American Ethnic Studies, or American Studies vs. Ethnic Studies?

Color-Line to Borderlands: The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies. Edited by Johnnella E. Butler. Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2002. 228 pages. $40.00 (cloth). $22.50 (paper).

Ethnic Studies: Issues and Approaches. By Philip Q. Yang. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000. 314 pages. $20.95 (paper).

Although American studies and ethnic studies share much common ground in both interdisciplinary orientation and in institutional marginalization, their respective practitioners often view each other with misapprehension, even distrust. Janice Radway's 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association offers a case in point. Attempting to answer her predecessor as the head of the ASA, Mary Helen Washington, who asked in her own presidential address, "What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?" ¹ —Radway suggested that American studies move toward some form of "Inter-American studies," partly by institutionalizing ties with ethnic studies organizations. ² To her lecture audience and to readers of the printed address in this journal, Radway was making a progressive gesture toward marginalized populations. Members of some ethnic studies organizations, however, perceived not an offer of partnership but a move toward hostile takeover. ³ These divergent readings of Radway's remarks are symptomatic of the mutual misperceptions, if not outright distrust, between American and ethnic studies.

Although both fields have always shared a deep dissatisfaction with the limits of disciplinarity in the academy, their differing creation stories have clouded their commonalities for decades. Most scholars in ethnic studies believe deeply in a story of ethnic studies's emergence from social and political activism in the 1960s and 1970s and feel that they remain true to the field's community-based and socially progressive—sometimes radical—origin. This story-as-history seems, to me, to be the critical issue in the American/ethnic studies divide. Correctly or incorrectly, many ethnic studies teachers and scholars contrast their own progressive and active roots with what they perceive to be the ivory tower origins of American studies. They see themselves as having emerged from the streets, and cast American studies scholars as having come from the relatively privileged and insulated academic class. That they do not recognize American studies's own radical roots, which in fact predate the institutional formation of ethnic studies, should not be surprising. Even former ASA president Elaine Tyler May, in her 1995 presidential address, admitted that she was surprised to learn of American studies's and the ASA's "powerful Marxist tradition" dating back to the 1930s (181), contrary to the widely-held belief that American studies grew out of conservative, Cold War searches for American exceptionalism. ⁴

Until more of those in ethnic studies better understand some of the radical origins of American studies, and until more of those in American studies acknowledge the importance of ethnic studies's essential self-definition based on its radical-roots origin story, the two fields will continue to experience bouts of sibling rivalry. The key to rapprochement and fruitful cross-fertilization lies in understanding, and reconciling, those creation stories. Toward that end, two recent titles from the ethnic studies camp, Color-Line to Borderlands: The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies, edited by Johnnella E. Butler, and Ethnic Studies: Issues and Approaches, by Philip Q. Yang, offer potential bridges to American studies practitioners ready to draw from and contribute to ethnic studies, in part by telling the creation stories of ethnic studies that Americanists can compare with several insightful accounts of the formation of American studies. Each of the two disciplines must understand where the other is "coming from" to get along.

Butler's volume aims to foster dialogue among ethnic studies practitioners as well as between them and their colleagues in other interdisciplinary programs, providing an overview of contemporary institutional issues and theoretical debates within the field. Within some of its thirteen disparate essays, the...