Scholarship and the State: Robert Greenhow and Transnational American Studies 1848/2008

History changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The United States Congress immediately passed the National Defense Education Act to respond to the threat of Soviet technological superiority. The generation of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, linguists, and area specialists created by this Act put a man on the moon, helped win the Cold War, and today has a spacecraft 746 million miles from Earth soaring amidst the rings of Saturn. . .

The September 11th Sputnik moment, the Global War on Terrorism, and the continued threat to our Homeland drive home the need to take action on the foreign language and cultural capabilities of the Nation.

Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, "A Call to Action for National Foreign Language Capabilities"

This pronouncement of a "September 11th Sputnik moment" came during a meeting of The National Language Conference: A Call For Action, held at the University of Maryland in June 2004, and sponsored by "the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in partnership with the Center for Advanced Study of Language, the Department of State, the Department of Education, and the Intelligence Community" (5). The white paper developed out of this largely state-funded meeting—which "brought together over 300 leaders and practitioners from Federal, state, and local government agencies, academic institutions, business and industry, foreign language interest groups, and foreign nations"—locates the origins of the conference and its suggested policy developments as a moment of charged historical apprehension, a flash of perceived simultaneity: the galvanizing result of glimpsing the past within the present and thus "recognizing the challenges of the current Sputnik moment" (5).

Yet in the parallel it lays out between the Cold War and the "Global War on Terrorism," between twentieth-century scientific belatedness and twenty-first-century monolingual deficiency, the white paper also kindles national desire with the flames of nostalgia: the desire to repeat the ostensible triumphs of the National Defense Education Act, which "put a man on the moon, helped win the Cold War," and, in alliterative celestial flight, sent "a spacecraft . . . soaring amidst the rings of Saturn" (1–2). Its mandate to respond to September 11, terrorism, and "the continued threat to our Homeland" hinges on the state centralization of "action on the foreign language and cultural capabilities of the Nation" (2):

It is urgently recommended that a National Language Authority be appointed by the President to serve as the principal advisor, advocate, and coordinator in the Federal Government and to collaborate with state and local governments, academia, and the private sector for improving our national foreign language and cultural understanding capabilities. This person should be a nationally recognized individual with credentials and abilities across all of the sectors to be involved with creating and implementing long-term solutions to achieving national foreign language and cultural competency . . . developing and overseeing the implementation of a national foreign language strategy across all sectors.

(3)

The National Language Authority would be a nationally recognized individual, overseeing national foreign language competency and national foreign language strategy. The mission of the white paper announces itself succinctly in the title: "A Call to Action for National Foreign Language Capabilities." The latter phrase, with its rather awkward frontloading of seemingly apposite adjectives—"National Foreign"—is oddly oxymoronic, as is, of course, our own discipline's formulation of a "transnational American" studies. Such resonances—between the conceptual formulations of American studies and those of, for example, the US Departments of Defense and State—constitute a heavy burden to rest upon the shoulders of a discipline that has generated so much of its critical traction out of historicizing itself: out of excavating the Cold War political and ideological contexts within which American studies emerged and created its defining intellectual trajectories, its paradigmatic rhetorics of individual freedom and national exceptionalism. Given our rigorous attention to disciplinary historicism over the last decades, how can we not skeptically wonder, to borrow from the title of a recent International American Studies Association paper, "Why Hemispheric Studies Now?"¹

The pages that follow will not provide an answer to this...