10.07.2009

WS 240 Critical Genealogies: US Studies After American Exceptionalism
Spring 2010
Professor Robyn Wiegman
M 10:05 am- 12:35 pm

In recent years, there has been a conscious effort to redefine "American Studies" in global perspective, leading many scholars to focus not on the mythic over-reach of "America" but on the undertheorized nation-state form figured as the "United States." Much of this work has set itself against Cold War exceptionalist paradigms, repositioning the place of US Studies in relation to both area and identity knowledges on one hand and comparative nationalisms on the other. This course will focus its attention on the challenge of forging an internationalized approach to the US an object of study through four points of intervention. The first concerns resituating the history of the formation of the US outside national narratives of self-becoming. One important way to do this is to consider European colonial contestations over "New World" lands, resources, and people as the eviscerated global history in which the US as a specific entity emerged. The second intervention arises in the comparative reframing of nation-state formation, such that we interrogate the strange ways in which the study of the US in the US university has come to be posed against, even opposite to the "international." The third entails analyzing the various emergent paradigms that seek to turn the study of the US outside of itself, including the post-national, transnational, trans-Atlantic, diasporic, bordered, hemispheric, international, and global. And the fourth requires returning to the "origins" of American Studies in the U.S. university to consider the condition of post-nationality as, paradoxically, the precondition from which "American American Studies" was organized. Throughout the course we will specify what is now called "American American Studies" by paying attention to scholarly discourses and critical projects that arise in studies of the US from around the world.

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