Jacques Pothier
Area Studies, Global Studies: American Trends
My overview of the history or area studies in the US goes back to the early days of the young republic, when the rise of the nation-state throughout the western worldcoincided with the American Renaissance and its quest for a national mode of expression.As Immanuel Wallerstein has shown[1], the romantic vision that collapses territorial units on nation-wide societies is contingent. The development of the Nation-state and of national identity is parallel with the organization of the social and human sciences into the categories (we call them “disciplines”) that are now standard. As the scientific approach spread into the sciences of man, “scientists” now argued for universality, “that human behavior was a natural phenomenon like any other,” and as universal as any natural pheonomenon. On the contrary, “particularizers”, or humanists, would argue that human behavior resisted to uniformity. Universalizers were more likely to work in dept. of economics, sociology and political science, particularizers were more likely to work in departments of history or literature. The conflict between area studies and disciplines plays at various levels, and the rivalry, if there is rivalry, is of varying intensity. Underlying this split, Wallerstein claims, was the conceptual consensus that an individual society as “politico-cultural unit” (whether state, nation or people) was the basic unit of analysis, and that its historical course led it to economic, social and political “development” in a basically convergent direction. A comparative approach leads to developing universal laws out of diversity, and the truly relevant differences between areas will be seen in terms of stages. In the humanities, on the contrary, difference is assumed.
1.American Studies
They may have been more self-conscious about their patriotic duties that their European counterparts, but it was very much on the minds of the writers of what came to be described as the American Renaissance that they had a pivotal responsibility in bringing about an awareness of common identity for a nation made up of a crucible of cultural heritages, within borders whose only limits would be “manifest destiny.”
The place of literature in a broad sense in the building of a national identity was underlined in our time by the establishment of a collection of heritage texts, the “Library of America”
I see in this approach the origin of a field of studies that is peculiar to the US academia, which they call “American Studies” devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history. “They approach American culture from many directions but have in common the desire to view America as a whole rather than from the perspective of a single discipline,” as the manifesto of the ASA claims.[2]
2.From Subaltern Studies to Global Studies
As the current ASA agenda suggests, the approach is more comprehensive and analytic than centered and synthetic. Where American Renaissance thinkers were gathering the bricks of a common core American identity, our ASA scholars want to leave no stone unturned of the components of American diversity. American Studies serves as academic umbrella to all kinds of minority and subaltern studies as well as studies of popular cultural forms less dignified than canonic literature.
Which is where it can connect with objects common with some area studies. African American studies grew to include a transatlantic interest for all the cultures of the populations linked to the African diaspora, and evolved into Africana studies, Black studies, or Africology-- the study of the histories, politics and cultures of peoples of African origin. Chicano/a studies, initially the study of the culture of an ethnic minority of Mexican seasonal, and then permanent immigrants in California, developed into Latino/a studiesand often spawned an interest for Latin American studies. Thus through its subsidiary branches American Studies is paradoxically relevant to a development of global studies where American paradigms are extended beyond the US borders.
Whether this generalization of American paradigms tried out in the US is a new, intellectual and therefor cultural form of post-colonial colonization is open to discussion. The case of the development of Latin-American studies is particularly interesting—and of course relevant in our present approach for the IdA conference.
After these insights on the development of the American Studies angle, it is interesting that common core curricula in undergraduate programs have proved much less parochial than their 19th century heritage might lead us to expect. Students in English at American universities are generally required to pay as much, or even more attention to the English classics, or to Classic literature for that matter, than to the American canon. You could argue that the mission of defining American identity sits more squarely on the existence of this trend of American studies.
"American Studies" are concerned with what constitutes the core of "American" identity from the vantage point of all cultural aspects, not just literature. It is area studies applied to the United States.I want to argue that the “American studies” approach is important to keep in mind when studying the epistemology of area studies in the US academic context.
3.Area Studies and the Disciplines
Area studies: suggests that beyond the nations that have access to national identity, the human communities of other regions of the world are more loosely connected in larger groups, not completely identified with common languages, but content with features of kinship between their cultural creations. This was the case for Latin America: as Drake & Hilbink note, “Partly because of this mixing of peoples and cultures, claims of uniqueness or exceptionalism -- e.g., Ecuador is so unusual that it can be understood only on its own terms and only by Ecuadoreans or by those deeply immersed in Ecuadorean culture -- have been less common in Latin American studies than in studies of some other areas, such as the United States, China, Japan, India, etc.” (25)
Area studies still refer to the US center. As Szanton remarked, “The broad goals are twofold. One, to generate new knowledge and new forms of knowledge for their intrinsic and practical value. Two, and more reflexively, to historicize and contextualize - in effect, to de-naturalize - the formulations and universalizing tendencies of the US social science and humanities disciplines which continue to draw largely on US and European experience.”
So the interest of areas studies, given the hegemonic position of the US, is to decenter paradigms that have been proclaimed universal, although the “concepts, theories, models, analytic fashions” are “derived from European or US experience”. In this perspective area studies provide documentary fodder for more serious disciplines that apply to western contexts. This centering would have been further encouraged by a post-1989 sense that the western economic and social model is now universally accepted over the planet—in other words, as Friedman famously argued, the world is flat.
4.Area Studies and the challenges of hybridity
In a post 9/11 world, the interaction between area studies, cultural studies and global studies becomes more problematic, generating new forms of scientific intercourse to accommodate a changing meta-research community, while the need for government to understand regional patterns would seem to be satisfactorily served with nor recourse to scholars, relying instead on the advanced listening devices of the NSA.
On the academic field, as soon as global studies include area studies, either they just integrate the research units that have developed locally on the random interests of the local scholarly community, or they fall back on geographic no-nonsense divisions that the current crisis in Ukraine shows to be inadequate to make sense of regional tensions. Areas need to be redefined according to the dimension of human, social and economic experience one considers. Although for practical reasons it is impossible to specialize in too wide an area, means must be found to accommodate the tensions and flux between cultures. Contrary to the Herderian template, cultural studies scholars have found that cultures are more likely to grow from the disruptive, transgressive margins of their communities
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[1]Immanuel Wallerstein, “A World-System Perspective on the Social Sciences”, British Journal of Sociology 2010, 167-176.
[2] «What the ASA Does» consulted December 9, 2013. URL: