America thereby deny themselves an essential way to perceive and correct class violations of the universalistic ideal. This would seem a high cost indeed. But is Higham's premise correct?

Many in the field would likely deny its accuracy. Multiculturalists routinely evoke the study of "the holy trinity" of race, class, and gender (and sometimes ethnicity) as the premise and purpose of the post-1960s "new" American studies. The phrase "race, class and gender," for instance, appears at least six times in the published version of Linda Kerber's 1988 presidential address to the American Studies Association (ASA)--a crucial document in the consolidation of the multicultural paradigm in American studies. Moreover, in his account of the transformations in the field since the 1950s, Leo Marx simply assumes that by the mid-1990s class (and other "salient differences dividing . . . Americans" [race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation]) is the focus of "intense interest" to today's practitioners. In her 1998 presidential address to the ASA, Janice Radway also judges the new American studies scholarship already to have "centered" on class (again along with gender, race, and ethnicity) and suggests that institutionalizing the post-1960s innovations in American studies "will entail a recognition of the theoretical centrality of working class and ethnic studies" (emphasis in original). Such references could easily be multiplied, suggesting, contrary to Higham, that class is firmly fixed in the outlook and activity of American studies scholars today. ²

Michael Schudson and other critics of cultural studies, and by extension many of the post-1960s American studies scholars, find, on the other hand, that "class regularly drops out of view," and one of Higham's critics in the AQ debate, Gerald Early, allows that multiculturalism does privilege racial difference over class. Even some highly visible proponents of the new American studies fear that class is not getting its just due in contemporary theory and research: Paul Lauter, for example, concludes that although "race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability, have become central to American studies . . . practitioners have been considerably less successful in focusing on 'class' in the context of the United States than on other of these conceptualizations." Again, references consistent with Higham's argument could be easily multiplied. ³

Thus there is no consensus on whether current formulations of American studies' "central" problematic is now so narrowly defined--namely, as inquiry into racial-ethnic, gender, and sexual subjectivities, exploitation and resistance--that the deployment of class as a potent tool in the scholar's toolbox...