Inside and Outside: What Kind of Knowledge Do We Need? A Response to the Presidential Address

The theme of the 2006 annual meeting of the American Studies Association was "The United States from Inside and Out: Transnational American Studies," and Emory Elliott's carefully crafted presidential address acknowledges the theoretical challenge linked with the transnational turn in American studies when he asks in the subtitle of his address: "What Does It Mean When American Studies Is Transnational?" Indeed, it is important to clarify what we are actually referring to when we use the term transnational, because at present three different meanings are often used interchangeably: an institutional, a conceptual, and a methodological one. In its institutional aspect, the term transnationalism emphasizes the desirability of increased international cooperation and exchange, so that scholarship in American studies will escape the parochialism that is one of the legacies of American exceptionalism. Conceptually, the goal is no less than the redefinition of the field of American studies as transnational, transatlantic, transpacific, hemispheric, or even global studies. On the methodological level, the term transnationalism is usually employed to support claims for a comparative perspective that will help to broaden our interpretative options in American studies. All three meanings carry welcome associations of disciplinary progress. This may be one of the reasons why they are so easily conflated. However, one can obviously support increased international cooperation wholeheartedly without subscribing to a transnational or hemispheric research agenda or even without committing oneself to the priority of a comparative perspective. It is necessary, then, to keep these different aspects of the term transnational apart and consider their usefulness separately.

In his presidential address, Emory Elliott puts special emphasis on the idea of international collaboration and exchange. As an American studies scholar who has been involved in many international activities, I have had numerous opportunities to work with Emory on American studies projects and to observe his strong dedication to international cooperation from close range. Based on these experiences, I am convinced that there is hardly a scholar better qualified to make the case for an internationalization of American studies with such authority. Precisely because he was already committed to an agenda of international collaboration long before it became fashionable, Emory Elliott is a particularly credible spokesperson for recent attempts by the American Studies Association to engage in extensive dialogues with scholars from outside the United States. Perhaps partly in response to the emergence of the International American Studies Association, the American Studies Association has successfully opened up and internationalized American studies under its last few presidents. It has given increased attention to international contacts, as the massive presence of non-U.S. scholars at the 2006 meeting in Oakland demonstrated. With some goodwill (and a few glasses of wine) one could almost think of the reception in the presidential suite at the convention hotel in Oakland as a gathering at the United Nations. American studies scholars from outside the United States gratefully acknowledge and fully support this transnational turn taken by the American Studies Association, articulated and embodied so convincingly by its current president.

However, it would be wishful thinking to assume that the mere fact of increased international contacts will in itself have a positive impact on the development of the field. Because of Fulbright, the worldwide activities of the U.S. State Department, institutions such as the Salzburg Seminar, and last, but not least, the growing number of international exchange programs at American colleges and universities, there has always been a considerable amount of international contacts, exchanges, and collaborations in the field, and yet this has hardly produced any notable critical outside perspectives or "alternative approaches for reconfiguring traditional or more insular versions of scholarship and teaching."¹ Most American studies scholars outside the United States are still an often beleaguered or marginalized minority in their respective English, history, or sociology departments, and usually respond to the threat of marginalization or, worse, the threat of a loss of faculty positions in American studies, by trying to be as up-to-date with U.S.-American developments as they possibly can. For a long time, European Americanists—and I guess this...