Originating as a proponent of U.S. exceptionalism during the Cold War, American Studies has now reinvented itself, vigorously critiquing various kinds of critical hegemony and launching innovative interdisciplinary endeavors. The Futures of American Studies considers the field today and provides important deliberations on what it might yet become. Essays by both prominent and emerging scholars provide theoretically engaging analyses of the postnational impulse of current scholarship, the field's historical relationship to social movements, the status of theory, the state of higher education in the United States, and the impact of ethnic and gender studies on area studies. They also investigate the influence of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies on U.S. nationalist-and antinationalist-discourses. No single overriding paradigm dominates the anthology. Instead, the articles enter into a lively and challenging dialogue with one another. A major assessment of the state of the field, The Futures of American Studies is necessary reading for American Studies scholars.

Contributors. Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Gunter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, Jose Estaban Munoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos

A state of the art portrait of the field of American studies-its interests and methodologies, its interactions with the social and cultural movements it describes and attempts to explain, and a compendium of likely directions the field will take in the future

About the Author

Donald E. Pease is Avalon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context and editor of a number of books including National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives and, with Amy Kaplan, Cultures of United States Imperialism, both published by Duke University Press.

Robyn Wiegman is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies at Duke University. She is the author of American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender and editor of Women's Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change, both published by Duke University Press.

Reviews
"The Futures of American Studies shapes a farsighted and richly provocative argument about the intellectual space, time, and politics of the cultures of American studies. It's a millennial work."-Laura Wexler, author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism
"Fascinating and provocative, this collection is sure to attract wide attention as the latest collective statement of the major directions in which 'New Americanist' scholarship is heading."-Lawrence Buell, author of Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond



Book Information
ISBN 9780822329657
Author Robyn Wiegman
Format Paperback
Page Count 632
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 907g