Post-Nationalist American Studies

Introduction

1 Introduction Barbara Brinson Curiel, David Kazanjian, Katherine Kinney, Steven Mailloux, Jay Mechling, John Carlos Rowe, George Sánchez, Shelley Streeby, and Henry Yu Our group was initially organized under the title “Post-Nationalist American Studies.” In the call for applications, the description beneath the title, however, emphasized the intersections between changing models of American Studies and “ ‘post-national’ models for community and social organization .” During our weekly conversations, we frequently talked about the differences between the terms post-nationalist and post-national as well as the implications of the prefix post- more generally. Some of us were wary of the implications of the post- in the phrase “post-national American Studies.” While post-national has gained a certain currency in discussions of globalization and in revisionary “New Americanists” projects, many of us worried about the term’s developmental trajectory and the sense of belatedness it evoked, as though the time of the nation-state had passed.1 Although we agree that the flexible regimes of accumulation underpinning what David Harvey has described as the condition of postmodernity are dramatically changing the meaning and significance of nationalisms and the nationstate , none of us believes that the nation-form has been or will any time in the near future be superseded. California’s passage of Proposition 187, which sought to withdraw bene- fits from undocumented workers, and the University of California Regents’ decision to rescind affirmative action in admissions and hiring made it particularly unsettling to meet under the rubric of “post-national American Studies,” because both national borders and citizenship privileges were once again being marked off in restrictive ways. Even as debates about the movements of capital and people across national boundaries intensify, nationalist nativisms are repeatedly mobilized to oppose immigration; transnational corporations continue to rely on nation-states for labor control; state intervention in “unstable financial markets” has become, according to Harvey, 2 INTRODUCTION more rather than less pervasive; and the “National Symbolic,” as Lauren Berlant puts it, with its “traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives” in many ways continues to “provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national subjectivity.”2 Indeed, in the current context , invocations of the post-national by U.S. intellectuals can function as disturbing disavowals of the global reach of U.S. media and military might. Our use of the word national thus refers to a complex and irreducible array of discourses , institutions, policies, and practices which, even if they are in flux or in competition with other structures and allegiances, cannot be easily wished away by the application of the post- prefix. The term post-nationalist, of course, is open to many of the same objections . If we have not superseded the nation-state, neither have we superseded nationalism. On the one hand, the insistence that the fall of the Soviet Union means that the United States “won” the Cold War has re-engendered narratives of American global superiority. In some instances , especially in other parts of the Americas in the age of NAFTA, a “nationalistic emphasis on meaningful autonomy and independence” could provide a source of “resistance to the increasingly total consolidation of the system of international capitalism.”3 Within the United States, moreover , it is important to distinguish between nationalisms which are aligned with the nation-state and those which challenge “official” nationalism. As George Lipsitz reminded us when he joined our seminar one week, despite their limitations, black and Chicano nationalisms, for instance, are not identical with or reducible to U.S. nationalism.4 In other words, we need to critique the limits and exclusions of nationalism without forgetting the differences between nationalisms or throwing all nationalisms into the trashcan of history. Despite the paradoxes and dangers of a post-nationalist approach to American Studies, however, that adjective does begin to describe the desire of those in our group to contribute to a version of American Studies that is less insular and parochial, and more internationalist and comparative. In this sense, our efforts to formulate a post-nationalist American Studies respond to and seek to revise the cultural nationalism and celebratory American exceptionalism that often informed the work of American Studies scholars in the Cold War era. If our post-nationalism wrestles with an earlier version of American Studies, it is also inevitably informed by our respective locations and workplaces. This residential research group was convened on a university campus in Southern California, where disputes about immigration, assimilation...