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[17] günter h. lenz toward a politics of american transcultural studies: discourses of diaspora and cosmopolitanism Transnational American Studies in a Time of Globalization American studies in the United States since the 1970s and the 1980s have been characterized by a sequence of redefinitions of “culture” and of “politics ” in cultural studies. The presidential addresses read at the conventions of the American Studies Association (ASA) testify to the evolving logic of this critical engagement of the profession, from Alice Kessler-Harris, Mary Helen Washington, and Paul Lauter to Janice Radway, Amy Kaplan, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stephen Sumida, Emory Elliott, and Philip J. Deloria. The theoretical and institutional work of the new Americanists, particularly of Donald E. Pease, Amy Kaplan, and John Carlos Rowe, and of scholars in minority, feminist, and border discourses has produced a wide-ranging, highly charged philosophical and political debate that has fundamentally revised and reconstituted the field of American cultural studies and placed it in an international political context. Let me briefly indicate some important steps in this argument: • Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition of the cultural identity of minorities and ethnic groups and the politics of location have implemented and often replaced the politics of redistribution of the Left conceived in terms of class difference. American culture is no longer seen as a homogeneous national culture as claimed in the European tradition of nation-states, but as characterized by multiple cultural differences, institutionalized in numerous minority studies programs, which are often conceived monoculturally and set in direct opposition to (white) “American culture as a whole”—cultural differences, however, of very different, contextually changing, and often conflicting and heteronomous kinds. • The culture concept has been redefined beyond the pluralism of more or less closed, stable, territory-based cultures (racial or ethnic cultures, all kinds of group cultures and subcultures) in terms of border discourses of hybridity, creolization, mestizaje, diaspora, and the study of intercultural contact zones, [392] günter h. lenz particularly with Mexico and Latin America, under conditions of unequal power. Intercultural imaginaries of border thinking are explored as new forms of subaltern knowledge that engage the “colonial difference” in local spaces where the coloniality of global power is adapted, rejected, and transculturated (Gloria Anzaldúa, José David Saldívar, Giles Gunn, Néstor García Canclini, Marwen M. Krady, Walter D. Mignolo, Deborah Madsen, Günter H. Lenz). • The nation-state (U.S.) has been questioned as an adequate frame of cultural analysis and reassessed. Acknowledging the hopeless limitations and quandaries of analyzing American literature in terms of a tradition and body of a national literature, scholars such as Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova have newly addressed the problems of comparative literature and the promises of a vision of world literature. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her book Death of a Discipline (2003), has radically reconceptualized the field and proposed a new planetary consciousness, a notion that, however, must not be introduced mainly to escape or displace the destructive, or deconstructive, associations concerning processes of “globalization.” • Postnational and postcolonial cultural studies and the critique of American (cultural) imperialism have been worked out. The different workings of American imperialism in a post-Fordist economy under conditions of globalization after the end of the Cold War reveal how cultural differences in U.S. culture “at home” were constituted through strategies and discourses of this new form of American imperialism abroad and reappropriated by the authorization and erection of a “state of emergency or exception” in the wake of the Homeland Security Act after 9/11 (Donald E. Pease, Amy Kaplan, John Carlos Rowe). • Responding to the theoretical and political thrust of postcolonial cultural critique, leftist American studies scholars have addressed more forcefully the strategies of a radical political practice of the American studies community in the contemporary world and explored the political dynamic of institutionalizing cultural studies. They have set out to clarify the options of political activism, the energizing strategies of different traditions of radical cultural critique, and the emancipatory potential of new social movements on a global scale (Paul Lauter, George Lipsitz, Michael Denning, Timothy Brennan, Joel Pfister, Giles Gunn; cf. Warren and Vavrus). They have also redefined the structures and the strategies of teaching the new American studies (Henry A. Giroux, Paul Lauter, and especially John Carlos Rowe’s “comparative U.S. cultures model”). • American studies have been internationalized in an attempt to move beyond the borders of the U.S., see the U.S. from...

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