Globalizing American Studies Edited by Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (review)

This collection of essays deliberately aspires to illustrate the current global register of the American studies discipline. The edited volume offers a survey of the field to exemplify the variety of lines of inquiry that contribute to and substantiate the imperative to look beyond the geographic, political, and ideological borders of the United States. With the United States as the common denominator, the individual chapters provide a set of diverse examples of studies that emphasize the transnational connections and comparisons among the United States, its cultural products, and other cultures around the world. The editors situate the collection in the escalating trend in American studies of focusing less on the United States as a singular, exceptional nation and culture and instead emphasize the vast, enlightening comparisons between international reference points and U.S. culture and its development. Though the shift to a transnational focus in the study of U.S. culture has already been firmly institutionalized, often polemically, the ethical imperative driving the shift, and this volume, is as timely as ever.

As many scholars in the discipline have articulated, the transnational turn in American studies is ethically driven to undermine the imperial characteristics of the way U.S. culture and ideology circulate globally. The goal, as articulated by the editors of this volume, is to allow the United States to remain no longer the privileged, unchallenged center of global interactions. According to the introduction, the collected essays “trace variously the emergent consciousness of America as one among many—even with all its imperial impulses—in an emerging multilateral imaginary. Hence, these articles posit a ‘spectral America’ in various circulations, where ‘America’ may lose its referent or exist only as a specter” (6). In referring to “spectral America,” the editors articulate the desire to decentralize America, which in the book and in the name of the field is used to refer to the United States of America (the nation-state), despite efforts to use the term America more discriminately. Many of the chapters successfully decentralize “America,” or the United States, using it as a mere reference point; however, paradoxically, the United States of America is what unifies the texts. We see potential contradictions in the collection’s title. Though it embodies American studies’ embrace of a transnational focus, the title phrase, “globalizing American studies,” does not identify the active agents of the present progressive verb. It is not clear whether the process is passive or if the studies themselves “globalize” and actually impel globalization trends. If this is the case, as in the title, “America” remains central. Nevertheless, the collection takes as its fundamental concern how to undermine U.S. hegemony when the United States is the inescapable link.

To deal with the conundrum of not privileging the United States in a field for which it is the essential link, the editors’ introduction provides an instructive framework for thinking about the dimensions of global American studies. The editors present Globalizing American Studies as a corrective to the concept of “American exceptionalism,” with which American studies has a history of being complicit. To do so, their introduction draws heavily on Donald Pease’s contribution to the volume, “American Studies After American Exceptionalism? Toward a Comparative Analysis of Imperial State Exceptionalisms.” In the essay, Pease critically surveys the theoretical apparatus of the discipline through an instructive genealogy of American exceptionalism. He defines the term to show the import of its contextualization and deployment; for him, American exceptionalism is a “discourse through which individuals have taken up an imaginary relationship to the real exceptions of the U.S. imperial state” (76). According to Pease, scholars in American studies often criticize the concept by referencing George W. Bush’s “state of exception,” which (supposedly) renders obsolete American exceptionalism, but their efforts are counterproductive. Pease provocatively criticizes texts by three eminent Americanists, Djelal Kadir, Amy Kaplan, and Daniel Rodgers, to argue that despite their attempts to undermine the negative...