Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations

Foreword: Transatlantic Traffic 1610–1910

vii for e wor d Transatlantic Traffic 1610–1910 Susan Castillo Street One of the last half-century’s most interesting, and often challenging, developments in the academic humanities is the blurring or erasure of the conventional disciplinary taxonomies and boundaries that arose in the Enlightenment and were consolidated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is particularly the case in scholarship on the Americas and on the relation of the Americas to other parts of the world. In recent decades , scholarly analysis bounded by the confines of the exceptional nationstate has revealed itself as limited in a globalized economy in which images, goods, capital, cultural icons and stereotypes, and information flow across increasingly meaningless borders. In many ways, developments in the discipline of American Studies in recent decades embody this paradigm shift in area studies. Gene Wise, in an oft-quoted article titled “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” has traced several different phases in the development of United States Studies, and describes a “representative act” for each phase. He begins by evoking American Studies ’ pre-institutional phase, for which the publication of Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought in 1927 would be the representative act. Parrington, for Wise, exemplifies the lone scholar, working in isolation, without institutional or peer support, characterized by Wise as “an act of human intellect reduced to the barest essentials—a single mind grappling with materials of the American experience, and driven by concentrated fury to create order from them.”1 This phase of the American Studies movement would be followed in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s by the intellectual history paradigm; its practitioners include Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, and Leo Marx of the myth-and-symbol school. Generally speaking, according viii Foreword to Wise, the work of these scholars is predicated on five notions: first, that something called the American Mind can be said to exist; second, that by virtue of its location in the “New” World it is characterized by its optimism, innocence, pragmatism, and homogeneity, as opposed to the limitations and cynicism of the “Old” World; third, that the American Mind is most fully expressed by the nation’s leading thinkers; fourth, that it is an enduring form running through the whole of America’s past, from Puritanism to Pragmatism; and finally, fifth, that although the study of popular culture may be of interest, the American mind is most completely discerned through the scrutiny of its “high” culture. This was also a time of relative affluence and corporate expansion in the discipline of American Studies in the U.S., supported by grants from bodies such as the Rockefeller Foundation , the Carnegie Corporation, and so forth.2 George Lipsitz has made the very valuable observation that, while the myth-and-symbol school did not adequately address issues of racial hierarchy in the United States or its imperial relations with other nations, it did function as, in Lipsitz’s words, “a democratic, egalitarian, and progressive force because it preserved an institutional site for exploring the chasm between the real and the ideal in the United States.”3 That chasm was explored with a vengeance in the following phase, in the 1960s. This period was marked by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy , Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, the demonstrations and legislative breakthroughs linked to the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the escalation of the Vietnam War and the mass protests against the war on American campuses, along with the increasing radicalization of students. Partly due to the changing demographic on university campuses, the notion of a unitary American Mind was challenged, and the field saw the rise of ethnic and minority studies, women’s studies, and so forth. Gene Wise suggests that this meant the fragmentation and splintering of the discipline into new militant (and divisive) subdisciplines, but adds that at the same time it had the salutary effect of recasting the old divisions between Old World and New into an awareness of the widening gulf between the developed and developing world. At the time that he was writing (1979), Wise points out that the field of American Studies in the United States was characterized by a new pluralism, an emphasis on proportion rather than essence; the emergence of a cross-cultural, comparative dimension; an an- Foreword ix thropological turn; and a similar turn toward the examination...