Next Times: The Futures of American Studies Today

Love is lovelier the second time around,Still wonderful with both feet on the ground.

Sammy Cahn, “The Second Time Around”

I must be getting old when I start mooning about with Bing Crosby’s and Frank Sinatra’s renditions of that old 1960s favorite, “The Second Time Around,” but the 16 essays in this issue about their authors’ second book projects make me grow nostalgic. Once upon a time, you awoke from the nightmare of the tenure-and-promotion trauma, smiled briefly, and then were clutched by cold fear. “What am I going to do now?” was probably never uttered, because it was utterly rhetorical. “Write your second book, genius,” some internal devil sneered. “Oh, time, cash, and patience,” Herman Melville complains in Moby-Dick; if we could just find a little of all three, then we could write the second book, earn our promotion to professor, and forget about that morning after.

Today, of course, the situation is far more complicated. Will books still be published five or six years from now, when I finish this project? Will there be any professorships left, especially in the liberal arts, once the corporatization of higher education has replaced us with recorded modules in the Distance Learning Campus, located in Utopia, The Cloud? Forgetting all those woes, will I have anyone able to afford my $275 tome (but “free shipping!”), much less literate enough in my microspecialization to be able to read it? Rule out my parents, neighbors, nonacademic friends, and even colleagues in other departments at my own university. “How do you make any money out of that?” my neighbor said contemptuously of my new book project, which I was crazy enough to describe to him.

I return to some of these institutional and professional issues at the end of this essay. First, I want to congratulate the 16 contributors to this special issue for their stimulating projects, all of which inspire and teach me, as well as for the authors’ courage in forging ahead at this moment of crisis in the profession. Taken together, these essays show us how American studies, ethnic studies, American literary studies, and queer theory will appear respectively and in relation to each other over the next decade. My task is to provide an overview of the broad questions raised by these projects. Unlike the editor of a volume in which these essays might be collected, I do not offer the customary and boring abstracts of other people’s work. I am addressing professional readers who will be reading these essays. My task is to represent the theoretical issues raised by these essays. To that end, I divide my remarks into four broad categories or theoretical problems: (1) transnationalism, post-nationalism, and globalization; (2) interdisciplinarity; (3) queer theory, identity, praxes; (4) liberalism, neoliberalism, and politics in general. In a brief conclusion, I address what I think are some of the most important topics not treated by these scholars.

1. Transnationalism, Postnationalism, Globalization

These projects give strong evidence that we are still struggling to redefine our fields in the aftermath of the critique of American exceptionalism and the ongoing process of first world globalization. In “The World, the Text, and the Americanist,” Brian T. Edwards notes that the historicist approaches of the past two decades may have had the unintentional consequence of reframing American Studies in nationalist terms (2–3). The scholarly desire to contextualize in thickly historical ways the texts we interpret has caused us to draw on familiar histories, even when we have changed the texts. Jesse Alemán, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Sean X. Goudie, and Sean Kicummah Teuton reflect self-consciously on this recentering of the US in new hemispheric and other transnational approaches. Alemán’s discussion of the US Civil War in the contexts of reform movements and political instability in nineteenth-century Mexico and Cuba warns us against the dangers of studying hemispheric Americas in ways that reduce everything to the dominance of US ideology. But Alemán’s own project is haunted by this problem as it attempts...